Vernacular Neoliberalism - Duncker & Humblot eJournals

Sociologus, Volume 65, Issue 2, p. 177 – 200 Duncker & Humblot, Berlin

Vernacular Neoliberalism: How Private Entrepreneurship Runs Public Transport in Ghana By Michael Stasik*

Abstract Public transport in Ghana is a private enterprise. The incapacity of the Ghan aian state to adequately provide for transport services is at once capitalized on and compensated for by local entrepreneurs. Characterized principally by market-oriented entrepreneurial actions, their practices have not only been never captured by the state, but they form the basis for repelling regulative forays of the state. Manifest in the socially embedded economic behaviours of the transport workers is a form of entrepreneurship that can be conceived as both the source and the product of a ‘vernacular neoliberalism’; that is, a kind of avant la lettre neoliberalism that has not been enforced exogenously, but that emerged from the local grounds of long-established modes of economic practice. Drawing on a combination of historical and ethnographic research, this article examines the development of a market imperative as a main structuring force of social organization. In so doing, it suggests a progressive reversal of the ways the conceptual lens proffered by neoliberalism can be put to use for describing the significance and explaining the perseverance of local economic practices in Africa. Keywords: neoliberalism, transportation, entrepreneurship, Ghana

1. Introduction On a late evening in October 2011, heavy rains poured down over Ghana’s capital Accra. Worst affected were the areas adjacent to the Odaw River. At the Neoplan Station, which is a major hub for public road transport located right at the riverside, the floodwater wreaked havoc. It swamped shops, destroyed wares and created panic inside the station. Dozens of vehicles were demolished, many more car engines damaged. Six people were believed to be killed by the sudden tides. * Facheinheit Ethnologie, Fakultät für Kulturwissenschaften, Universität Bayreuth, D-95440 Bayreuth · Email: [email protected]. Sociologus 65 (2015) 2

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For the first time in years, station traffic was brought to a halt – only for that night though. Already at dawn, the station workers had recommenced their operations. While some toiled in making the yard accessible again, others arranged new loading bays. New buses and drivers had been called in. Where buses were in short supply, private cars and taxis were deployed on the required routes. Operators from other stations, who usually compete with Neoplan for passengers, joined in by loading in parallel. Despite all calamities, business was recommenced in a matter of hours. As summarized by one station worker in hindsight: ‘There was no time for sorrow. People demand movement.’ The mechanisms put into place for coping with the emergency were not planned or prepared for. Corresponding to the fragmented and competitive structures by which the station is run at ordinary times (which I will detail below), they were crafted via a combination of self-regulating arrangements and opportunistic collaborations of variously engaged actors. Their actions, pursued by ways of heterogeneous strategies, were nevertheless all geared towards one main goal: to make ends meet by instantaneously calibrating their capacities in relation to the dynamisms of the market, the transportation of people and goods. These were not mere acts of improvization or make do. Manifest in the station workers’ drawing together of different resources – human, material, financial and spatial –, was a vigorous form of mobility of practice. By acting upon volatility in such ways as to retain operational capability, they turned flexibility into a resource for economic survival and, ultimately, returns. Once the yard was cleared, these arrangements were dissolved again. By and large, the solidarity and collaboration that had emerged during the flood remained limited to the necessities of re-establishing operations. The unfortunate ones who were put out of business (above all, storekeepers and ‘owner-drivers’ whose cars suffered total loss) received little to no help or assistance. They had to start from scratch or relocate to other locales. Deserted shops were taken over by new vendors; dilapidated vehicles were replaced by cars of other owners. Some people called on God, praying for dispensation; others sought reimbursement from their insurance agency, most of which turned out as futile as divine invocations. Yet, most notably, no one was making claims to the city authorities or the government. Not only was the state absent in all of these rearrangements, its absence was not even perceived as a flaw. As I contend, these expedient, self-reliant and instrumental practices by which Neoplan’s workers responded to the havoc are indicative of a deeply sedimented mode of social organization structured by a market Sociologus 65 (2015) 2

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imperative. With entrepreneurial utility taking precedence, little regard has been left to internal tragedies and external agencies. Similar to what Peterson (2014: 112 – 114) describes as the entrepreneurship-centred ‘Igbo market theory’, the sets of dispersed and self-regulated actions of the station workers have been made cohesive by collectively performed realignments to extremely sudden changes in their capacities to serve (people’s) demand. Generic models of an ‘informal’ economy (with their implied dichotomy in relation to ‘formal’ economic spheres and practices) are of little help for explaining these dynamic market adaptations; not least because, in terms of Ghana’s overall transport economics, the practices of private small-scale road entrepreneurs in fact constitute the dominant economy. Further, these entrepreneurial modes are a far cry from communalistic views of African local economic practices characterized by an emphasis of ‘moral economies’ and related notions of risk-mitigating, retributive mechanisms ascribed to ‘economies of affection’ (Hydén 1980). Unlike the (subsistence) farmer in Scott’s (1976: 1) famous metaphor, who is prone to be drowned even by a ripple of water, at the Neoplan Station even the (literal) floodwaters could not restrain the majority of workers from continuing their ventures, although some of their co-workers actually drowned. This, however, is not to reproduce postulates about some kind of ‘disembeddedness’ of the economic practices of the station workers. Nor is it to relate their calculative attitudes and risk-embracing actions to external structural forces (and pressures) of the sorts of ‘global capitalism’, which effectively would explain away their salient agency. As I will argue in the remainder of this article, their economic practices, along with the sets of norms and orientations that underlay these practices, are in fact firmly embedded socially, and they reach far back into the history of local road transport entrepreneurship. My main point is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, their embedded economic practices have long been shaped by market-centred orientations. While this is not exactly an ‘economy of disaffection’ (Lemarchand 1989), as forms of mutuality and patronage are also involved, I suggest that competition and conflict are the principal modes that structure both their businesses and their behaviours. I will qualify this assertion by relating the modes of operation that characterize Ghana’s private transport sector today to the historicity of economic practices and larger-scale changes that have shaped it since the early days of motorization in the 1910s. The internalized ‘logic’ behind this long-established, self-enterprising yet collective economic endeavour represents what I suggest framing by the notion of vernacular neoliberalism. In what follows, I thus deviate from the by now well-worn conceptualizations of neolibSociologus 65 (2015) 2

