Humanists in affluent societies concerned with the welfare of low-income, debt-servicing countries typically lack information about how ordinary citizens in those countries cope daily with drastically limited infrastructure. This lack of data handicaps international debate about whether debt-imposing countries bear any ethical obligations to distant people living under the pressures of external-debt servicing.

But from the standpoint of technology recipients in Ghana, facts about what a new installation can do technically are no more essential or basic than facts about who will be entitled to its use and who will be responsible for distributing its benefits and costs. Such concerns do not reflect peculiar prejudices that Ghanaians in particular harbor towards technology or its control so much as the primary concerns of any rational agent forced to contend with an egregious scarcity of resources in a severely debilitating infrastructure. Significant cultural differences do exist between Ghana’s traditionally agrarian social norms and the values dominant in a technocracy. But devoting excessive attention to such differences obscures a crucial failure among foreign policy makers and moral theorists: typically when debating and constructing economic policy, they fail to rely upon Ghanaians’ own authoritative experience in coping with extensive economic and technological deprivation. This volume attempts to correct the shortfall in published Ghanaian opinions about new technology and the conditions of its transfer.

It must begin with reference to the outstanding volume I of this series of Ghanaian Philosophical Studies, Person and Community, edited by Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye, with the outstanding collaboration of W. Emmanuel Abraham, N.K. Dzobo’s studies of Akan culture, Joyce Engman and J.N. Kudadjie. That volume forms the philosophical basis upon which subsequent studies of Ghanaian culture must build.

Here in Chapter I, "Culture: the Human Factor in African Development," Kofi Anyidoho argues that there is a crucial link between respecting cultural integrity and successful implementation of economic development plans. He reviews the thirty-year history of a notoriously disappointing agricultural development project first established using military force at Wheta in the Volta Region. Since the 1960s various projects in Wheta have been administered under the state’s centralized Irrigation Development Authority. The root problem with these early efforts engaging foreign capital in agriculture was their disregard for the expertise of individual farmers and the cultural integrity of the farming community. Anyidoho explains that `culture’ denotes not only festivals, craft industries, drumming and dancing; it correctly refers to the whole yearly work cycle and the daily routines that characterize a way of life. Interpreting farmers’ agro-economic needs for them is not merely ineffective; it is also, arguably, unethical insofar as it denies the authority of a people’s own culture, and hence their cumulative creative freedom.

Exposure to the global economic facts related to Africa’s current socioeconomic disarray may help to avoid the mistake of attributing the scarcity of technology in Ghana to some culturally determined aversion or incapacity borne by Ghanaians with respect to mechanistic or scientific ways of reasoning. In Chapter II, "Modern Technology, Traditional Mysticism and Ethics in Akan Culture," George P. Hagan corrects a popular misconception that African traditional religious doctrines undermine the cognitive effort to develop scientifically a sustainable technology and a reliable industrial base for the country. On Hagan’s interpretation, there is no contradiction between the Akans’ traditional religious accounts of physical reality in mechanistic terms, on the one hand, and their treatment of spiritual and ethical concerns constituting social reality, on the other.

From within Ghana in particular, news of the currently escalating economic crisis is usually not forthcoming. This is partly because many Ghanaians consider it in bad taste, at times self-destructive, to speak out as individuals to publicly embarrass authority figures guilty of abusing political or administrative power. Whistle-blowing and finger-pointing are not viewed by Ghanaian intellectuals as their civic or moral duty. Academia in contemporary Ghana does not sport the fringe of adamantly vocal professionals found in a late capitalist welfare state like the USA, where it is stylish for academics to adopt a morally high ground from which they function as self-appointed watchdogs of the overall system. In a traditional African community’s public affairs, only the prestigious master drummer of the royal court and other suitably recognized officials can correctly assume the carefully circumscribed responsibility of publicly criticizing a chief on behalf of his people. Even then the criticism is couched in elaborately formal protocols, using the sacred, impersonal symbolism of drum language or the stylized indirection of proverbial speech. This duty to conscientiously protect the integrity of public authority carries over in modern day notions of the individual’s civic responsibility. The carry-over is particularly pronounced when individuals confront the post-colonial international arena, where West Africa remains the focus of essentially exploitive and self-interested (or at best condescending) attention by foreign developers, speculators and assorted experts.

