Introduction
The English social theorist David Beetham once wrote that ‘democratisation’, by which he meant the process of transition to a more democratic political regime, ‘is always and everywhere an unfinished process’ (1994, 159). In this Debate piece, I argue that there is a case to be made that the 2007 discovery of oil in commercial quantities in Ghana furthered rather than limited democratisation. This argument goes against the grain of extant research, because the discovery of oil in Ghana induced panic in Africanist intellectuals. They feared that Ghana, a country on West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea, known for its promising democratic credentials in a region in which state failure had become the standard, could be affected by the natural resource-curse syndrome. This syndrome, a popular topic among academics, describes a situation in which an abundance of natural resources inhibits institutional development, causes perverse economic development and leads to corruption and rent seeking and sometimes conflict (see Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Gylfason, Herbertsson, and Zoega 1999; Mehlum, Moene, and Torvik 2006). Specifically, a branch of the resource-curse literature suggests that, ‘oil and mineral wealth tends to make states less democratic’ (Ross 2001, 328). Because of Ghana’s promising democratic credentials the oil-impedes-democracy hypothesis became a concern. For example, Oxfam America and ISODEC published a report entitled Ghana's big test: oil's challenge to democratic development (2009). Similarly, in the article Ghana and its oil: is democracy at risk?, published by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Ghana Office, Christoph Buchberger argued that Ghana’s democratic development could be retarded due to the discovery of oil (Buchberger 2011). Studies have been produced and conferences held on strategies for preventing the natural resource curse in Ghana (see, e.g., Cavnar 2008; Moss and Young 2010; Okpanachi and Andrews 2012). However, scholars’ preoccupation with the popular resource-curse theory has led to neglect of the actual developments unfolding in Ghana, such as institutional mutations towards democratisation. The resource curse, rather than Ghana, has become the subject of enquiry.
As insightfully observed in this journal by Jon Phillips, Elena Hailwood and Andrew Brooks (2016, 28), oil politics in Africa have generally been reduced to a deterministic relationship with negative outcomes. Certainly, a branch of the resource-curse literature explicated through the causal mechanism of ‘Dutch disease’ is a specific and a somewhat technical concept. But the political branch of the resource-curse literature, which is the main concentration of Africanist scholars – i.e. the idea that an abundance of natural resources can inhibit political development and lead to a system of corruption – is purely political (Kopiński, Polus, and Tycholiz 2013). Rather than focusing on the resource curse, it is vital to consider the context and nature of politics in Ghana to understand and plot future directions of development (Phillips, Hailwood, and Brooks 2016). A few researchers, using the framework of political settlement, have already opened up a space for this (Ayelazuno 2014; Mohan and Asante 2015; Hickey et al. 2015). For these writers, oil is integrated with the politics of the day in Ghana, which is a multiparty democratic system, and creates no new ruptures.
The current Debate takes this approach one step further by gesturing toward the role of feedback generated by the oil sector in the reinforcement of the politics of the day. Using the institutional concept of feedback, I show how the insertion of oil into the Ghanaian political landscape consolidates the existing principles of Ghanaian politics; therefore, oil discovery could be leading to a more democratic political regime in Ghana.
In the following piece, I first unpack both the political-settlement approach and my slightly revised version of this approach, using the institutional concept of feedback. My argument is that oil can be said to be consolidating Ghana’s democratic system (instead of a recourse curse). Second, I highlight several conceptions of democracy and the corresponding indicators used for measurement. Third, I provide an empirical signpost, based on a reorientation of several previous studies, of feedback from oil directed towards democratisation. This Debate is not exhaustive or comprehensive; it points to a neglected area that clearly requires more and proper research – the link between oil and ongoing democratisation in Ghana.