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eralism as a denominator of hegemonic projects of political-economic restructuring. What I propose – in a provocative rather than definitive manner – is a progressive reversal of the ways the conceptual lens proffered by neoliberalism can be put to use for describing the significance and explaining the perseverance of local economic practice. The analysis I develop here is based on eleven months of fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2013. It combines historical data gathered in archives and ethnographic data collected in interviews and conversations as well as through participant observation.1 I also worked as an apprentice and was employed (cf. ‘thick participation’, Spittler 2001) in various divisions of Accra’s Neoplan Station. 2. Reframing the Neoliberal Lens Neoliberalism has become a highly popular notion in social science analysis. Arguably, it lacks a consistent operational definition. Yet the proliferous writings invoking neoliberalism as an analytics can be grouped around a couple of (more or less consistent) approaches. A distinction suggested by Wacquant (2012: 68 – 70) is helpful in mapping out two prevalent approaches used in current debates, which he dubs ‘big-N Neoliberalism’ and ‘small-n neoliberalism’. ‘Big-N Neoliberalism’ designates an economic orthodoxy (going back to von Hayek; cf. Harvey 2005), which advocates a model of market rule centred on the triumvirate of deregulation, privatization and state pullback. In practice, this model translates into a political project to reengineer the state in relation to the market, unfettering the latter from the constraints of the first. ‘Small-n neoliberalism’ represents what Wacquant (2012: 70) calls the ‘governmentality approach’: a neo-Foucaldian take on a form of globally-circulating, all-pervasive ‘technique of governing’ honed in on marketization, audit and ‘self-responsibilization’ and reified through ‘a flowing and flexible conglomeration of calculative notions, strategies and technologies aimed at fashioning populations and people’ (id.: 69). Here, neoliberalism is not equated with a reduction of the state but with its redeployment through reconfigured projects of ‘subjectification’. 1 Archival research was made mainly in the National Archives of Ghana. I also drew on documents from the Ministry of Transport, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, the national and regional offices of the Ghana Private Road Transport Union and the Progressive Transport Owners’ Association. I made interviews with active and retired transport workers in the Neoplan Station and in numerous other main stations across Ghana, with national and regional executives of Ghana’s private road transport associations and with representatives of governmental departments.

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This curt discrimination, though far from being exhaustive or consensual2, provides for an entry point for reviewing common applications of the concept in conjunction with African economic systems. However (un)surprisingly, many analyses of ‘global neoliberalism’ make no noteworthy mention of Africa at all (Harrison 2010: 1). Of those writings that do relate neoliberalism to Africa, the majority uses the term synonymous with the policy measures of ‘structural adjustment’ mandated by the World Bank and IMF in the 1980s. Here numerous studies focus on the enduringly disastrous consequences these reforms bore on African populations by increasing economic inequalities, deranging social relations and constricting the realms of existence itself (e.g. Prempeh 2006; Riddell 1992). Corresponding to a market rule approach, neoliberalism as ‘structural adjustment’ came to designate a kind of predatory force of ‘global capitalism’ bursting in on Africa’s nations from the outside. The governmentality approach found rather limited resonance in the Africanist body of work. This limitation appears to stem mainly from the inapplicability of the idea that neoliberal ‘techniques of governing’ correlate with the retrenchment of the welfare state, which the approach is often premised on but which lacks an empirical equivalent in state-citizen relationships across Africa. As Hilgers (2012: 87) points out, ‘many citizens in Africa have never received a cheque for unemployment or disability benefits, or for that matter any other public aid for survival’. That is to say, the tropes of quotidian volatility, uncertainty and ‘responsibilisation’ (Trnka and Trundle 2014) indicate nothing particularly new in the lives of many Africans. While falling short in terms of the responsibility-thesis, analytics related to small-n neoliberalism have been adopted for explaining changes in the ways states work in Africa – particularly in relation to claims of renewed sovereignties via reengineered regulatory regimes (e.g. Chalfin 2010) – or for how African states came to work (even) less – formulated exemplarily in the trajectory of liberalization, privatization and the ‘criminalisation’ of politics and power (Bayart et al. 1999). The conclusions derived from these varied engagements with neoliberalism as an analytics applied to African realities turn out rather monotonous. Ferguson (2009: 166) summarizes this monotony in the typified expression of ‘neoliberalism is bad for poor and working people, therefore we must oppose it’. More often than not, this conclusion is of course a valid one, especially when seen through the lens of neoliberalism as a synonym for ‘structural adjustment’. And I surely do not mean 2 For a thorough examination of the neoliberal trope in social science analysis, see Ganti 2014.


