Podcast: Politics and progress in Accra with Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai

Chris Jordan [00:00:08] Welcome to this edition of the African Cities podcast. My name is Chris Jordan. I’m the Communications Manager for ACRC based at the University of Manchester. And today I’m delighted to welcome Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai to talk to us about some of the research that he’s been doing on Accra. So Abdul-Gafaru is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Ghana Business School. He’s also well known to us at the Global Development Institute. Abdul-Gafaru did his PhD here. He’s an honorary research fellow and also did lots of work around the Effective States and Inclusive Development research project, looking at the political settlements of Accra and of Ghana. He’s also been the city lead for the foundation phase of work in Accra. So Abdul-Gafaru, welcome to the podcast. 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:00:59] Thanks very much, Chris, thanks for having me. 

Chris Jordan [00:01:02] So, you are obviously somebody who works at the University of Ghana, which is located slap bang in the middle of the city. Can you tell me how long have you lived in Accra for? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:01:13] So I think it’s been on and off. I first went to Accra actually for the first time, leaving or travelling outside my hometown, in the year 2000 to start my undergraduate programme at the University of Ghana. But I say it’s been on and off because shortly after finishing my undergraduate programme, I travelled to the UK for my master’s degree in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. But then I went back to Ghana again and worked with an NGO in Accra on governance issues, on issues of local governance, decentralisation, strengthening citizens’ capacity in engaging with duty bearers. But after about three years, I just saw myself as an academic and I chose to explore more to get back to school. And, fortunately, I had an opportunity to get back, this time around in Manchester, where I studied for my PhD in development policy and management. So it was after completion and after a one-year postdoc with Manchester that I went back to Accra to start my present position as lecturer at the University of Ghana Business School, I think, in early 2014. Yeah. So since then I’ve been more or less based in Accra. 

Chris Jordan [00:02:49] So it must have been interesting coming and going from Accra, you must have noticed a lot of changes over the last 25 years since the year 2000. How has that looked from your perspective? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:03:02] Yeah, I think there is no doubt that Accra is changing, the population of the city is growing. You can point to some evidence of improvements in some dimensions, but of course the improvements appear extremely slow, in some cases very hard to notice. If you look at the most recent population and housing census in Ghana, it shows clearly that the population of the city has grown very rapidly. One of the observations in the report is that Accra’s housing deficit has reduced. But of course it remains substantial – I think at about 1.8 million. So when I say it’s very hard to notice, I mean, if you still have a housing deficit of close to 2 million, you can imagine the problem that ordinary people still struggle with or go through to be able to meet their basic housing needs. There are many significant challenges in so many dimensions. Beyond the issue of the housing deficit, and partly as a result of this deficit, you have a significant number of informal settlements and conditions of life in these settlements are very deplorable. So there is very clear evidence that, yes, some progress has been made, but is so, so, so, so, so slow. The city still struggles with problems of having gas or sanitation. There is no reliable access to electricity. There is no reliable access to water. There are significant levels of inequality among different neighbourhoods. So even with regards to the issue of housing, the housing sector presents us with somewhat of a paradox. In some dimensions, where you come to high-income neighbourhood and high-rise buildings and so forth, there is actually an oversupply of housing – a lot of homes that are not being bought. But when it comes to issues of housing for people working in the informal economy, for the urban poor in general, that’s where you see these significant levels of deficits, and as a result, having these problems with regards to the proliferation of informal settlements, for example. It is not as if government is not doing anything about these problems. It’s just that the level of progress is so slow and sometimes probably also as a result of defaults in the manner in which policies are designed. We have problem not seeing the kind of progress that we all desire to see. So I’ll give you one example in regards to this issue of housing. One of the very recent initiatives that government has put in place to address challenges associated with housing had been to establish a new entity that would help address problems associated with rental accommodation. So, by law, according to the Rent Act of Ghana, you are not required, as someone who is actively seeking to rent a home, you are not required to pay beyond six months of rent, and your rent is supposed to be paid on a monthly basis after the initial lump sum payment of around six months. But that is the formal rule. The practice is that landlords require to seek rental accommodation to make advance payments of a minimum of between two to three years – in fact, in some cases, five years. I recall my own situation when I was leaving Manchester to relocate back in Accra, I had to pay an initial rent for a two-year period. Where do you expect the urban poor to be able to accumulate this kind of money, to be able to pay a two-year advance? So government recently put in place some kind of new arrangements to provide some loans to those seeking rental accommodation, which of course, on the one hand you would laud as a good initiative, but on the other, this is an initiative that is specifically designed to benefit those with regular income. So, and as part of the qualification, you need to show evidence of regular income. And we know in general, those working in the informal economy have incomes that are often very irregular. So the probability of this initiative not sufficiently benefiting probably those who need it most is very high. So these are some of the things that I have in mind when I say, well, yes, there is progress, but generally the progress is slow, sometimes partly as a result of flaws in policy designs, but in most cases as a result of weak implementation. 

