RAWLINGS AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT IN GHANA

Abstract

RAWLINGS'S 'SECOND COMING' has understandably aroused great hopes in Ghana and amongst those, more generally, who care for the welfare of her people; hopes based not only on a well-grounded belief in Rawlings's personal sincerity and moral integrity but also on the conviction that he is now politically less naive than when he first took power in June-September 1979. Behind the phrase 'less naive' lie, of course, a number of rather different ideas as to what, more precisely, he might and should now do. But the dominant train of thought amongst Ghana's radical intelligentsia seems to run as follows. A short period of moral exhortation of corrupt government officials and 'kalabule' market women of the kind attempted in 1979, even when combined with a certain amount of exemplary punitive action, is not, as the return to old practices under the Limann administration showed, nearly enough. Rawlings has now hopefully realized the need not only for a more thorough purge of local exploiters and for institutionalising popular watchfulness (through people's defence committees, for example) to guard against their re-emergence, but also for a re-structuring of Ghana's society and economy so as to get at the roots of the exploitation of her workers and farmers. It is, on this neo-Marxist2 perspective, 'imperialism' (by which presumably is meant foreign capitalist interests) which, working through local agents, has ultimately been responsible for the ruin of Ghana's economy and the catastrophic fall in living standards of the mass of her people. All of this is eminently sensible and realistic except for the last sentence-and this, of course, is absolutely crucial. Neither Ghana's rapid economic underdevelopment over the past decade nor the associated phenomena of escalating