<TITLE: Development Communication Policy and Economic Fundamentalism in Ghana
ACADEMIC DOMAIN: social sciences
DISCIPLINE: journalism and mass communication
EVENT TYPE: doctoral defence presentation
FILE ID: UDEFP070
NOTES: continued in UDEFD070, read from notes

RECORDING DURATION: 20 min 36 sec

RECORDING DATE: 28.6.2004

NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: unknown

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 1

S1: NATIVE-SPEAKER STATUS: Dagbani (Ghana); ACADEMIC ROLE: research student; GENDER: male; AGE: 31-50>


<S1> distinguished opponent , ladies and gentlemen . development communication policy and economic fundamentalism , the title of my dissertation establishes the position that policy practices in ghana operate under a new paradigm of economic fundamentalism , by economic fundamentalism i mean the tendency for policy practices to be justified and assessed by the yardstick of the market only , that is without regard to the humanist requirement of need and community , this position of the study is a temporary one because i've come to realise that in the research process there is always a problem of completion it is never entirely complete it is always a process and once in a while , you bracket out a temporary moment , a temporary closure to continue shortly afterwards , today's occasion is the examination of one of such temporary closures , i want to , tell you a story it's a real story , that probably helped to define my interest in the current research project and (for that matter) my object of study , precisely in 1992 when i was then working as a journalist in upper west region of ghana quite a very remote area , i happened to have the displeasure of visiting a rural community on the entourage of the local mayor , and we went down to a place called <PLACE NAME> and this remote village . the trick was for the local mayor to , encourage the people to pay their taxes to the state so that the government could undertake development projects , and that was because the world bank had instructed the ghanian state to cut down expenditure on local government , social expenditure and local administrations were under pressure to maximise the tax net in order to meet up the expenditures , after thirty minutes of speaking to villagers on the need to pay their taxes , one of the local spokesmen got up and a- and told us that five years earlier floods washed away the entire village more than half of the people died , and those who survived rebuilt their lives nobody came to their aid , it wasn't news outside the village the entire village handled the problem alone , without any governmental or non-governmental assistance , so the spokesman asked the mayor where was government then , as a journalist i- it was a traumatising experience for the simple fact that we were embarrassed to hear the story of a community that had faced a disaster without any assistance , i was embarrassed that this community never felt it belonged to what we thought was an imagined community of a nation state called ghana , probably there's any moment in my life that i should point out to as forming the seed for the development of my intellectual interest , in the idea of the post-colonial nationalism as an imagined community founded on the fabric of a shared communication infrastructure , this was it , the rest of the country simply did not know that disaster has struck that small community , no telephone no radio no journalist to report indeed no access roads to their village to serve as a conduit for the news about a disaster , so the entire village did not understand why they should pay taxes , and in my opinion they were well justified . my embarrassment turned into an intellectual curiosity , when i later abandon the news room for the classroom , hence the subject matter of my dissertation . for the purposes of theoretical rigor i have tried position the late post-colonial nation state as yet coming into being , it is in the process of coming into being because it is called a developing country , and again this promise of coming into being would be to a large extent delivered through the agency of communication infrastructure , now let me qualify this statement i am not anthropomorphising technology i will not do that after spending so much time in my dissertation sorting out the relationship between technology and human agency , i'm only here celebrating the enabling effects of technology . can we write a history of the formation of developed countries without a chapter on a strong communication policy , north american post-colonies and we have to acknowledge the power of telecommunication and railway networks , european nations like finland which did not evolve from empire and we have to acknowledge the power of public service broadcasting . the conjuncture around which this project was undertaken is dominated by one enduring policy initiative , that is ghana's adoption of an IMF and world bank supervised structural adjustment programme in 1998 1993 sorry , since ghana's independence in 1957 structural adjustment programme has led historical record of being the longest running policy initiative ever to be implemented in ghana , it has gone through a decade of military rule and three democratically elected governments , and from all indications it will be there for a long while , what makes structural adjustment programmes key to any analysis on communication and development policy in ghana is the fact that it has a comprehensive reach including a communications sector reform , i have tried to