Chris Jordan [00:08:36] Yeah. And I guess like many African cities, I think in Accra population has doubled over the last ten years. So I guess even with fantastic service provision and great coordination, that would be a huge challenge for any metropolitan area, let alone one that that is experiencing such inequality and has so many low-income communities based around it. I’m just wondering, for people who haven’t been to Accra, could you describe it? Obviously it’s on the coast, so presumably that plays a big role in how it feels and its character? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:09:16] Yeah, that’s a very loaded question. And I say so because the question of “what is Accra?” honestly doesn’t have a one universally acceptable meaning or definition. People use the word Accra, the name Accra, in reference to very different things. So there are people who would refer to Accra in the form of the Greater Accra Region. Ghana has 16 administrative regions and the Greater Accra is the national capital. So in many cases, you would hear people saying that “I’m going to Accra”. They mean the Greater Accra Region. Especially people outside of the Greater Accra Region, when they say they are going to Accra, they mean they are going to the Greater Accra Region. But let’s assume you happen to travel from Manchester to Accra. You’ve landed in Accra. It will not be strange for you to see someone picking a car and telling you that he or she is going to Accra. Right? So you’d be wondering, “but we are in Accra, I’m in Accra, what do you mean by you are going to Accra?” And it’s just because of changes in geographical boundaries over time. So there are people who refer to Accra in terms of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, which is actually the heart, the centre, more or less, of Accra, or some would call it original Accra. And people will refer to that original Accra, because boundaries have changed substantially over time. So the Accra Metropolitan Assembly – so, for example, if you look back prior to say 2000, 2004, the geographical boundary of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly has shrunk substantially because the city has been subjected to a form of fragmentation, the creation of so many local government units. So whereas the AMA, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, would have probably at some point in time covering maybe several hundreds of square kilometres and so on and so forth, the jurisdiction of the Accra Metropolitan Assembly has shrunk substantially. Now, another way that people refer to Accra, which is actually how we approached Accra in our study, was to look at it not in terms of the Greater Accra Region, nor the Accra, the small Accra Metropolitan Assembly, but what has increasingly become known as the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area. And the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area comprises – people again, typically define it differently, some would actually refer to it as the city region, some would actually define it to include local government units that are even outside of the boundaries of the Greater Accra Region, for example, to include districts like Awutu Senya in the central region, for example – but within our research, we defined the Greater Accra Metropolitan Assembly to refer to the 25 urban municipal metropolitan councils within the Greater Accra Region. So at the moment, the Greater Accra as a region is made up of 29 local government units, but we focus our study on the 25. Of course, we do an urban kind of study, so we didn’t think it was worth including the rural district that are still within there. So we define Accra as the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, which more or less refers to the 25 urban sort of councils – we don’t call them councils in Accra. They are popularly referred to as district or metropolitan, if you like, municipal assemblies within the Greater Accra Region. And I’m sure of course everyone knows that the city is located on the coast of West Africa. There’s a lot of diversity within the city, both in terms of, I would say, culture, because there are still some communities that are dominated by the indigenous, ethnic group within the city. But significant parts of the city have become highly cosmopolitan, dominated by migrants, who are not indigenous to the city. So you would see some kinds of variations, depending on a wide range of factors, depending on whether you are living in a poor or affluent neighbourhood, depending on whether you are living in an indigen-dominated community, so you would see substantial variations. So it’s very hard to define or explain what Accra really is from a very homogeneous point of view. 