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to gainsay its denouncement of the growing inequalities between haves and have-nots that were amplified by macroeconomic restructurings of the last decades. What I tend to disagree with, however, is the schematic predictability implied in common uses of the concept; particularly in relation to Africa where invocations of the neoliberal trope appear especially prone to re-issue ‘political-economic truisms’ (Allison and Piot 2014: 3). Taking up Ferguson’s suggestion to appropriate ‘key elements of neoliberal reasoning for different ends’ (2009: 174) rather than just opposing it, I here want to seize on the concept for the ends of an alternative analytical frame. Let me delineate the contours of this reframed analytics by resorting to Wacquant (2012). Following his critique of ‘big-N’ and ‘small-n’ models, he proposes an integrative approach by conceiving of neoliberalism as a re-articulation of the relationship between state, market and citizenship that, as he writes, ‘harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third’ (id.: 71). Although Wacquant claims his approach to be applicable ‘to the vexed issue of neoliberalism and state-crafting on a global scale’ (id.: 66), his perspective is limited to the empirical realms of Western states only. This discrepancy was worked out productively by Hilgers (2012), who ‘decentred’ Wacquant’s Western-centred theory by transferring it to the empirical realms of African states. In so doing, Hilgers reminds us that, because of limited regulatory capacities and an infrastructure of social and public utility services that is often close to non-existent, most states in Africa are at once more vulnerable and more aptly suited to reforms of deregulation, privatization and austerity. Because of this inherent (or inherited) structural vulnerability, African states come to represent a kind of neoliberal ‘vanguard’ (id.: 82). Expanding on Hilgers’ ‘decentred’ approach, I suggest turning upside down Wacquant’s tripartite conception of neoliberalism. Hence, rather than framing neoliberalism as an altered relationship between state, market and citizenship, I suggest approaching it in terms of an articulation of the relationship between citizenship (here broadly defined as non-state actors), market and state in that the first harnesses the constituents of the second to repel the third. This expansion requires us to complement the analysis of the ‘historicity of the state’ in relation to top-down implemented policies, as put forth by Hilgers (id.: 81), with an analysis of the historicity of embedded economic practices of specific groups of local actors in contexts of changing political-economic relations. While this implies a shift away from a top-down approach, it is not simply to be replaced by a bottom-up approach that corroborates the argument by moving from the ground up. Rather, it necessitates a perspective that brings together the levels of (top-down devised) poliSociologus 65 (2015) 2


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cies and (bottom-up evolved) practices and relates them with the changing parameters of the market. Ghana’s public transport sector provides an illuminating case for substantiating this reframed analytical lens of neoliberalism; conversely, the neoliberal trope offers a fine-honed analytics for making sense of the sector’s developments and structures. To be sure, the themes of neoliberalism and (road) transport in Ghana and Africa more generally have received a fair amount of scholarly attention (e.g. Godard and Turnier 1992; Mwase 2003; Obeng-Odoom 2009; Rizzo 2002, 2011). The bulk of these writings, however, read neoliberalism as tantamount to the (World Bank-promoted) ‘adjustments’ of deregulation and privatization that mainstreamed the transport policies of African states during the last quarter of the twentieth century. While these analyses provide important insights regarding the effects of transport policy regulations during a particular period of world system constellations (namely, of economic liberalization), they are confined to the analytics of ‘Big-N Neoliberalism’ only. Accordingly, they tend to (re)produce rather monotonous conclusions about ‘transport policies gone wrong’ (to paraphrase Simone 2005: 1). The following is an attempt to break this monotony – both conceptually in that it reads neoliberalism in a broader theoretical ambit which integrates policy and practice and temporally in that it extends the analysis well before the advent of ‘structural adjustment’. 3. Lorry Age Economics Since the advent of what Hill (1963b: 234) coined ‘the lorry age’, public transport in Ghana (and the Gold Coast respectively) has largely been a private enterprise. The first to realize the potentials – and profits – of the road transport business were local cocoa farmers, Hill’s (1963b) ‘rural capitalists’. Using money derived from long-term ventures in land cultivation, the farmers reinvested in lorries and engaged in the construction of road networks, much of which passed off without government support or even notice.3 By 1920, these early ventures lead on to what Wrangham (2004) described as an ‘African road revolution’ (see also Hart 2011: 50 – 103; Heap 1990; Ntewusu 2012: 129 – 154). Running contrary to colonial efforts (and investments) directed at the development of railways, the ‘lorry business’ got rapidly established as the main mode of motorized 3 Colonial authorities began finding out about these newly emergent road infrastructures (for the construction of which some farmers contracted with Swiss construction companies) as their revenues from import duties started to rise inexplicably (Hill 1963b).


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transportation. With Lebanese traders running an elaborate ‘hire-purchase system’ (Hill 1963a) that facilitated immediate access to vehicles, hence the market, the proliferous growth of the Gold Coast’s private transport industry gave rise to a ‘new kind of African entrepreneur’ (Hawkins 1958: 4; cited in Hill 1963b: 215): the commercial lorry driver, who was able to invest in fixed capital (the motorcar), worked on his own terms (thus outside the structures of waged labour) and was able to collect profits daily. Key to success was the drivers’ flexibility as compared to the rudimentary public transport provisions of the colonial state.4 Characterized by high adaptability to passengers’ demand while enabling connections to areas beforehand accessible by carriers only, the motorcar not only conquered new markets but created them. Of further importance was the relatively easy handling of these early types of vehicles (mostly American Ford lorries), which rendered each owner-driver with high degrees of operational independence5 – an independence, which was reflected in the decentralized organization of the sector. The first interventions aimed at increasing the state’s regulative leverage materialized in the late 1920s through the creation of central lorry parks that local drivers were obliged to use.6 Concomitant with these regulatory measures (and most probably triggered by them), the many individual operators began organising themselves in local drivers’ associations.7 Many of these associations labelled themselves as ‘unions’. Yet they had little in common with trade unions of employees but rather resembled kinds of guilds (see also Hart 2014). The main function of each of these associations was to regulate the internal relations of a heterogeneous group of individual entrepreneurs – comprising princi4 State-run transport comprised of a railway service, limited to the haulage routes of minerals and cocoa in the country’s southern parts, and a municipal bus service, in turn confined to Accra only (Gould 1960). 5 As noted by Maxwell (1923: 222): ‘The introduction of the Ford vehicles completely revolutionarised transportation. The standardisation of their parts and the simplicity of their construction rendered it easy and cheap to maintain in a good state of repair’. 6 The first main parks were opened 1929 in Accra, Sekondi and Koforidua, 1930 in Kumasi and 1931 in Cape Coast (Public Records and Archives Administration Department, Accra [PRAAD]: ‘Accra Town Council Annual Reports 1929 – 30’ – CSO 20/1/20; ‘Municipal Annual Reports 1930 – 31’ – CSO 20/1/16). 7 The biggest associations included the Gold Coast Motor Union (established 1929 in Accra), the Drivers’ Association of the Western Province (1929, Sekondi) and the Ashanti Motor Union (1930, Kumasi). While most of these associations originated from earlier coalitions of drivers, the concurrence of the enforced establishment of lorry parks and the emergence of the associations suggests a causal rather than a coincidental relationship. Archival sources, however, are inconclusive in this regard.