Theoretical issues: political settlement and feedback
Following Michael Watts, Phillips, Hailwood and Brooks (2016, 28) argue that the discovery of oil does not create the economic, social and political ruptures commonly attributed to the resource. Instead, as Watts himself argues, the discovery of resources such as oil is characteristically ‘an idiom for doing politics as it is inserted into an already existing political landscape of forces, identities, and forms of power’ (Watts 2004, 76). Therefore, the question of whether Ghana will become a victim of the resource curse (in the Nigerian sense) is somewhat irrelevant: the development of oil in Ghana will take on the characteristics of domestic politics or the political settlement in Ghana. In several studies commissioned by the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID) at Manchester University, a political-economy approach is used to relate political-settlement theory to oil governance in Ghana (Mohan and Asante 2015; Hickey et al. 2015). The theory of political settlement offers useful insights into how elite coalitions shape institutions and government decisions (Di John and Putzel 2009, 4; Khan 2010, 4). In terms of effects of natural resources, the nature of the political settlement at the moment when resources are discovered has important implications on the effect of those resources. (See Oduro, Awal, and Ashon 2014 for a dynamic map of the political settlement in Ghana, with key actors and groups and their levels of influence in policy process.) The nature of the Ghanaian political settlement is therefore reflected in the government’s decisions on and development of the oil sector (Hickey et al. 2015).
But the insertion of oil into an already existing political landscape or settlement is unlikely to have zero effect on the nature of politics. Taking Watts’s above statement at face value would require a static conception of politics in which natural resources insert themselves neatly into an existing political landscape and everything continues as before. Politics is never that static (Khan 2010, 7), although some changes may be too slight to capture. Although there may not have been a change in overall political logic following the insertion of oil into Ghana’s domestic political system, there are strong theoretical grounds for supposing that the discovery of natural resources creates a juncture at which an existing political trajectory is consolidated. This can be explicated using the institutional concept of feedback (Pierson and Skocpol 2002, 700). Feedback is a process of reinforcement whereby the addition of a new instrument of social significance (in this case crude oil) to an existing institutional arrangement generates a response leading to slight changes in the system (Pierson 2004, 28).
The twin concepts of feedback and path dependency are defined by William Sewell (2005, 100) as follows: ‘what has happened at an earlier point in time will affect the possible outcomes of a sequence of events occurring at a later point in time.’ These concepts may help to explain how political institutions develop and mature over time through gradual reinforcement as a result of constant feedback along an established path. A multiparty democratic system was the political path in Ghana when crude oil was discovered in 2007 and, as Paul Pierson argues, it is difficult to change or overturn institutions that are already in place (2004, 27), because, borrowing from political-settlement theory, institutions reflect the distribution of power in society, which ruling elites are in no hurry to change (Khan 2010, 4). If the discovery of oil (a new instrument of social significance) were to create new political currents (such as a new civil awareness and citizen mobilisation across communities, or a new sense of purpose in the media or among civil society groups or intellectuals), these currents would have to be channelled through the existing rules of the game, in this case a democratic system, and might therefore play a role in reinforcing the game.
Likewise, if the nature of politics is semi-autocratic and characterised by inter-ethnic conflict and frequent rebellious activities, new political currents will be channelled accordingly, and generate feedback that consolidates the existing path. Therefore, the oil-impedes-democracy literature would be more informative if initial conditions were factored into the theory. In Ghana, the initial conditions were conducive to imagine further democratisation. It is thus necessary to explore the possibility that the discovery of oil will foster democratisation in Ghana.
But an age-old question remains: how should democracy be conceptualised and measured? The standard approaches used to measure democracy (the Freedom House methodology1 and the Polity IV project2, for example) are somewhat inadequate for the task at hand.
Conceptualising and measuring democracy
Democracy is commonly understood to mean the rule of the people. But the conceptualisation of this type of rule varies. Clearly, differences in conceptions of democracy determine the form of measurement adopted. In a prescriptive article, Michael Coppedge and John Gerring et al. (2011) identify the following six broad conceptions of democracy:
Electoral: competition or contestation is the main principle.
Participatory: government by the people.
Liberal: emphasis on a limited government, individual rights, civil liberties, etc.
Majoritarian: majority rule/centralisation.
Egalitarian: political equality.
Deliberative: government by reason/through deliberation.
