African democracy often seems like an oxymoron. We hear so much in the western press about corruption, failed states, dictatorships, ethnic violence, and disputed elections that many would be surprised to find that anything like ‘normal’ politics occurs in Africa. But in Ghana there has just been a very close presidential election that saw the opposition candidate win by the tiniest of margins. On 7^th January Professor John Atta Mills was sworn in as President, representing the National Democratic Congress (NDC) who displaced the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that had governed for two terms. The NDC conspicuously borrowed from President-Elect Obama’s campaign by arguing that ‘A Change We Need’ although in terms of economic policy there is not a lot to tell between the two main parties.

NPP election billboards in Accra.
[Images by Giles Mohan, © copyright Giles Mohan]

Although the credit crunch and global recession have affected many developing countries in terms of demand for their commodities and availability of credit, Ghana already had a huge budget deficit compared to the size of its economy. So, like all governments, it is concerned with what will drive the country’s economy. Last year, after much speculation, oil was discovered in the west of the country, mainly offshore, but with the possibility of land-based reserves. For a country dependent on oil imports and a massively over-stretched energy generation infrastructure this was great news. No sooner had the discovery been confirmed than the NPP president hailed Ghana’s economic problems to be greatly relieved. Domestically people were cautiously hopeful, but have witnessed the plight of their near neighbours in Nigeria who have massive oil wealth, but are dogged by corruption, environmental damage, and growing inequality and so are desperate that Ghana doesn’t go down the same path.

Internationally, the oil producers began arriving. Initially the discovery was through a UK-US consortium, but the Chinese were soon in negotiations to secure drilling rights in one of the off-shore blocks. The Chinese, like all industrialising countries, need to secure energy supplies and so see sub-Saharan Africa as a region that is under-exploited, although one with higher than average risks for investment. Already the Chinese are well-established in Sudan, Angola, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea with Ghana representing the latest addition to a string of producers bordering the Gulf of Guinea. With oil production due to begin within the next two years it is a critical period for Ghana and the new NDC government who have the benefits of this new revenue stream, but also need to manage the potential downsides.

Ghana’s energy problems run deep. When I was in Accra last month we had power cuts everyday as the water levels in the Volta Dam, Ghana’s main source of electricity, dropped during the dry season. Here, again, the Chinese are heavily involved in energy production through the construction of another hydro-electric dam in the north-west of the country at Bui, and a power plant near Accra.

Sign for the power plant near Accra built by a Chinese State construction company.[Images by Giles Mohan, © copyright Giles Mohan]

As part of China’s development assistance and more commercial considerations it has given low interest loans to the Ghana Government for the Bui Dam. The original plans to dam this part of the Black Volta River began in the 1920s and both the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the French in the 1990s looked at the feasibility of the project. However, it was the Chinese who offered the most favourable finance package and the cheapest tender, and got agreement from the Ghana Government in 2005. The Chinese contractor, Sinohydro, is a major multinational and is well under way to finishing the project with electricity beginning to flow in December 2011.

Although Chinese firms in Africa have been criticised for importing their own labour the agreement ensures that jobs go to Ghanaians with about 700 Chinese expatriates working on the project compared with 3000 Ghanaians. Already we have seen migration of job-seekers from other parts of Ghana to the remote Bui site. Bui is also a national park and about one-third of it will be lost to the dam with associated loss of land and wildlife. However, despite some rumours on the web about an anti-dam lobby we made inquiries among a number of NGOs in Ghana and not one of them seemed opposed to the dam, which will add 400 MW of power to the grid. And there are plans to build Bui City next to the dam, which one official optimistically said would be “like Dubai”. All in all, then, these are interesting times for Ghana where the people deeply crave the infrastructure of modernisation and have new lines of finance from China and the prospects of oil revenue.

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About the author

Dr Giles Mohan is a Reader in the Politics of International Development at the Open University. His research has examined politics in Africa, particularly ways in which rural communities access the government as well the role of diasporas in national politics.

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In the last month or so I’ve become intrigued by the spectacle of the Republican ‘pick’ of Sarah Palin for the vice presidential candidate. I say spectacle because Palin is everywhere in US news bulletins and in the ‘blogosphere’, alternately spoofed, lampooned and applauded as ‘everymom’, and even turned into an action doll range wearing a school girl uniform with a red bra and a gun holster.