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pally lorry owners, drivers, mechanics and lorry park personnel – and furthermore to protect the economic interests of their members against competitive forays of other drivers’ ‘unions’. Corresponding to the decentralized structures of the associations, there was no overall route licencing system. The distribution of routes came to be structured by market demand and by the capacities of each association’s drivers to serve these demands and withstand competitive pressures. And as most routes (journeys, that is) began and ended in the lorry parks, the control over access to the parks came to constitute the only effective entry controls to the public transport market. These were organized on the basis of a vehicle registration system subjected to the associations that based their operations in the respective park. Because drivers had to move their vehicles between different parks, a complex system evolved in which the associations created branches in the parks controlled by other associations that their vehicles plied to and fro. Here cooperation evolved as a means to facilitate competition. By way of these interleaving arrangements, the privately run motor transport industry established a highly fragmented and decentralized system of operations, which became as powerful in generating profits as it was divided over the distribution of gains. Following the logic of a ‘niche economy’ (Guyer 1997) in that mutually enforced principles of competition led to the creation of ever more of ‘points of connection’ (quite literally so) and, ultimately, of ‘niches to participate in the circulation of money, goods, and services’ (Barrett-Gaines 2004: 3), the institutionalized fragmentation that underlay the sector became a mechanism to immunize it against attempts to curb, monopolize or regulate its operations. The efficacy of this ‘immunity’ has been demonstrated repeatedly in the defiance of various attempts successive administrations – of both colonial and post-colonial regimes – configured in order to restrict the sector’s latitude of self-rule, which basically was one of market rule. One of the first followed from the introduction of the Motor Traffic Ordinance in 1934, which marked the first general traffic code and included restrictive clauses concerning commercial driving.8 At first, many drivers appeared to simply ignore the new laws, reckoning up the risks of punishment (and of getting caught in the first place) against the gains derived from operations continued in grey areas of legality.9 8 Largely based on the British traffic code, the 1934 Ordinance included laws concerning speed limits, carrying capacities and licences for commercial driving (PRAAD: ‘Motor Traffic Ordinance, 1934’ – CSO 17/1/18). 9 The President of the Accra Town Council summed-up the situation from the perspective of law enforcement officials in a statement dated from August 16,


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As conflicts over the enforcement of drivers’ discipline increased – and as more and more drivers saw their commercial activities trenched on –, in 1937 tensions culminated in a strike.10 The scope of the strike was curtailed in that many drivers abstained it, with many others being exempted in order to convey foodstuffs (and prevent ‘a great famine’, as worded by one drivers’ association).11 Yet the authorities nevertheless responded to the drivers’ demands and passed a series of amendments (Hart 2014: 203 – 205). Although this episode of the transport entrepreneurs’ collectively staged action was rather short, it demonstrated the extensive bargaining power they held in relation to the state. The mechanisms at work behind this power, however, did not so much relate to their ability of organising collective action as to their collectively shared aversion to central regulation. Their agenda was geared towards forcing the state to retreat from their affairs; it was economic throughout.12 With the Second World War, the authorities abated their regulative counteractions significantly. Having to bear numerous imposts of Britain’s war-adjusted colonial policies, the de facto relinquishment of regulative authority to ‘natives’ turned from a threatening loss of (however frugal) jurisdiction to a veritable option for administrative relief. Emblematic of this turn in policy was the government’s surrender to demands for the ‘native administration of lorry parks’.13 While the municipalities retained the legal entitlement over the acquired land, in terms of organization, conduct and also the collection of revenue the parks have been taken over gradually by local drivers’ associations. As lorry parks came to serve as veritable ‘switch boards’ of their decentralized economic operations, the lorry park personnel became pow1935. Referring to commercial drivers’ repeated offences against the new traffic regulations, he wrote that ‘[s]uccessive commissioners of Police have found themselves unable to prevent this or to bring home prosecutions for the offences’ (PRAAD: ‘Control of Motor Traffic in Accra, 1935 – 1938’ – CSO 15/7/108). 10 Hart (2011: 113 – 143) provides a minute reconstruction of drivers’ increasing hardships (and complaints) by quoting numerous petitions drivers and their associations presented to government officials. 11 Sub-Inspector to Commissioner of the Gold Coast Police, 1. 12 1937: ‘Report on Strike of Drivers’ (PRAAD: ‘Lorry Driver Strike, 1937’ – ADM 11/1/1656). 12 Tellingly, the transport associations did not participate in the politically motived strikes directed against colonial rule in the 1940s (Pawar 1979). 13 In parallel with the anatomy of political rule in the colony, these processes first took shape across the Northern Territories and Asante, thus where direct British authority has evolved the least and where native administration (in the context of indirect rule) has been the strongest. The claims for the delegation of rule over lorry parks have been advocated mainly by the Ashanti Motor Union, which had established branches in all major towns in Asante and the North (PRAAD: ‘Native Administration of Lorry Parks, 1940 – 41’ – CSO 17/4/6). Sociologus 65 (2015) 2