discuss this in my book as thoroughly as possible , structural adjustment programme as the wording implies , was designed to re-engineer the less commodified economy of the developing countries into the financial discipline of global capitalism , the process of colonialism was already on such a mission but the process was cut short by the global articulation of the people's right to self-determination . structural adjustment programme was therefore designed to continue from where formal colonialism ended , a way of reading the scene that i'm trying to paint out is to argue that the political project of nationalism terminated the economic project of globalism , that is from colony to post-colony , but for a short period only for economic project to return but this time through the agency of the post-colonial state under the tutelary of international finance capital institutionally embodied as the IMF and the world bank , the political state involved in the project of building an imagined community ladies and gentlemen is now turned into an economic state involved in building a new market of consumers , this shift as i've tried to point out in my research was inaugurated by the implementation of structural adjustment programme , the task of the development communication theory then as i see it , is to focus attention on the post-colonial state , and i've traced the trajectory of the of development communication theory and one of the key arguments that i have forcefully established is how the state is how state agency in communication policy is woefully undertheorised , part of the reason being that communications scholars took the state for granted nation building in progress , focus on the international relations , this omission was justifiable because the full implications of structural adjustment programmes were not yet evident at the close of the 1980s , if the promise of political community was so alluring and tempting to preclude the post-colonial state from critical analysis in development communication , the news is that with structural adjustment in place the post-colonial state is now a political turncoat and we need to retool our analytical categories to capture the contemporary conjuncture of a commodified post-colony , and this is precisely one of the tasks i have ventured into in this dissertation it may take a generation of scholars to do that and mine is just a step in that direction , doing this required an interdisciplinary approach , i have a feeling and the feeling is that development communication theory has for a long time been a provincialised undertaking . i'm saying so because interdisciplinarity is not in abundance in the area of this study , thus i have tried to initiate cross-disciplinary discourse of post-colonial theory political theory cultural studies and political economy , this have been fruitful because while the post-colonial state was analytically neglected in our field of development communication it was subjected to unsparing analysis in these other fields of study so i consider interdisciplinarity as one of the central features of my book , i want to briefly comment on my choice of methodology for this study , one of the troubling aspect of this project was the question of how , how do i approach my object of study which also happens to be my object of desire , i chose articulation theory because whiles i while i wanted to do policy analysis i was sure i did not just want to do a traditional policy analysis as done in the field of policy studies , my policy analysis was to combine discourses both formal and informal about policy the processes of policy making , the target of policy and the various constituents who have stakes in policy making and its outcome , too many angles all in the name of policy research isn't it , traditional discourse analysis or content analysis to my understanding would not allow me to capture these various angles of study , more especially when i am interested in capturing the moments in the processes , as i've tried to justify in my introductory chapter articulationist methodological purchase lies in its resilience and its flexibility and picking up the moments and elements that make up policy discourse and processes for interrogation in a word its forensic quality as a tool for investigation , why did i choose to examine telecom broadcasting internet phone (penetration) and consumption all under the title of communication policy , if one goes by the international media representation of africa and ghana for that matter one may ask why there is no chapter on the print media or the newspaper industry in this project , the good news is that there isn't much to problematise about it apart from its urban centeredness , press freedoms by liberal democratic standards are well in forced in the country respected by both the government and the opposition as well as the military , no license is needed to publish and all medial a- er and all media related conflicts are subject to the due process of the law , for me then this is not a juicy area of research , within the circumstances of the post-colony the relations between broadcasting and misinformation is more obvious than it's with the print media broadcasting's ability to transcend literacy barriers its simultaneity and its facility in mediating multilingual communities makes it topical , so for this project i chose a more historical approach to broadcasting to see how broadcasting has been used and continue to be used in nation formation and my discovery i must admit surprised me , the