Notwithstanding their reticent international profile, Ghanaian intellectuals (especially lawyers and historians) have been notoriously troublesome to ruling elite classes since political independence forty years ago. But this pestering has been sustained exclusively in the arena of domestic politics, without appealing for the attention of the international human rights community. For instance if one scans reports that were published by Amnesty International in the middle and late 1980s, one finds no record of human rights abuse in Ghana. Yet in retrospect, that period of military rule remains notorious for the extra-judicial killings and state terrorism that then prevailed. More recently, the longest strike by university faculty in the history of the country (1995) miserably failed to save university education from the sacrifices made by the government in fulfillment of IMF demands on World Bank borrowers. Yet through the duration of their strike, Ghanaian academics remained mute in the international press while Ghana’s president simultaneously received honorary doctorates in the United States, where he continues to be lauded as a progressive champion of education for the masses. Thus, the international arena witnesses none of the signals one might expect to be generated from the intelligentsia of a sophisticated society that is undergoing virtual economic genocide.

In Chapter V, "Informalization of Ghanaian Politics," Kwame A. Ninsin details how events on the domestic political scene since independence have disenfranchised and dissipated Ghana’s labor resources — a process called `informalization’ of the economy. Essentially, informalization amounts to an orchestrated, intentional institutionalizing of massive unemployment. He details how specific stratagems to fracture and dissipate the lower middle classes and the unemployed have succeeded in sustaining the present regime’s stronghold for many years under the guise of wide populist support. Ninsin argues that some foreign sociologists mistakenly romanticize this decentralizing of economic activity because they misunderstand it. The last-ditch efforts of laid-off Ghanaians fighting destitution in isolation are not comparable to the creative job alternatives fashioned voluntarily in a late-capitalist welfare state by maverick self-employed entrepreneurs. The latter are seeking to escape the conventionality of salaried positions in corporate structure. But the situation in Ghana is quite different. In a stalled economy, with no wage-earning prospects, no means of travelling for new job opportunities nor saving to invest in new skills or in technical inputs, Ghanaian workers who survive in the informal sector cannot be said to freely choose the self-employment they have pieced together in makeshift stalls, backyard industries and roadside retail hawking. Yet this informal economy now constitutes well over half of the nation’s commercial activity. To comply with World Bank dictates the government publicly encourages new college graduates to get a foothold in such `private entrepreneurial’ activities instead of seeking salaried job opportunities that do not exist in the formal sector.

When queried, Ghanaian intellectuals typically do not blame foreign-based policy makers for the economy’s problems. More directly, critics blame the current get-rich-quick style adopted by Ghana’s own government leaders and administrators. There is a lack of the initiative and imagination necessary to carry national economic policy beyond the crisis-management tactics mandated by foreign financiers. Today’s foreign financiers are primarily concerned with the global movement of capital, not the welfare of the Ghanaian population. In this respect, the basic principle underlying Ghana’s commerce with the outside world has not changed in 500 years.

Egregious diversions from democratic process go unchecked in Ghana, since foreign investors are interested in safeguarding their accumulation of capital. Hence, they approve — indeed, they encourage — political stability at any social cost. One may argue that the general voting public within Ghana over the last twenty years has been intimidated by episodes which include extra-judicial killings and detentions, imprisonment of journalists, gratuitous displays of fire power just prior to Election Day in 1992 and 1996, dawn to dusk curfews accompanying both election periods and non-election periods, staged disruptions of peaceful office-worker demonstrations, tear-gassing and televised clubbing of student demonstrators. In such a climate the general public may be relied upon to dispatch election formalities peacefully in order to avoid confrontations with the military. Meanwhile, the American corporate community is treated to expensive advertising by the government of Ghana that features its economy as robust and bursting with exciting investment and tourism opportunities at every turn. Building an economic climate to enhance Ghanaians’ opportunities for investment and leisure is pre-empted by vigorously preparing a liberal trade environment attractive to foreign corporate investors.

Along with respect for the intellectual and cultural property of individuals, there is the need to protect legally both human and natural resources from the extractive power of foreign capital. In Chapter VIII, "Hight-technology, Individual Copyrights and Ghanaian Music," John Collins details the incongruities for protecting artistic property rights that have recently emerged since Ghanaians adopted computerized music and foreign legal provisions. Digitalizing music has peculiar effects on the aesthetic quality of Ghana’s varied folkloric productions, particularly since each live performance in every genre of traditional music is especially valued for its nonreplicable originality and its context-dependent uniqueness. These aesthetic qualities inherent in live traditional ensemble work are virtually obliterated through the artifices of electronic sound reproduction.

Western copyright law, designed to protect claims on printed property, is comparably alien to musical production in a living oral tradition, according to Collins. He argues that unless appropriate legislation is crafted to accommodate the complexities of African musical composition and the special conditions of its creation, the effort to protect indigenous artistry will be wholly self-defeating. Appropriate legal protection entails safeguarding Ghanaian artists’ rights to exploit their own folkloric heritages while constraining foreigners from doing the same. Favoritist protection of human resources may be an essential contribution of the judiciary towards asserting Ghana’s cultural integrity in the modern world.