This is by no means an exhaustive representation of the possible conceptions of democracy, but the list captures the gist of recent scholarship in this area. The list is included here to show that there is a methodological problem with the indices used to measure democracy, and that this problem begins at the level of definition. As a consensus on definition may be necessary to obtain a consensus on measurement, it is impossible to arrive at a universally accepted measure. For example, whereas members of the electoral school define democratic consolidation in terms of free and credible elections, using Samuel Huntington’s two-turnover test for instance,3 the liberal school uses other standards. It is not within the scope of this Debate to solve the definitional problem; however, Coppedge and Gerring et al. (Coppedge et al. 2011) usefully summarise the measures corresponding to the above conceptions to arrive at the most reliable indicators. The mechanisms of and indicators for measurement are as follows: sovereignty, authority, elective government, male and female suffrage, turnout, regular elections, free elections, access to media and campaign funds, executive rule of law, executive constraints, legislative power, judicial independence, judicial review, party strength, party ideology, party system size, electoral system proportionality, competitiveness, turnover, media freedom, civil society independence, civil society political engagement, subnational government elections, direct democracy, civil liberty, property rights, religious freedom, equal resources, gender equality, ethnic equality and inclusive citizenship.
Although a referent may be associated with just one conception (for example, turnover is mainly associated with electoral democracy), most referents are associated with more than one of the above conceptions, because a given institution may perform multiple functions. A free and independent press, for example, may enhance competition (electoral democracy), increase participation (participatory democracy), provide an unbiased platform for deliberation (deliberative democracy) and empower out-groups (majoritarian rule). The six conceptions of democracy listed above overlap in terms of mechanisms of and indicators for measurement. But certain mechanisms/indicators can be defined in each case. Under the participatory framework, for example, turnout, media freedom, civil society independence and civil society political engagement are used to measure democratisation.
Whichever conception of democracy is adopted, it is possible to trace the role of feedback from oil discovery in Ghana’s democratisation. Clearly, this cannot be done to a satisfactory extent in such a short briefing. Nevertheless, the following review of developments triggered by oil reveals the process of feedback from oil to democracy.
Signs of democratic feedback in Ghana
It is not my intention here to specify all forms of democratic feedback occurring in Ghana; I seek only to create a new space for thinking about oil politics and democratisation in Ghana. Clearly, some of the above referents have generated feedback; examples include sovereignty and authority (especially in relation to foreign capital), a freer press, executive constraints, party ideology, civil society independence, turnout, civil society political engagement and property rights. Space does not permit a plenary account of any of these markers. However, I start with party ideology (which generates feedback in several directions, especially in the areas of sovereignty and the rule of law in relation to foreign capital) and move on to civil society and political competition.
Although 25 political parties registered to compete in Ghana’s election in December 2016, national electoral competition in Ghana is dominated by two political parties: the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP). The NDC and the NPP have alternated in office every eight years since 1992, in increasingly tight and vigorously fought elections. Ghana is one of the few countries in Africa, and perhaps the only one in West Africa, in which ideology is explicitly part of the political discourse. With ideological roots stretching back to the split between J. B. Danquah and Kwame Nkrumah, the members of the NPP and the NDC are right-leaning, liberal, property-owning democrats and left-leaning social democrats, respectively. Naturally, intellectuals tend to write off ideology as mere rhetoric. However, a simple observation of the parties’ respective policies in relation to oil exploration (and to foreign capital more broadly) reveals a genuine ideological divergence between the two. A clear example is provided by the direction of policies before the discovery of oil.
The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) was established in 1987 under the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) (a military regime led by Jerry Rawlings) for the purpose of oil exploration. When Ghana became a democracy in 1992, the GNPC was only slightly altered, and Rawlings stayed on as the new president of the NDC for two terms. However, when the liberal NPP, led by John Kufuor, took over power in 2000, the GNPC was reoriented to attract foreign investors. The NPP criticised the previous structure of GNPC as inflexible and unappealing to foreign investors. The Kufuor administration offered generous and flexible terms to foreign investors, often to the irritation of GNPC staff and NDC members, who were generally suspicious of foreign capital. One GNPC official recalled the proposal made by the NPP government to ‘cancel royalties and tax’ (in order to attract foreign investment). The official’s response was, ‘Over my dead body’ (quoted in Hickey et al. 2015, 23). After the discovery of oil in 2007, the liberally oriented NPP took credit for having fostered a liberal climate of investment in oil: ‘the oil has always been there but the 19 years of (P)NDC rule could neither create the conducive investment climate … for the oil to be found. In the short period between 2001 and 2005, the NPP government … provided the conducive business environment to attract committed investors to our offshore oil fields’ (NPP 2008, 7). This was fairly accurate. In the election of 2008, however, immediately after the discovery of oil in 2007, government power swung back to the NDC.
