BY PATRICK BOND
ACCRA — There are signs of genuine hope in Ghana. In May, I was privileged to witness a careful regrouping of the country's former revolutionary student/community movement, which is strengthening its political base by addressing two key areas of economic and social strife: the legacy of structural adjustment and water privatisation.
As has been the case recently in Bolivia, Ecuador and South Africa, Ghana's capital city and rural areas could witness rising protest in coming months. The combination of neo-liberal economic policies and the commodification of water could well drive ordinary Ghanaians to the streets.
That would be bad news for a vociferous US ideologue of neo-liberalism, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who visited Accra in late April and declared that Africans want free markets, penetration by multinational corporations and the US Administration's African Growth and Opportunity Act of 2000 (AGOA).
"While the protesters in Quebec were busy denouncing globalization in the name of Africans and the world's poor", wrote Friedman on April 24, "Africans themselves will tell you that their problem with globalization is not that they are getting too much of it, but too little."
Friedman cited just one Ghanaian, George Apenteng of the Institute for Economic Affairs, which is funded by transnational corporations, including Kaiser Aluminum and Unilever.
A far better informant would have been Charles Abugre, director of the Integrated Social Development Centre (ISODEC), whose 68 staff do top-quality radical analysis, publishing, development projects, community organising, Africa-wide and international networking and unrelenting advocacy.
"AGOA is not having a positive effect in Ghana", says Abugre. "We see it merely as an instrument for opening Ghana's markets in the name of promoting US investments. For Friedman to argue that AGOA will be the means by which we can penetrate the US market is a delusion. The main effect of AGOA is to link aid to economic reform, by which is meant the dismantling of state regulatory environment. There are no benefits, and the costs include clear manifestations of deepening structural adjustment and deregulation."
Roll back AGOA
ISODEC and its allies in the African Trade and Development Network are campaigning to roll back AGOA. Abugre calls for vigilance from US-based Africa solidarity activists. "We are protesting AGOA in civil society groups across Africa and are placing it on the agenda of the Organisation of African Unity and UN Economic Commission for Africa. AGOA is simply another way of undermining Africa's ability to mobilise domestic resources for development, and of enforcing an anti- developmental trade regime."
Two decades ago, Abugre and several of ISODEC's other leaders were amongst those responsible for giving Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings a social power base of enormous importance — to their great regret.
After taking control of the students' June 4 Movement and gaining state power in a December 1981 coup, Rawlings did a vicious political U-turn within months, forcing the lead activists into exile, jailing thousands and killing hundreds.
The final straw was the young leftists' defeat after a national debate in late 1982 over whether Ghana should turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a structural adjustment loan program. Though public opinion was clearly with the student movement, conservative opportunists emerged and helped Rawlings turn right, though he retained his nationalist demagoguery.
During the 1980s and '90s the IMF and World Bank ran roughshod over Ghana, helping open the country's doors to Western governments whose aid schemes nearly invariably failed. US administrations became friendlier, capped by a visit from Bill Clinton in 1998. Formal democracy was finally restored in 1992 (Rawlings was then elected twice amidst a mediocre field and boycotts by opposition parties due to blatant vote-rigging).
Ghana was officially considered among Africa's star neo-liberal pupils, boasting an average of 4.4% economic growth a year from the mid-1980s to 2000. Yet last December, after two decades in which the average annual income of the country's 18 million people never rose above US$400, disgruntled voters replaced the ruling National Democratic Congress with the New Patriotic Party, led by John Kufuor.
A gullible neo-liberal in practice, Kufuor at least concedes the obvious when pressed. On May 7, ISODEC hosted a conference on the effects of two decades of World Bank policies. Kufuor sent a message with this frank admission: "After 20 long years of implementing structural adjustment programs, our economy has remained weak and vulnerable and not sufficiently transformed to sustain accelerated growth and development. Poverty has become rather widespread, unemployment very high, manufacturing and agriculture in decline and our external and domestic debts much too heavy a burden to bear."
World Bank
The local World Bank resident representative, Peter Harrold, confessed that Kufuor was right. Agreeing that the bank had ignored Ghanaian social priorities, he pledged more support to loan programs specifically aimed at uplifting the poor. Water system "restructuring" was one example, given the failure of Ghana's state company to provide affordable clean water to about 60% of urban residents.
A few days later, on May 17, Harrold was lambasted in front of several hundred more delegates at an ISODEC public forum on water. Harrold bragged of coordinating a rural water investment scheme to supply communal taps to villages under certain conditions. He also actively promotes the leasing, over 10-25 years, of two large urban water systems to supply several million residents. Five multinational corporations have already bid for the contracts.