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erful brokers between drivers, owners and the associations. Generally referred to as ‘porters’ (following the designation of railway station personnel), the most central figures among them were the ‘collectors’ (later on referred to as ‘bookmen’), who supervised the loading of vehicles and issued tickets to the passengers. In 1947, they became the target of a renewed attempt of regulative intervention. Seeking to capitalize on their strategic function in the organization of the parks – and thus of the transport sector at large –, collectors were to be put under the control of municipal authorities or replaced by official clerks. As this directive unleashed great unrest among the drivers’ associations, the case was presented to the government’s Commissioner of Labour, who vouched for maintaining the local system. The summary of his report reads: [The collector’s] objects and actions are not always disinterested or necessarily desirable, but the Commissioner of Labour, after considerable investigations, has gained the impression that generally speaking they serve a good purpose, and bring some measure of cooperation and organization into what is very often a disorderly industry.14

During the remaining years of colonial rule, the sector has been largely left to its own devices. Reflected in this tacit recognition from official side was the state’s acknowledgment that the continuously growing demand for transportation could only be met by private enterprise.

4. ‘The Police I No Fear’ With Ghanaian Socialism taking hold after independence (1957), the scope of state intervention into the conducts of private transport entrepreneurs remained remarkably low. The revamping of municipal and the set-up of intercity services in the early 1960s did pose some additional pressures to private operators. Yet their competitive position remained largely unchallenged, which was due to their much more differentiated network of route services and their far greater number. The registered number of privately owned commercial passenger lorries, for example, rose from 3,799 in 1945, to about 6,700 in 1961 (Hill 1963a: 6) and, including minibuses imported from the early 1960s onwards, to 9,821 in 1965 (Kjessler and Mannerstrale 1967: c3).15 Of considerable effect, however, were the aggregating recessionary pressures that troubled the country from the mid-1960s onwards (in 14 Chief Commissioner to District Commissioner, 14. 6 1947 (PRAAD: ‘Native Administration Lorry Parks, 1947’ – CSO 21/6/174). 15 The first figure stems from the 1945 Vehicle Census (PRAAD: CSO 17/4/9).


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turn fed by tort circuits of political mismanagement and corruption; see Frimpong-Ansah 1992), which subsequently led to shortages in vehicles, spare parts, tires and, latest since the 1973 oil crisis, petrol. While these economic strictures drove many operators out of the market, overall they appeared to bolster the position Ghana’s road entrepreneurs held in relation to the state. As government provisions for public transport remained largely unable to serve the demand (with state-run enterprises persistently operating in the red; see Fouracre et al. 1994: 50 – 51; IBIS 2005: 3 – 5), the lorry business offered a lucrative venture for those who managed to access vehicles and maintain them running. Drawing on various adaptive solutions, this ‘managing’ involved the creative skills of vulcanizers and mechanics (aptly called ‘fitters’ in Ghanaian English) as well as more clandestine practices (particularly, the purchase of smuggled petrol). The post-Nkrumah regimes, faced with a downward spiral of general economic performance, took on quite differing stances towards the ‘inordinate power’ (Hart 2011: 245) private road operators came to hold over the constituents of public life. The Busia-government (1969 – 72), corresponding to its agenda for promoting indigenous business (Esseks 1971), sought to reformulate its relations to the transport entrepreneurs along the lines of liberal corporatism, conferring on them the rank of self-employed public sector workers. In this context, a merger of many of the earlier local drivers’ associations led to the formation of the national umbrella organization of the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU). Its unified appearance and ‘trade union’-label notwithstanding, the GPRTU represented but a loose grouping of a mere nominal standing. Most regulative capacities remained on the level of local branches, which amounted to several hundred in the 1970s. The military regime of Acheampong (1972 – 78), in turn characterized by a strong distaste for factionalism and individual ‘profiteering’ (Owusu 1975), followed a much more restrictive course, which materialized in particular in the attempted statutory regulation of transport routes and fares.16 Yet ‘on the road’ – where these statures were to be implemented by (chronically underpaid) law enforcement agents – the balance of power between state agents and non-state (economic) actors was largely in favour of the latter. Because demand for transportation continued to exceed its supply by far, many drivers took advantage and fixed their fares at will. And though drivers were persecuted (and occasionally imprisoned), conflicts were mediated through routines of 16 Following the National Redemption Council Decrees 71 of 1972 and 181 of 1973, the regulation was supposed to be enforced by a newly created Licencing Authority.



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everyday corruption. The following statement from a commercial driver, quoted in an interview of an Accra-based student magazine, gives a telling example of this widespread preponderance of ‘practical norms’ (Olivier de Sardan 2015) over legal ones: For the police I no fear. I give them money for cigarettes and kenkey [a cornbased staple dish; M.S.] they forget all these rules. The whole of last year me I no renew my driving licence because no policeman dey take me for court when I give am something. Sometimes, too, I dodge them. (Oppong-Agyare 1971: 39)

These attitudes of bribing and ‘dodging’ and generally of ‘not fearing’ police and persecution were confirmed to me in numerous talks I had with retired drivers and station workers who were active in the 1970s. Referring to the years of Acheampong’s reign, one former ‘ownerdriver’ summarized the economic position and practices of private transport entrepreneurs as follows: Many people were going hungry. The country suffered. So they introduced ‘Operation Feed Yourself’17 to help local farming. But we the drivers usually never felt the hunger. Even if I drove only two days a week, I could make enough money to live well for the whole week. Even if one day the business was not too well, the next day I doubled the fare. And that was that. We were fully committed to feeding ourselves, successfully so, not like the farmers.