The left-leaning NDC government immediately protested that the investment deals granted by the outgoing government were too generous. The war against foreign capital that followed was mostly legal in tone, best exemplified by the Kosmos controversy (wherein a small foreign firm instrumental to the discovery of oil in 2007 attempted to sell its stake to ExxonMobil and was blocked by the NDC government, which sought to nationalise the stake by paying off Kosmos using a correct interpretation of Ghanaian law disregarded by Kosmos Energy). This controversy was a clear expression of the left-leaning politics of the NDC. The party’s distrust of foreign capital led the NDC government to demand strict adherence to Ghanaian laws from foreign investors, who were usually negligent in their Africa operations (see Phillips, Hailwood, and Brooks 2016; Inkpen and Moffett 2012, 10; Heilbrunn 2014, 164). This process of scrutinising foreign capital created democratic feedback on sovereignty and authority vis-à-vis foreign capital (Phillips, Hailwood, and Brooks 2016) as well as the rule of law (insistence that foreign capital must follow the domestic laws of Ghana) and the increase protection of property rights (Heilbrunn 2014, 164).
Another clear form of democratic feedback is the development of an effective civil society in Ghana, with increased citizen participation. The country’s military past has naturally restrained the development of effective civil participation outside formal political parties. But the discovery of oil galvanised civil participation in several forms. At the beginning of 2010, more than 120 small civil society groups drawn from all areas of expertise (policy and governance think tanks, research groups and human rights, environmental and community-based organisations) came together to create the Civil Society Platform for Oil and Gas (henceforth the Platform). The aim of the Platform was to monitor all facets of the oil industry: regulation, production, spending, and environmental impact. The members of the Platform subsequently asked to cooperate with the NDC government in the creation of a framework for the governance of oil: the Petroleum Revenue Management Act Bill (Gyimah-Boadi and Prempeh 2012, 99). The citizens involved in creating the framework included powerful constituents, traditional rulers, the media, faith-based groups and interested individuals. Their meetings led to recommendations to improve transparency and accountability.
Among the notable contributions of civil society groups to the Petroleum Revenue Management Act Bill was the inclusion of an independent body (that is, independent of parliament and presidency) called the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), which was tasked with monitoring and reporting on the government’s management of petroleum funds in in accordance with the law. It was almost unprecedented for a third-party organisation to be given the legal power to scrutinise the government. To ensure that PIAC members were not subject to political influence, they were statutorily nominated by professional bodies such as labour organisations, civil society institutions, private sector institutions, policy research organisations, traditional rulers, religious leaders and other non-state actors. MPs at first saw the PIAC as superfluous and a threat to the supremacy of Parliament, and tried to get rid of it. However, the Platform made skilful use of the free media and dissident MPs in a campaign on behalf of the PIAC, compelling MPs to support the committee for fear of being labelled corrupt.
The Platform also proposed the inclusion of a controversial bill intended to ban the collateralisation of oil revenue. After long debate and negotiation with the government, a compromise was reached that restricted the borrowing of money against oil revenue to budget-constrained resources (Kopiński, Polus, and Tycholiz 2013, 592). Since this bill, every parliamentary act relating to petroleum has been tacitly subject to the approval of civil society. The Platform modified the Petroleum Commission Act, passed in June 2011 to regulate and oversee the activities of upstream oil companies. It persuaded Parliament to reject a provision in the original text that provided a seat for the GNPC by arguing that the GNPC is an upstream company with commercial and operational interests, which therefore presented a conflict of interest. The Platform also forced the government to abandon the Petroleum Exploration and Production Bill because it allowed oil licenses and contracts to be awarded through negotiation instead of open competitive bidding (Gyimah-Boadi and Prempeh 2012, 99). In this case, the Platform enlisted the help of the media and opposition MPs (who were very happy to work with civil society) to alter the bill.