Once upon a time, two white male candidates would have been apparently able, quite unproblematically, to ‘represent’ all Americans including women and non-whites. I’m not saying that the absence up to now of non-white and non-male candidates for high political office was a ‘good thing’. I’m saying that the campaigns for non-white and non-male candidates in these US election campaigns have strongly veered towards a position where the capacity of candidates to represent something beyond their own interests or personal identity is now radically in doubt.

If you think back to Margaret Thatcher, there was little sense in which anyone expected her to ‘represent feminism’, just because she was female, and rightly so in fact, although it was a bitter pill for many to swallow. She was first of all a Conservative. She was also tellingly represented as a female masquerading as a male, but that kind of sexism notwithstanding, one lesson many (including feminists) learned from the Thatcher episode was that anatomy is not destiny. Thatcher showed many woment that you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

Thatcher showed you cannot assume that one’s best interests are represented by someone ‘like you’.

So, to return to the US elections: one black candidate (Obama) and one female candidate (Clinton), followed by one female VP nomination on the Republican side, has blown the universalism of the old days out of the water. Obama’s burden of representation is: can he, as an educated black man, represent all peoples, not just non-whites, not just the middle classes? Clinton’s was: could she overcome the difficulty powerful women have in the public domain, of being likeable as well as being authoritative? Could she attract more than just the feminist vote?

In the midst of these struggles over the Democratic nomination, a textbook semiotic situation , John McCain was looking old, white and male, just because there were these other candidates who could be contrasted to him. McCain invoked himself as ‘the American president Americans have been waiting for’ (as opposed to Obama, he meant, whose Americanness was implicitly in question). But his problem as Republicans perceived it, was that against Obama and Clinton he appeared to be more like Bush, whereas he needed to put clear water between his own brand of Republican politics and the track record of the Bush administration.

Sarah Palin.
[image by Sskennel, some rights reserved]

Once Obama failed to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate, the door was open to McCain to look like the progressive and agent of change by choosing a woman. So then the Republican party, picks Sarah Palin, a politically inexperienced self-styled ‘hockey mum’ from small town Alaska. She is often thus described, but this description is not my sexist inflection, it is exactly how she represents herself, and it is why the Republicans selected her. Palin was selected entirely for her gender and her entire pitch has been about folksy political illiteracy. Had she been a man, she would not have been picked for VP.

As I’ve pointed out, this American election is to a very great extent fought on the turf of identity politics, brought about by a mostly ‘happy’ collusion between political parties who seek to use identity politics and media institutions that for the most part are bent on the personalisation of politics.

Identity-exploiting candidates such as Palin use whatever connection to a community they have to appeal to voters' sense of cultural familiarity, which serves to obscure the candidates' competence or fitness for office.

Republican political machinery have been active in pushing Palin’s identity profile, with conservative radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham enthusing that ‘A lot of women are calling in excited…The women of America will see that she might be the first woman vice president.’ Palin’s identity-based advantages go beyond gender, in Ingraham’s view: ‘Palin has an Eskimo husband, a Down’s Syndrome son, an Iraq-bound son.’ Of course she has traditional Republican political strengths: anti-abortion, anti-gun control, creationism, pro-oil drilling in Alaska, aggressive foreign policy inclinations and so on. But these are the default positions of  many a Republican candidate. But, only a woman could have been billed a ‘gun-toting, moose-hunting mother of five’ and have used a campaign image showing her sitting in the bloodstained snow, gun in hand, alongside the carcass of a large animal killed by her own fair hand. A mix of femininity and killer aggressiveness – an image of political woman based on the compromises necessary for women in Republican politics, combining a frontierswoman self-reliance with the sexual allure of a beauty contest winner.

Republican strategists...hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters

Republican strategists have been open in the hope that Palin will attract disaffected Hillary Clinton voters, who believe that they had a right to a woman in the White House. It’s an extraordinary thought, that Palin was picked because it was considered that her anatomy could buy her Clinton’s votes, despite the fact she wears Republican clothes. Shades of  the Thatcher experience then, to any deluded voters thinking that she is a feminist ticket.

Indeed, feminist overtures and apple pie ‘mom’ was the balancing trick that Palin offered in her first rally in Ohio as VP nominee. She began by drawing on a hackneyed feminist metaphor, and directly echoing a speech of Clinton’s: ‘It turns out that the women of America aren’t finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all.’ In fashioning Palin’s affirmative action candidacy, the McCain campaign has gleefully adopted liberal feminist tactics and grievances that conservative Republicans have so long derided. No matter that Palin chastised Clinton for whining when she complained of sexism during the primary, or that McCain laughed approvingly when one of his supporters called Clinton a ‘bitch’.