All cynicism notwithstanding, this kind of blunt (and self-interested) entrepreneurialism made the work as a commercial driver of great appeal. Interpreting the inscriptions on Ghana’s commercial lorries, van der Geest (2009: 266) subsumes this appeal in the ‘image of the driver for whom everything seems within reach: money, travel, women – in short, the good life’. More often than not, however, the life as a driver – and its promise of ‘enchanted self making’ (Quayson 2014: 134) – came at a considerable price. Commonly perceived with a ‘mixture of admiration and envy’ (van der Geest 2009: 265), drivers not only had to bear anxieties related to witchcraft and other malevolent forces, but also grave commercial uncertainties related to market volatilities, indebtedness and reliance on often unreliable vehicles (see Peace 1988; Verrips and Meyer 2000). Indeed, as Hart (1970: 109) noted in his study of Ghanaian small-scale entrepreneurs, whilst the lorry business yielded ‘the quickest return’, for many ‘would-be operators’ the intricacies posed by it made ‘commercial transport an entrepreneur’s graveyard’. Furthermore, with a general ‘need for speed’ representing the most essential commercial imperative (Klaeger 2014), for many drivers the pursuit of profit led not to ‘the good life’ but to accident, injury or even death. 17

A national programme directed at increased production of food crops.


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The drivers’ associations had little to offer for mitigating the potentially adverse effects implied in the risky ventures of their members. Mutual assistance has been (and still is) mostly limited to ‘funeral money’ raised for the bereaved of a deceased driver. While this form of help should not be undervalued, especially as Ghanaian funerals can be extremely costly, the sense of safety it provides for the active driver is rather negligible. Apart from that the associations lack any form of financial security schemes, such as funds for health care, pension or unemployment. In fact, the constitution of the GPRTU (§30) asserts legal assistance in case of litigation or dealings with the police. This form of assistance, however, is but a pro forma offer and even appears to be unknown by drivers. In cases of accident, the confiscation of the licence or the vehicle or the issuing of fines (and collection of bribes) at the ubiquitous police checkpoints, drivers generally act both on their own behalf and on their own account (see also Klaeger 2014: 124 – 144). The most far-reaching interventions into the private road transport sector were realized under Rawlings’ administrations (1979, 1981 – 2001). Firstly, Rawlings’ regime gave extensive patronage to the GPRTU, strengthening its position in relation to rival associations. This system of clientelism proved largely successful, with the GPRTU becoming a ‘prosperous organ’ of Rawlings’ revolution (Gyimah-Boadi 1994: 132). Secondly, seeking to enforce discipline at lorry parks, and to clamp down on the inflation of bus fares in particular, so-called ‘union guards’ were introduced into the lorry park management (Cissokho n.d.). Authorized to collect dues from all vehicles entering the stations, these paramilitary-like proxies upgraded the status of the GPRTU to that of a self-policing organization (Joshi and Ayee 2002). Evocative of indirect rule, the control over Ghana’s lorry parks was effectively handed over to the GPRTU. These measures were reinforced significantly through the Economic Recovery Programme commenced in 1983 (Agyeman-Duah 1987), which introduced reforms that favoured the private transport sector in general and the position of the GPRTU therein in particular. A divestment of state-run bus operations to the private sector was coupled with a massive rehabilitation of road infrastructures, a favourably adjusted import policy for second-hand passenger vehicles and spare parts and a well-nigh lift of controls on transport fares (Gyimah-Boadi 1994: 132 – 133; Fouracre et al. 1994; Yeboah 2000: 76 – 77). These reforms and investments were encouraged (and co-financed) by the World Bank, which, latest since the ‘Berg Report’ (1981), had called for attending to the causal relationship between development and overcoming distance (see also Addo 2006; World Bank 1994). Sociologus 65 (2015) 2


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Framed by this global agenda for road infrastructure investment and the encouragement of private sector performance, the newfound affinity between the government and (GPRTU-aligned) road entrepreneurs led to a veritable bonanza period of Ghana’s private transport sector. The concomitant cutbacks in formal employment structures and growing imbalances of the urban labour market (proceeding from a neoliberal trajectory ‘from above’) further fed into this upturn (Kraus 1991). The effects of these diverging developments – of generally aggregating economic hardships and prospering transport businesses – became most pronounced in Ghana’s lorry parks. The stations progressively turned into enclave-like locales of condensed economic activities that attracted increasing numbers of small-scale entrepreneurs – be it as lorry owners, drivers and station personnel or by engaging in the sector’s adjacent micro-economies of hawking, trading and head porterage (see Ntewusu 2012: 61 – 90; Overå 2007; Stasik forthcoming [a]; Thiel and Stasik forthcoming). With the change of administration in 2001, newly elected President Kufuor initiated measures aimed at unfettering the transport market from the grip of the GPRTU, mainly by reanimating the role of other transport associations by removing the barriers for re-establishing their own branches in the stations. Kufuor’s policy change effectuated a significant redistribution of market shares, with dozens of new transport companies and yet many more individual operators entering the market. When seen from the ground-level perspective, particularly from within Ghana’s lorry parks, it mainly precipitated competitive pressures and dynamics of fragmentation within a ‘niche economy’ logic (Guyer 1997) that have characterized the sector since its earliest days. For the first time, the transport market indicated signs of saturation and, on various major routes, of oversupply. Rather than leading to a drop in supply, however, this saturation appears to have resulted in a general intensification of competitive practices, in turn advanced by what Jones (2010: 293), writing about the user and producers of Zimbabwe’s ’Kukiya-kiya economy’, describes as the incessant striving to become ‘more multiple, mobile and polyvalent than the adversary’. In the following, I will illustrate these processes by zeroing in on the practices and changing organizational modes of the workers in Accra’s Neoplan Station; hence the station I referred to in the introductory vignette about the flooding.


