No Electricity, no Power: Energy Politics, Foreign Actors and Populism in Ghana

• In Event: Service Delivery in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Though populist movements have taken the world by storm, in Sub-Saharan Africa some would argue they are conspicuously absent. However, the coming tide of ‘runaway development’ or unfettered capitalism driven by resource hungry states may well reverse this perception. Across much of Africa, re-constituted forms of authority and governance are casting sovereign wealth into the hands of external actors such as China and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, decentralized vehicles or conduits for governance though invaluable, are an insufficient modes for public and civil society mobilization against such developments. Growing public service delivery debacles heightened by investment from resource hungry states in some of Africa’s most promising if not ‘model states’ illustrate a heightened quandary under market oriented economies shackled by patronage and the lure of infrastructural development by China Inc and more.

This paper contends that the saliency of public goods provision is a critical vector for populist appeal most notable in the rallying cry for power sector reforms, provision of electricity in Ghana, and external actors. Electoral wizardry and patronage no longer suffice. Instead the evolution of media and communication—in short social globalization is shifting discourses on minimal state intervention towards an enlarged role for the state in the economy via power sector or electricity delivery amid investment from independent private producers and external actors. This paper examines the potential for a populist impulse rooted in the developments described above and will do so primarily in relation to public service delivery of electricity/energy reforms that emerged beginning the 1990s.

Author

• Naaborle Sackeyfio, Miami University of Ohio