The moral dilemmas arising from modern medical practice mark an extreme case of technology’s confrontation with traditional norms concerning the scope of personal freedom. A good example of this tension and how ‘situationist’ moral reasoning might resolve it is evident in the Akan view of euthanasia, discussed by Kwasi Agyeman in Chapter IX, "The Impact of New Medical Technology upon Attitudes toward Euthanasia among Akans". As a policy couched completely in the abstract, euthanasia cannot be morally evaluated by a situationist at all, since the moral features of any collective action are determined by specific facts concerning the agents involved on a specific occasion. For the situationist, when making the choice to die becomes a corporate decision new technology reconstructs the moral significance of a death. In the Akan view, it is morally acceptable to end one’s own physical life in order to sustain one’s spiritual dignity, but this does not extend to approving the behavior of a second party who assists technically in the implementation of that decision. Thus Akans achieve a kind of resolution between their respect for individual integrity through self-determination, and their respect for the ultimacy of divine power that does after all determine life and death.

New technologies intervening in the human reproductive process arrive packaged in Western ideology that contributes to people misinterpreting their relation to the environment. In Chapter X, "Population Growth and Ecological Degradation in Northern Ghana: the Complex Reality," Jacob Songsore explains that preoccupation with population growth and foreign postulates about optimal family size and structure grossly camouflages the extensive network of factors contributing to environmental degradation in Northern Ghana. These factors include the government’s uneven distribution of social goods and services nationwide, which reflects a vestigial pattern of colonial bias in favor of the southern trading coast. Consequently, to survive in Northern Ghana most farmers are forced into crisis-management strategies and over-concentrated uses of land. In the absence of improved crop and breed varieties, and without credit facilities, or paved roads, schools, clinics, water supply or electrical power to make village expansion coherent, these farmers are obliged to exhaust the land.

The argument for treating technology transfer as a moral obligation of affluent nations may involve the illusion that each new application of technical ingenuity marks an advance in human culture. It is now a familiar theme in post-industrial societies that less technology is better. This truism also holds in so-called ‘underdeveloped’ societies. For example in Ghana’s development of food agriculture, a recent initiative drastically reduces farmers’ dependency on manufactured products rather than increasing the repertoire of new technological farming methods. In Chapter XI, "Participatory Integrated Pest Management: IPM Training Methodology in Ghana," Kwame Afreh-Nuamah describes Ghana’s new Integrated Pest Management (IPM) training program adopted after a successful pilot project in 1995, when he pioneered the introduction of techniques that he researched in Indonesia. The key innovation of this training is that it enables farmers to improve crop yields by minimizing their use of imported toxic chemicals to control pests. The aim is to cultivate farmers’ expertise in applied ecology. Farmers are trained to analyze their pest problems scientifically and to plan cooperatively their crop protection strategies, minimizing their use of toxic chemicals. They learn to support the natural balances that they observe directly between crop-friendly insects and the pests upon which they prey. In the process they develop capabilities and patterns of cooperation with other farmers in the area — itself an important community building process.

In his capacity as an environmental economist, K. Tutu works on a consultancy team that now advises the government on coordinating its planning in different sectors — for example, fuel supply, transportation, agricultural extension services, and sewage management — in order to make alternative energy sources financially feasible on a national level. He argues that one way to finance the processing of biogas is to organize the commercialization of its byproduct outputs and to make a commercially attractive venture of transporting the raw sewage input as part of the investment in processing the fuel itself. This means utilizing the byproducts for retail as soil fertilizer, and also arranging a profitable scheme that attracts private transport companies to provide the raw waste input, at biogas production sites, rather than their disposing of sewage in haphazard ways that minimize clients’ costs while degrading the environment. Other energy-source options under study are solar power and liquid petroleum gas.

Ghana’s ambivalent pursuit of nuclear power is reviewed in Chapter XIV, "The Nuclear Option for Ghana," by Josef K. A. Amuzu. Since 1961, plans in Ghana for building a nuclear research reactor have been reversed five times. This underscores the desirability of detaching national economic policy as much as possible from international diplomatic pressures. On the other hand, an accurate analysis of the special difficulties involved for low-income countries building a nuclear resource capacity cannot be isolated from global politics, despite cessation of the `Cold War’.

In sum, this volume of essays documents the invaluable critical distance acquired by fifteen professionals through their extensive university training that began at the University of Ghana, as J.S. Djangmah highlights in the Epilogue, "Some Thoughts on the Future of Ghanaian Universities". Since pre-independence years, Ghana’s formal education system has sustained the highest international standards, with college graduates excelling in post-graduate degree programs at the finest institutions around the world.

