Series On Agrarian Reform

Verse 2 ? The Paradox of Neo-colonialism.

In ?A Relevant Page From History?*, my keynote verse on agrarian reform, I established first principles on dependency in Ghana. Simply stated, the inability of the Ghanaian leadership to successfully pursue a policy of institutional transformation, which will unleash the potential of indigenous capital has been responsible for the continued dependency of our economy. Even when the leadership has been aware of the general solutions to the problem of underdevelopment, and has acted in consonance with the development theories of the day, the particular solution as to the path of Ghana?s transformation has remained elusive.

Dependency and its corollary, foreign domination, in all their covert and overt forms, collectively underlie the phenomenon of neo-colonialism that was indicted by the Osagyefo in his book ?Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism.? Describing the phenomenon, he states that, ?The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent, and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system, and thus its political policy, is directed from outside.?

On foreign investment, the Osagyefo, who had certainly sought and utilized lots of it, bitterly warned that, under neo-colonialism, ??foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world.? It may be that, the image of Kaiser, soon to benefit immensely from two-thirds of electricity from the Volta River project, without any signed deals of integrating our indigenous aluminum industry, was weighing heavily on Kwame?s mighty brow.

What makes Nkrumah?s observations seem extraordinally prescient is that forty years after he wrote those words, the largest FDI flows to Ghana are in the mining and forestry industries ? both extractive and exploitative - and cocoa still dominates the agriculture and economy of the nation. UNCTAD?s revealation that Ghana earns only 5% of the total gold exports of almost a billion dollars, and the supervision of our macro-eeconomic policy by the World Bank, ring true to his description of the outcomes of neo-colonialist dependency. Sadly, the prescience loses its lustre under critical observation. The Fount of Honour?s epiphany was only a coming-of age, an awareness of a phenomenon to which he himself had been sujugated, and to whose continued sustenance his own role had become causal.

When Lenin determined that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism, there was implicit in it a sense that world socialist revolution, including the rebellion of colonial subjects, will defeat capitalism in this its final frontier. That neo-colonialism stll exists today indicates the failure of the former colonial subjects to defeat imperialism. But because the difference between imperialism and neo-colonialism is only the presence of a native political government, neo-colonialism, in actual fact, is merely colonialism through the agency of native political rulers. This syllogism is fairly obvious.

Being that there is enough consensus from development experts, and evidence from countries who have made the transition, that institutional transformation to unleash domestic capital will end dependency and foreign domination, neo-colonialism loses its punch as an inevitable force of domination, and we are not passive in our socio-economic predicament. We can change it. The only reason it stays is because we have not been able to. Far from being a co-ordinated attempt by foreign multinationals and their governments to keep us dependent and oppressed then, neo-colonialism is a system of oppression sustained by the ineptitude or ignorance of the African leadership. We are active agents and accessories to our own dependency and domination. Rather than the inevitable march of imperialism, as Nkrumah charges, neo-colonialism represents collective failure of the native leadership to battle imperialism.

Writing in ?Reaping the Whirlwind? Geofrey Bing, one time Attorney-General in the Osagyefo?s government, imputes Nkrumah?s failure at institutional transformation of the Ghanain economy to the relentless and successful efforts of the British colonial government at refreeing the process of independence in such a way that, they virtually guaranteed the continuation of the colonial mode of production upon which the whole edifice of exploitation was built. As true as Mr Bing?s position rings, it is subsumed by the fact that the act of independence fully invested the agency of causation with the new native central government and this government and its successors have been ?free? to pursue a path that will overturn the dependency.

To be fair to our leadership, their failure at institutional transformation is neither for want of awareness of its existence nor for lack of trying. Right from independence, the dominant development theories in Ghana have centered on the number one priority of a ?concentrated attack on the system of growing food.? Sir Arthur Lewis, the Nobel Laureate, whose ?report on industrialization in Ghana? was responsible for development policy for the last 10 years of the Nkrumah era, stressed that, increased agricultural productivity was critical to ensuring an adequate market for expanding manufactures through the import substitution program. Increased agricultural productivity, the report posits, constitutes the first line in generating savings from the increased wealth of farmers to finance the program of industrialization. Sir Lewis?s report also served as the basis of Nkrumah?s rudely truncated 7 year Development Plan in 1964, and remains very much the basis of the economic organization of the country today.

In the dialectical continuum from general to partiucular solutions, increased agricultural productivity had become a critical part of Ghana?s unique solution. The far reaching consensus of this solution can be seen in our reference today to Ghana as an agricultural country, even if we can?t fully feed ourselves. Presently, the NPP-led central government?s affirmation of agro-industries being the strategy for industrialization, albeit flippant and glib, arise out of this development theory. A dialectical reversal however continues to challenge the Ghanaian leadership. Even as there are objective laws that guide agricultural development in general, they are challenged by finding the particular path of Ghana?s agricultural development. In the shift, increased agricultural productivity had become another general solution.

It is meet then, at this point, to examine the two contending strategies that Ghanaian central governments have pursued to transform agriculture ? state ownership that has been championed by Nkrumah and his followers, and the Busia- Danquah advocacy of private ownership, which forms the ideological plinth of the current Kuffour government. Theoretically, obviously, there is a huge ideological chasm between the two poisitions, but my intentions, at this point in my ?Series On Agrarian Reform?, are not to debate the merits of, or wage polemics against, any of these positions ? there has been enough done of that already in the last 100 years. My concerns are that, despite this theoretical chasm, what becomes clear in practice in the particular situation of Ghana is the uncanny similarities in our leadership?s approaches to agricultural transformation and the failures which have characterized and continue to plague these approaches.