moment of transition from colony to post-colony that is what we call independence is not a moment of a shift in policy rather it is a structurally adjusted state and here i mean the str- the state under structural adjustment , that inaugurates a discontinuation of broadcasting for community building to broadcasting for consumers , until i started working on this chapter my assumption was that , the shift in policy would occur during the colony post-colony transformation that is the moment of independence , a logical development of this chapter would have been a comprehensive focus on broadcasting but the fact of technological convergence suggest that the feature of broadcasting like anywhere else in the world probably lies in the future and power of tele- (webs) that's my reason for shifting quite soon to telecom policy and the shift has been a fruitful one , i discovered that within policy circles there is a conceptual shift from thinking of communication for development to information for the fortressed state the stress here ladies and gentlemen is on the conceptual difference between a concept of communication and a concept of information , it is a paradigmatic and strategic move by the post-colonial state now that certain constituents are disconnected from the promise of community with the gravitation (of the sector) . ghana has been a peaceful country and i hope it will continue to be but just across the western border of ghana is the country we all know called the ivory coast , a country which used to be cited as a paradigm case and a paragon of a successfully adjusted economy , as recent development shows the state in the ivory coast got properly adjusted and the discontented constituents are now also trying to adjust hence a civil war , that is only way dispossessed communities can speak to the state , the ivorian experience if anything at all underscores the relevance of this research project on ghana , looking at world bank and the ghanian state's recent rearticulation of communication as information has been a rewarding venture for conceptually i have argued that it is the only way communication can be sent to the market arena , i have tried to examine the implications of such an articulation on civil society , the muddy and messy area of policy implementation has been examined in my book as well , here too the sorry condition of the post-colonial state's ability or inability in telecom regulation has been laid bare , it is a disheartening story that had to be told and i did just that . if market thinking has colonised the policy process the evidence is not one of complete sorrow , my chapter on digital consumption allowed me to demonstrate not only the losers but the winners of the regulation as well , the process of consumption is not always a story of senseless conspicuous display of affluence but one of civic participation as well , the chapter allows us to appreciate the market from both sides at the same time that it gives us a window of opportunity to see how digital capitalism disconnects and connects various constituents in the post-colonial vis-à-vis the global , so my project can be seen as offering moments and windows in broadcasting telecom internet consumption and phone consumption as evidence of communication policy , one of the conclusions of this study has been that policy actors have a simplistic view of communication and development they evoke liberal economic articulations that have recently been brought to bare on communication without understanding the full implications of their arguments , market regulation is understood as a magic wand for delivering development needs including improving access to communication facilities , even where recent experience shows otherwise as i demonstrated in my study the story of telecom policy in my book shows that they would not want to question the suitability or otherwise of the market as an instrument of regulation , now to my conclusion , one of the developed interests that i gathered from this project is a passion for a focus on issues that bring together economics communication and community , if i have to use one phrase that captures the spirit of this work i will say that it interrogates the violence of economics on community through communication policy , so i would like to continue from here , there is a project that interrogates the rhetoric of economics on the constitution of communication policy communication commodification and community are therefore the three key concepts that will shape my scholarly thinking , these concepts of communication commodification and community appear to have different implications with two within two different discursive regimes or what can also be described as two epistemic communities namely the intellectual discursive community where there is a visible attempt to resist the celebration of progress and the power of market , the other epistemic community which controls a bureaucratic practice and for that matter has direct influence over communication policy celebrates progress idolises technology and religiously believes in the market , thus between an ivory tower sophistication in theory on the one hand and a problematic and simplistic orientation in policy practice i find my research interest developing around the rhetorical economical articulation in communication policy and this is precisely what i intend to pursue when i draw the curtain on this project or more precisely , if i survive the intellectual sword fight for which we are gathered here to witness , thank you </S1>
<APPLAUSE>