But in l992, having complied with the World Bank’s mandate to restructure the entire school system to yield a quicker, cheaper, American-style product — and to make the transition without additional financing — Ghana’s education system reached a crisis point. In March l993 the country’s graduating senior high school class became the first to pass through the new American-style system. But 98.8% of this class finished their secondary schooling unqualified to take Ghana’s own University Entrance Examination. Throughout the 1990s, while the schools were frantically revamping their programs and tripling their enrollments to abide by IMF demands, no mention was made of education in the World Bank’s published ‘country reports’ on Ghana. In the 130 page country report issued in April 1991 the word ‘school’ appears only once, in reference to a children’s de-worming exercise. According to the World Bank’s l993 annual country report on Ghana, no cost-sharing reform of the school system had occurred. Surrealistically, the report urged that cost sharing be considered as an option.

In the 1993 document, the total annual cost of sending a child to primary school was quoted as 7,000 cedis and 2,000 cedis (in the city and ‘rural’ areas respectively). Yet this is a blatant fiction; 7,000 cedis would not settle the bill for even two of the required government set-price reading primers. The same report urged that the best way to ensure repayment of college loans is to deduct ten percent from the indebted graduate’s first paycheck. Yet the typical monthly salary for a new graduate lucky enough to find a salaried job in the formal sector of the economy is unlikely to cover public transport costs to and from the workplace. (More recently the Bank recommends scratching the loan scheme outright.) Indeed, in 1995 the annual salary of a University Vice Chancellor was the same as that of a senior janitor or chauffeur at the Bank of Ghana, another parastatal agency.

Djangmah regards the problems facing Ghana’s universities as soluble. But he argues that the indigenous faculty community should be playing a central role in finding solutions, rather than being sidelined as is the current practice of education reform committees. Where the bottom line of the policy proposed typically is drawn by foreign expertise. Yet it is a patent truism that the dilemmas encountered in rebuilding quality education, along with the other challenges of infrastructural development discussed in this volume, are most likely to be resolved through Ghanaian ingenuity, commitment, and initiative.

Legon, 1998

1. Peter Caws, "Towards a Philosophy of Technology," Chapter 16 in his collection of essays, Yorick’s World: Science and the Knowing Subject (University of California Press, 1993), pp. 196-209.

2. B. Pratt and J. Boyden, eds. The Field Directors’ Handbook—OXFAM Manual for Development Workers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 81, 132, 144-145, 150.

3. Interview with World Bank VP for West Africa, E.V. Jaycox, "Are World Bank’s Policies Working? Yes." African Farmer The Hunger Project, July 1994 vol.18. World Bank President B. Conable (1991), "Reflections on Africa" (Washington, D.C.), p. 5.

4. Ghana: 2000 and Beyond, February 1993, "Social Safety Nets and Traditional Coping Mechanisms" (The World Bank West African Regional Office), p. 15.

5. Perhaps this will change dramatically in the twenty-first century. For, if information and nuclear technologies wholly stratify and subsequently decimate over-industrialized parts of the earth, then Africa could become virtually all that remains recognizable of the ‘Real World.’

6. Robert Chambers, Putting the Last First (Essex: Longman, 1983).

7. Jonathan H. Frimpong-Ansah, "Flexibility and Responsive-ness in the Ghana Economy: Reflections on the Post-Decline Atrophy Syndrome," J.B. Danquah Memorial Lecture series, 29 (Accra: Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996), February.

8. Passed in 1992, the Political Parties Law outlawed campaign rallies scheduled after normal working office hours. It outlawed the association of former political leaders or party names with those parties registered for the 1992 race. The law prohibited outright any campaign contributions made by corporate bodies; and it outlawed any individual’s contribution exceeding the equivalent of US$200. Nor was ‘equal time’ on television or radio ensured for opposition candidates. In 1996 the promising presidential nomination of K. Pianim (in-law of the media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch) was banned by a court ruling on moot grounds.

9. Ghanaian Times, Tuesday August 26, 1997, front page.

10. Ghana: Progress on Adjustment, Restricted circulation report no. 9475GH, April 16 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1993), p. 53.

11. "Infocus" advertising supplement on Ghana, New York Times Sunday edition, April 1999 p. 10.

12. World Bank Development Report: Development and the Environment (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1992), pp. 104, 142.

13. Ghana: 2000 and Beyond, African Regional Office, West African Department (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1993), February, pp. 18, 21, 22. Higher Education: The Lessons of Experience (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 1994), quoted by F.A. Bekoe, "The Flight from Science," Presidential address to the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (Accra: 21 November, 1994).