Let me state categorically that I do not for a minute question the commitment of the exponents of these approaches ? our Nkrumaists and Busia-Danquahists. They both stress large scale commercial plantation agriculture with efficient storage and marketing; they cite improved transportation, and the use of science and technology to improve agricultural production and to raise the productivity of ?man per acre?; they both advocate and even practice to some extent the extension of credit to the farmer be it in cash or inputs and implements; even if inadequately funded, there is an awareness of the value of scientific research to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability; and finally, they earnestly regard agriculture as a solid foundation for the industrialization of the country.

A menacing similarity exists too. Because they have essentially chosen the proceeds from the cocoa economy as the major means to finance their ideas on transformation, it has become only a matter of expedience ? nay necessity ? to leave the cultivation of cocoa and, more importantly, the tenurial practices and the social relations that underpin its cultivation, largely intact. These tenurial practices and social relations had, by the time of independence, made Ghana the world?s largest producer of cocoa in the world with substantial sterling reserves and sizeable yearly proceeds. Cocoa?s arrival in Ghana towards the end of the nineteenth century did not occasion a major shift in the land tenure system in the areas where it was cultivated. The traditional system was able to subjugate its cultivation and expansion to its tenurial laws. Under its tutelage the industry grew to heights and, in turn, was easily delivered together with the mining and forestry concessions, to the colonial economic machine and imperative to which the traditional system itself had become subordinate. It is a relationship, whose present manifestation, I have referred to, elsewhere, as the ?debilitating duality of power?, of chief and central state, perpetuates the structural framework of economic exploitation and dependency.

To our post-independent governments the question was, why rock the boat of the mode of production, tradition and customary practices that guard this cash cow when it was better left alone - with some help in imputs of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides and even money from the central state to keep it the cocoa beans flowing? Just as the colonialists had done. Making it easier for them was the nostalgic belief that this traditional sector, along with all kinds of misconceptions about its true nature, represented authentic African culture.

In effect then, our development agenda, which gives primacy to the cocoa economy, has maintained, and even legitimized the mode of production, tenurial and social relations of production that are suitable to an economy based on subsistence and even slavery. What we call the traditional system, governed by the customary land tenure system on the one hand and the chiefs, stools, skins, priests and medicine men at its apex, is the highest expression of social organization of societies that had, for 400 years of slave trading and a century of colonization, steeled itself for mere survival and subsistence. What people refer to today as the resiliency of chieftaincy today represents the honing of survival instincts, over five sombre centuries, of the leading guardiansof subsistence based on an agrarian cultural ethos. Just as one does not consult the Court of the Holy Inquisition for the means to enlightenment, basing institutional transformation into industrialization on the mode of production and social relations of subsistence is a retrogressive and therefore doomed to failure. Today the systemic re-emergence of child labour and slavery on cocoa farms and fishing villages, two so-called traditional sectors, have only been possible because of the continued existence of the customary mode of production and its social realations. This is the agricultural equivalent of depending on our dependency to get rid of our dependnecy.

Where Nkrumaists and Danquaist differ is their choice of strategy, outside the ambit of the cocoa agricultural ethos, in implementing their shared objectives in the development of agriculture. Implicit in their different strategies was that, institutional transformation would be an outside force that eventually supplants the ?primitive? traditonal mode of production.

Despite the Nkrumaists wailing that the coup prematurely halted the implementation of Nkrumah?s plans, there is no denying that by 1966 his ?collectivist? approach to agriculture through firstly, cooperatives and then rapidly through the establishment of State farms and Brigade farms, accounted for less than 2% of total Ghanaian agricultural production. The State farms alone produced less than 1% of the production in the trraditional sector, employed less than 1% of the agricultural work force and occupied less than two percent of the land under cultivation in the traditional sector. Not too surprisingly, prior to 1961 when the Agricultural Development Council was established, there had been no institutional approaches to the development of agriculture in the country. The traditional sector reigned supreme.

Similar to the Nkrumaists, the Danquaists lament that they have been in opposition (or non-existent) throughout most of the history of Ghana and except for the last 6 years and the ill-fated two years of Dr Busia?s reign, have had no opportunity to fully implement their agricultural policy. Despite the promotion of commercial farming in the later decades of colonization, the sale of northern region lands to members of the Ghanaian bourgeoisie for large scale rice cultivation since the NLC-Busia era, and the present commotion about land banks to increase foreign and domestic investment in agriculture, about 90% of agricultural production emanates from the traditional sector with its customary tenurial relations and mode of production.

Experts have labelled these intrusions into the larger operation of the traditional agricultural sector, either by the state or private commercial farmers, as part of the ?dual economy?, and much ink has painted the lurid gloom of its operation. By any name, one thing remains sinificantly clear. Just as the dependency on cocoa and other primary products is expected to finance the industrialization and modernization of our economy, in agriculture the mode of production and social relations of subsistence and dependency have remained the basis of production. This, the very negation of development, is the prominent face of the neo-colonialist quagmire in Ghana today.

* ?A relevant Page From History? can be read at http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=100270