Replying to Harrold, development practitioner Danumin Subiniman — who coordinates numerous rural northern Ghanaian water schemes paid for by a 1999 World Bank loan — complained that "full cost recovery, the demand driven approach and World Bank conditionality of 5% upfront payment are fully enforced."
Yet "these cost too much", insists Subiniman, and are responsible for numerous rural system failures. A deadly epidemic of Guinea worm, a debilitating water-born parasite, has broken out.
Nor is water quality testing provided in poor areas, says Subiniman. And because the bank and the state insist on full cost-recovery from poor people, "huge sums of their income are being spent on capital and maintenance".
The forum unveiled that the World Bank and the state's full cost-recovery strategy assumes water can be stripped of "public goods" (or what economists term merit goods, or externalities). Reduced to the status of commodity, water should be bought and sold in the marketplace.
Thus, according to the 1999 World Bank water loan documentation cosigned by Harrold, "It is assumed that the health benefits known to users are captured in their willingness to pay for good quality water."
Abugre objects that the bank's "willingness to pay" surveys are ludicrous. Instead, in a context of terribly low levels of "ability to pay", in rural areas that basically survive without cash incomes, the benefits that flow from disease abatement, gender equity and economic spin-offs justify much greater water subsidies.
Moreover, says Abugre: "Water is a human right. Without it, there can be no life. We cannot let it become a mere commodity."
Harrold may have failed the rural poor with his dogmatic refusal to subsidise operating and maintenance expenses. But his contribution to the privatisation debate is more complex.
Last year, Harrold derailed the first attempt to lease Accra's water system because of bribery — allegedly worth US$5 million, and implicating Rawlings' wife — by an Enron subsidiary. Other multinational water companies had complained about the bribe and non-competitive bid, and this incident gave Harrold a chance to reverse the World Bank's local image for being soft on corruption.
Desperate
The World Bank remains desperate to claim an Anglophone West African privatisation success story, and so Harrold is making the urban water leases a precondition for Ghana's access to debt relief via the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.
A commentator from the floor of the forum remarked that the appalling conditions that Accra water consumers face directly reflect class power and segregation. Virtually all upper- income people have no problem accessing clean tap water and water-borne sewerage in Accra's bourgeois neighbourhoods; virtually all low-income people have irregular or non-formal access to water. Ghana's neo-liberal state works for the rich, not for the poor.
But now Harrold intervenes, with a devious way of capitalising on resentment against the Ghana Water Company, so as to promote privatisation. The World Bank has played a triple trick on Ghanaian society since Rawlings came to power:
(a) running down the state, so that privatisation appears as the only alternative to public service failure;
(b) exacerbating class inequality in society, so it is logical to argue that the existing system is biased toward the rich (and hence claim that privatisation will actually benefit the poor);
and (c) compelling the state to raise water tariffs (prices) sharply before privatisation so that the chosen multinational corporation would be spared public anger.
Harrold could therefore claim to the ISODEC forum that only a private supplier can extend the system to the poor and fix the leaks system responsible for half of Accra's water never being charged for.
This triple gambit was first used to promote water privatisation in the World Bank's main pilot project, Buenos Aires, as my academic colleagues in the Municipal Services Project have shown in a recent study ().
Here, then, is where internationalism is evolving from solidarity into concrete alliances with Ghana's poor and working people. There are increasingly similar institutional enemies in the "hydro-class struggles": the World Bank and multinational water companies (best critiques at ).
Harrold immediately ran into difficulty when a secret document revealed that "cherry-picking" — i.e., avoiding poor areas — will be built into the leases that will govern the city's water.
The World Bank and Ghanaian government's "Information Memorandum" — tellingly labelled on page i, "strictly confidential" — was prepared by Stone and Webster Consultants of Washington, DC. "Rather than expansion" of the water supply to low-income urban communities, the privatisers are instructed by the document not to "displace" the existing super-exploitative private-sector water tankers who have monopolised supply to low-income communities.
Faced with this evidence, the community groups at the forum constituted a Ghana National Coalition Against the Privatisation of Water to "ensure that the ownership, control and management of water services remain in public hands".
"This deepening of the movement is what we failed to do twenty years ago", acknowledged veteran activist Rudolf Amenga-Etego of ISODEC. "Our naivety and overconfidence as young student activists led us to believe that if we could catalyse a left-wing coup, we could march into power and reconstruct society from above. But as you see from the state of our country, it ended in disaster."
He smiled. "Now we know that building this movement against structural adjustment and water commodification from the bottom up is the only way to succeed. It may take a few more years but we won't be deterred from this path."
[Patrick Bond is based at the University of Witswatersrand and is an activist with the Alternative Information and Development Centre in Johannesburg. Visit the AIDC web site at .]