The PIAC has since produced several meticulous reports (PIAC 2012; 2013; 2014; 2015), some criticising the government for failing to adhere to petroleum law. The NDC government sees the PIAC as a threat, and initially tried to undermine it. In its 2012 report, PIAC criticised the government for failing to strictly adhere to the requirements for oil-sharing revenue (according to which 70% was designated for budget spending and 30% for saving), and also noted a wide disparity between forecast and outturn (according to the formula for allocation, the government is required to forecast yearly revenue every September, and the PIAC duly noted that the government manipulates budget funds by manipulating the forecast). The Ministry of Finance subsequently attempted to undermine the activities of the PIAC by refusing to provide it with funding. However, when the PIAC was evicted from its premises in Accra due to non-payment of rent, the media recorded the events and there was an outcry. This led the government not only to disburse the required funds but also to donate vehicles to the PIAC to aid its operation.
The point is that civil society has morphed from a collection of street protest groups into one of the strongest stakeholders in the Ghanaian oil industry. This has favourably affected other sectors: education, poverty reduction, health etc., where civil society groups have also penetrated. The feedback from oil and civil society development touches on several referents: civil society independence, civil society political engagement, citizens’ participation, executive constraints, press freedom etc. There is evidence that oil has not only increased the duties of the press but their freedom as well. Indeed, in the 2016 World Press Freedom Index, Ghana was ranked 26th globally (up from 41 in 2012 and 66 in 2005): the second freest country in Africa and ahead of Spain, the UK, the USA and France. Whilst this ranking is not objective, there is a sense that the Ghanaian press has benefited from the discovery of oil by using it as a means to scrutinise the government and host debates and discussion.
There is also evidence of heightened political competition between Ghana’s two main political parties (which is itself a form of democratic feedback) as a result of the infusion of oil into the political landscape (Whitfield et al. 2015; Mohan and Asante 2015; Hickey et al. 2015; Kopiński, Polus, and Tycholiz 2013). Political economists generally view this increased competition negatively, as leading to short-term goals for re-election. This may be accurate in part; but if so, short-termism is a problem afflicting competitive democracy in general, not one unique to Ghana. Additional democratisation does not necessarily mean better developmental policies. But the increase in political competition may have other advantages, as indicated below.
Self-scrutiny, self-correction and adherence to the law among ruling elites are logical outcomes of intense political competition. With two equally strong political parties, the opposition is likely to search for shortcomings in the ruling party (such as corruption and disregard for laws) for electoral purposes, and the ruling elites will try to deny them this advantage by promoting transparency and accountability. The ruling elites know that once they leave power, the other party will examine all of their past activities to portray the departing government as corrupt. This leads to a political strategy of self-correction. For example, during the Kosmos Energy controversy, some NDC officials believed that oil companies may have been complicit with the NPP and the Kufuor administration. Several investigations were launched to test this proposition. Similarly, some MPs from the NPP suspected the NDC of corruption and promised to audit the books when they regain office, which they have recently regained.
This increase in political competition has also led to more populist policies, which are not new to the Ghanaian political landscape (Whitfield and Therkildsen 2011). For example, there has been a rise in government borrowing and spending in indirect response to expected oil revenue (Bax 2015). Pauline Bax (2015) notes that the implementation of a new salary structure for more than 600,000 civil servants in 2010 (which placed an enormous burden on the national budget) was a populist political gesture. These are problems with multiparty democracy, which more democracy will serve to intensify.
But there is clearly a limit to populist policies. Both the NDC and the NPP rejected a proposal made by traditional chiefs in western Ghana (where oil was discovered) to decentralise revenue management with a provision of 10% of revenue to the region. Both political parties stressed the need to consider all resources as national as opposed to regional or ethno-regional, thereby consolidating the power of the nation state and the sovereignty of the centre over the regional, thus strengthening the sanctity of the Ghanaian state (Mohan and Asante 2015, 12).
Conclusion
The goal of this Debate is simply to show researchers that the feedback generated from the oil sector has played a role in strengthening Ghana’s existing political system – multiparty democracy. This redirects the focus of research from the resource curse to the actual influence of oil (which is in fact somewhat symbolic, as the amount of oil discovered in Ghana is fairly small!) on every dimension of politics: ideology, sovereignty, participation, the judicial and executive exercise of power and restraint, media freedom and effectiveness etc. There is clearly an institutional mutation in Ghana, but capturing it in journal articles and book chapters is not an easy task. Nevertheless, the direction of research ought to be the political changes instigated by oil discovery. It is possible that future generations will look back and identify a critical juncture in Ghana’s political history resulting from the discovery of oil.