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5. Lorry Park Economics At the time of Neoplan’s creation in 1979, it comprised four independent branches (all of which affiliated with the GPRTU) that together served seven destinations, including the most important route in the country, that which connects Accra with Ghana’s second biggest city, Kumasi. Corresponding to the long-established pattern of branch organization, each branch was made up of the ‘office staff’, which acts as the administrative body, and the ‘yard staff’, which runs the transport on the yard. The yard staff of each branch was further divided into so-called ‘gangs’. Responsible for the loading of cars to one particular destination, each gang was grouped around a ‘bookman’ (the former ‘collector’), his loading boys, who assist in ticket sales, and a ‘station master’, who oversees the work of the gangs. According to the estimates of the longest-serving station workers, during these days each branch included no more than three gangs and had about fifteen vehicles registered with it. As the influx of additional workforce and capital commenced in the early 1980s (the latter manifest in the registration of additional vehicles), Neoplan’s branches began expanding their itineraries (hence the supply side of the transport market), both by serving new destinations and by doubling services on particularly lucrative routes. With more and more people attempting to eke out a living by finding (and creating) new engagements within Neoplan’s ‘niche economy’, the gangs began introducing evermore-refined differentiations between the vehicles they loaded at the same time and for the same destination (categorising them by size, speed and comfort, among others). At the same time, a proliferating number of additional positions has been appendixed to the branch organization (mainly as sub-supervisors, middlemen, assistants and henchmen) – a process I have described with reference to Geertz’ (1963) notion of ‘involution’ in more detail elsewhere (Stasik forthcoming [a], forthcoming [b]). A telling illustration of this competition-driven, inward-bound expansion gives the increasing deployment of so-called ‘shadow passengers’, whose task consists in sitting in the loading vehicle and pretending to be ‘real’ passenger to give the impression of a bus almost ready for departure. While the payment of each yard staff member is derived from parts of the ticket sales of the vehicle he helps to load and disbursed immediately after departure, the office staff collects a share of all revenues made by their gangs during a full shift (usually twenty-four hours). This hand-to-mouth maxim implied in revenue distribution – along with its promise of ‘quickest return’ (Hart 1970: 109) – further spurred internal splinter tendencies. As the continuous incorporation of more positions Sociologus 65 (2015) 2


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into the branch gangs effectively decreased each individual worker’s share in the returns from ticket sales, it resulted in a multiplication of gangs and, ultimately, in the creation of new branches. This multiplication of branches, which represent the basic organizational unit of commercial operations, gives a striking illustration of both the causes and the effects of unfettered competition within a largely self-regulated, undersupplied and relatively easy to access market. As I will flesh out by way of the following vignettes about the interrelated creation of three of Neoplan’s branches, the practices of the involved entrepreneurs are as much driven by entrepreneurial ingenuity, commercial opportunism and risk-taking propensity as by pretence, persuasion and failures. Throughout the 1980s, the majority of Neoplan’s Kumasi-bound cars registered with the so-called ‘No. 4’ branch. Within No. 4, the highest turnover of cars and passengers was achieved by a gang led by the then-bookman Odzinga, which loaded minivans. Odzinga’s men, his successor explained it to me, were ‘the fastest loaders of the fastest cars’ – an assertive demeanour they ascribed to their particularly cunning way of persuading passengers to buy tickets from them, rather than from their colleagues who loaded bigger (and slower) buses. Following growing dissatisfaction with their role as ‘subsidies-men’ for the ‘weaknesses’ of others gangs, Odzinga talked a group of (Ford) minivan drivers into secession from No. 4. The newly formed ‘Odzinga Ford Highway Express’ branch became extremely successful and even outcompeted No. 4 with regard to the number of vehicles dispatched on the Kumasi route. The success of Odzinga’s branch has in large parts been made possible by its ability to register some of the most recent minivan models imported (second-hand) to Ghana, which proved highly popular with passengers. Largely responsible for the required brokerage between individual car owners, import agents as well as customs and licensing authorities was Odzinga’s remarkably able handed ‘Secretary’ (this being his nickname and position). After some three years of cooperation, and supposedly triggered by allegations of embezzlement, the Secretary decided that he would be better off fending for himself and splintered from Odzinga’s branch by forming his own. Trying to copy Odzinga’s model of serving fast cars on the Kumasi route only, his demerger proved a failure. As commented on by one of his former drivers, he was ‘too office-minded’, implying an inaptitude for the practicalities of yard work. The Secretary vanished, leaving behind many outstanding accounts and disgruntled members of his splinter-branch. Unwilling to return to Odzinga, they discontinued the (overly competitive) Kumasi route and Sociologus 65 (2015) 2