However, lest she came over as an aggressive feminist (and given that conservatives traditionally scoff at the idea that American society systematically blocks women from advancement), the main theme of her speeches have been her own personal story, spliced with sentimental guff such as ‘Our family has the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys…I’m just one of many mums who will say an extra prayer each night for our sons and daughters going into harm’s way’.

Palin’s popularity reflects, in great part, a cultural mistrust of expertise and intellectual rigour. Her inexperience as a former mayor of a tiny town and governor of a small, idiosyncratic state for less than two years, her confident ignorance about the economy and international relations, her ditzy delivery and religious zeal, all add up to the sense of a special kind of feminine ignorance catapulted onto the world stage.

At the televised debate last week between the VPs, Palin played all flickering eyelashes and flirty folksiness, at one point actually winking at the camera. As one typical political commentator said, ‘She lit up the screen at times with her smile and occasional winks’. In recent days, though, we have had less ‘lipstick’ and more ‘pitbull’, as an increasingly desperate McCain-Palin ticket exploits the anger of Republican extremists about Obama, stirring up mob-like behaviour in the ranks. As the Republicans move into the territory of assassinating Obama on racial grounds (Palin said he is someone ‘who doesn't see America as we do’), they move further into frivolity. Ignorance doesn’t have to be a woman, and ignorance may not secure votes in the long run, but only a woman could build her political credibility on the appeal of ignorance.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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The advent of the so called ‘Web 2.0’ and the explosion in social networking that the web sites and ‘mash ups of technology’ that underpin it have enabled has led to a resurgence of interest in electronic or digital democracy. This is the belief that first emerged in the United States in the 1970s that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be used to renew democracy. It was argued then, as now, that the interactivity of these new technologies – by which contemporary advocates of digital democracy mean the internet – will deliver new forms of political practice and participation, thereby reinvigorating and reinventing public debate and political accountability.

As with technological development generally much of the literature and debate on the internet and democracy has always been highly technologically determinist and optimistic: it treats technological development as historically inevitable (hence my use of ‘will’ not ‘can’, above), politically neutral, and fully accepts that any drawbacks and risks are outweighed by the benefits. For digital democracy specifically this translates into development, research and policy that is heavily biased towards the input side of democracy. That is, on technologies and their application and operation and not on what impact these have (if any) on outputs such as policy and decision making.

Allied to this entrenched determinism is a long standing tradition that can be traced back to the libertarian beliefs of the early pioneers of the internet: it is an inherently democratic medium. Its decentralised and devolved nature, and the weak forms of control to which it was subject for many years, certainly aided this view, thereby creating a utopian image of the internet as a separate socio technical system. Today we can witness this in much of the discussion of, and activity in, ‘virtual worlds’ such as Second Life, Habbo Hotel, and so on. However, the takeover of social networking sites and rapidly growing colonisation of virtual worlds by multi-national enterprises, allied with the widespread surveillance of cyberspace by government agencies must make even those who subscribe to the separate social system thesis question their position.

The potential for digital democracy has suffered the same fate, I believe. As the power and influence of governments and organisations committed to advancing consumerist forms of managed democracy has grown so the potential of the internet to act as a liberation technology has rapidly decreased. Instead we are witnessing the consolidation of a trend that was observable by 2000, when, working with colleagues from Denmark and Holland, we concluded our review of electronic democracy in Western Europe by reporting that:

“The scenario that emerges then, is of a “two-tier democracy”: a “big” democracy, concerned with policy and decision-making at a national and international level…And a “small” democracy where “ordinary” citizens try to make a difference in terms of the quality of everyday life. (Hoff, Horrocks and Tops 2000:187)

Since then the gulf between big and small democracy has grown as more and more people have become disengaged from the terrestrial world via their on-line personas, increasingly losing touch with, and interest in, real world politics and decision making and what they can do to influence and control these. To me, therefore, the main democratic problem of today seems to be how (or if) these two types of democracy can be reconnected.

Further reading

Democratic Governance and New Technology, edited by Ivan Horrocks, Jens Hoff, Pieter Tops, published by Routledge

About the author

Ivan Horrocks is a lecturer and member of the Technology Management Group at The Open University. He has written many publications about the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICTs) and government and politics.

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