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instead established whole new services on selected long-distance routes. Preceded by a kind of bottom up compiled analysis of market potentials, in turn derived mainly from their drivers’ expertise, the branch members began ‘recruiting’ passengers in towns located behind Kumasi who before had to change vehicles on their way to Accra. Based on this strategy to produce demand by creating supply, they grinded out their niche within Neoplan’s competitive passenger market and subsequently grew into one of Neoplan’s biggest branches. By way of these diverse economic strategies, motives and behaviours, the Neoplan Station continued expanding and eventually splintered into the altogether thirteen branches that operate from it to date. More recent secessions lead to the establishment of independent stations located in close proximity to Neoplan, creating a belt of satellite stations. Concomitantly, Neoplan’s itineraries increased to serving thirty-four destinations, half of which are fought over by at least two different branches. To exemplify the exuberantly competitive relations that resulted from these processes: today, there are up to twenty-two separate gangs from four different branches, including many dozens of loading boys, a fluctuating number of supervisors, sub-supervisors and often far more than one hundred shadows that all, at the same time, compete for passengers travelling to Neoplan’s main destination only (Kumasi); with the other thirty-three destinations being run by similarly vast numbers of station workers. While the number of vehicles (and thus drivers) that operate from Neoplan is subject to considerable fluctuations, it regularly amounts to 2,500 departures daily. Besides leading to a considerable expansion of the route network and availability of vehicles, these competitive mechanisms have also forced down transport fares. All of these developments have passed off without state direction or much notice, not to speak of support. As the ‘union guards’ have been degraded into ordinary branch overseers in 2001 (most of their executive powers, however, have already forfeited with the end of military rule in 1992), the state’s presence inside the station has been reduced to a small unit of officers literally gleaning marginal gains in the form of trifles of tolls they collect from each vehicle that enters the station. These altogether four municipal clerks, who work in shifts and only during office hours and who regularly lose out to the drivers’ reluctance to deliver the asked payment, are salient reminders of the state’s absence in the volatile developments of the station, rather than prosecutors of state authority or control. Tellingly, after the October-flooding of 2011, the state toll collectors have not showed up at the station for weeks. Sociologus 65 (2015) 2


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Similar to the ‘power of location’ (Clark 1994: 35) that determines the commercial success of traders in the Kumasi central market, the Neoplan Station constitutes a ‘location of power’. Its economic potency growths with the sheer number of actors that engage with it, regardless of whether or not they succeed in utilising the possibilities it offers in the long run. In this, it represents Ghana’s privately run transport system writ large. For, as the transport sector at large, the station facilitates the integration of more and more differentiated ways by which people come to approach it as a resource and exploit it for some form of gain. The thereby-secured economic appeal simultaneously enhances its degrees of operational resilience and organizational versatility, while also making it indomitable to external pressures and allowing for a large margin for individual failure.

6. Conclusion The notion of a neoliberal ‘vanguard’ referred to by Hilgers (2012) appears a fitting analytical frame for approximating the constituents of Ghana’s public road transport market. Hilgers, however, infers it from African states’ low capacities to adequately provide for public utility infrastructures. Regarding the relations that structured the balance of power between the state and local transport entrepreneurs in Ghana (and the Gold Coast respectively), this inference accounts for only one side of the neoliberal coin. On the one hand, the weakness of the state has been both capitalized on and compensated for by the entrepreneurial strength of local actors. On the other hand, throughout the centenary of the sector’s existence, its bottom-line oriented public utility ‘providers’ have been subjected to repeatedly staged regulative vagaries from above. Depending on the larger (macro-)economic and political constellations of the time, these interventions materialized as restraints imposed via sanctioning forms of law, taxation, price control, the competition of parastatals as well as brute, military-backed attempts to clamp down on their operations. Yet in spite of, and in defiance of, these variously configured mechanisms of regulation and coercion – most of which aimed at restricting the sector’s latitude of self-rule –, Ghana’s private transport entrepreneurs retained a decisive scope of operational freedom. Notwithstanding episodic entanglements with political patron-client networks (particularly during Rawlings’ reign), they adhered to an organizational mode structured according to imperatives of risk and competition. The market-oriented economic practices that, from the beginning, have characterized their operations have not only been never captured by the Sociologus 65 (2015) 2

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state – they formed the very basis from which they repelled regulative forays of the state. From the perspective of the individual operators, the constraints following from state interventions have been taken mainly as but another element of market volatility. And more often than not, they have been dealt with accordingly, either by confronting, ‘dodging’ or simply riding out the implied repercussions. As I have argued in this article, these variegated engagements with the commercial ‘perils and possibilities’ of roads (Klaeger 2013), and hence the lorry business, can be retraced to long-established practices and orientations bent on entrepreneurship and utterly flexible market adaptation, some of which have turned out more, (many) others less successful. Their main structuring force is rooted historically, and in this it is socially embedded, not exogenously enforced (or ‘enabled’) through more recent policies of economic liberalization. In other words, economic ‘self-responsibilization’ in the face of weak service provisions of the state is nothing new to Ghana’s road entrepreneurs; and neither are matters of risk, uncertainty and the individual strivings to maximize chances for commercial opportunity and ‘quickest return’. Admittedly, this conclusion could be read as tantamount to a triviality. Yet in view of common assumptions that ‘the Midas touch of capitalism immediately destroys local indigenous economies’, to borrow from Yang’s (2000: 481) polemics against schematic critiques of capitalism (which apply equally well to the monotony prevailing in critiques of neoliberalism), it appears reason enough to draw the however trivial inference that some local economic actors in Africa have accommodated to, and harnessed, market-logics already well before the advent of the ‘neoliberal age’. The neoliberal vanguard they thus came to represent can be read as being principally of a vernacular kind.

Acknowledgements Field research for this article was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the project ‘Roadside and travel communities: towards an understanding of the African long-distance road’. Drafts of this article were presented at the African Studies conferences in Bayreuth (VAD) in June 2014 and Indianapolis (ASA) in November 2014. I express gratitude to Sidy Cissokho and Kurt Beck for suggestions, as well as to two anonymous reviewers.



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