Chris Jordan [00:14:33] And Accra itself is also right in the middle of the West African Corridor. There’s been a lot of focus on that part of the world. There’s this new highway between Abidjan and Lagos that’s due to be constructed. Is that something that you feel when you’re living and working in Accra? Do you feel part of this, a kind of broader West African urban sprawl, almost, or, does it still feel more national in focus? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:15:03] I think it would probably depend on which part of the city you are. But largely, in most parts of the city, you wouldn’t have that strong West African feel – depending of course, on where you are. So, for example, first and foremost, it’s important to note that Accra is regarded as a second-tier global city, meaning that the development trajectories of the city, the experiences of the city, are actually shaped not just by what is happening domestically, but actually also globally. And a lot of the things that go on in this city are actually influenced by the influx of people from not just within West Africa, but actually across the globe – there are so many business opportunities that you find, a lot of multinational companies, especially following the discovery of oil in in 2007, which of course has had significant impact on the value of land, for example, in the city. So a lot of things that actually shape the city’s development trajectories are actually external, global, international in nature. But in everyday politics and everyday lifestyles or living, and in most parts of the city, you wouldn’t necessarily have a feel of this. But I made a point that it depends on where you are in the city, because I visited one informal settlement. And you would notice that there’s a certain business in the city, we’re speaking informal sector wastepickers. This is a sector that actually appeared dominated, or at least a sector that has a very strong influx or dominance or presence of people from other West African countries – and Niger, to some extent, Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Mali and so forth. So if you live within, if you work, if you operate within that sector, and if you live within that part of the informal settlement, you would have a much stronger feeling that Accra is not just for Ghanaians. You would see that West African appeal, more or less. So by and large, I would say that it depends so much on which part of the city that you are actually living in. 

Chris Jordan [00:17:52] Fascinating. And I know you’ve led a lot of the work around looking at the politics of Accra and how that intersected with national politics. Obviously, Accra is the capital of Ghana – how did that shake out? You’ve already mentioned the fragmentation at the local level, how does it work between national and city politics?

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:18:14] Yeah, I think this would take much longer time to address than we probably have. I think the first thing to bear in mind is the importance of city to national elites. Accra, and especially when you approach it from the perspective of the GAMA – the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area – or the Greater Accra Region is the most populous urban agglomeration in Ghana. That’s number one. Number two, it is a typical swing voting city. It is a city that you have fewer loyal voters to any of the two dominant political parties. What it means is that it’s an important electoral battleground for Ghana’s two dominant political parties. So obviously, this is not a city that any national elite would want to have less control over. You would want to have control. You would want to be in charge. You’d want to do things in a way that you can have a significant grip over how the city is governed. You would have a significant interest in determining how resources get distributed, in ways that would enhance your own chances of winning elections. And as the most populous, most swing voting seat in Ghana, what it also means is that to win presidential elections, it is not an exaggeration to say that you ought to win Accra. Of the several elections – is it eight or nine elections or so that have been held since 1992? – it has only happened on one single occasion that the party that won the national election lost narrowly in Accra. In other words, almost every political party that has won the presidency won or had to be in Accra. So that tells you how important the city is to national elections. And this has had a lot of implications on the manner in which the city is governed. First and foremost, there have been a lot of conversations about the need to allow ordinary citizens to choose who their city mayors should be. For decades, national elites have been dragging their feet over this idea of allowing ordinary citizens to vote their seat. So democratic as Ghana is often seen to be, Ghana doesn’t practise what you would call democratic decentralisation or devolution, in the sense that, till date, the question of who becomes the mayor of Accra is more or less the exclusive preserve of the president. So mayors have remained presidential appointees. And who qualifies to be appointed or who is likely to be appointed as the mayor of Accra is not the most competent, is not the most knowledgeable, is not the most experienced in urban governance, but is the one who is more politically loyal to the president. It is more about your records in building the local party machinery over time. It is more about your records in supporting – I mean, how visible are you to local party activists is the most significant factor that determines whether you become a mayor. And what that means again, is that no matter how brilliant you are as a mayor, if the president who appoints you loses presidential elections, you automatically also lose your mayoral position. Because the incoming president is also keen on appointing a new set of mayors who would be more politically loyal to him or her. So you see a lot of things actually happening at the city level, and you struggle to actually separate the interest of city authorities from the interest of ruling national political elites, because as a mayor, I’m aware that how long I stay in power depends on how long you, as my appointed president, stay in power. So there is that sort of collusion, more or less, between national city authorities, because they tend to have a common interest in making sure that the ruling party stays in power. And that has a lot of implications, for example, in terms of how distributive politics plays out, who benefits more from distributive politics or the distribution of public goods, to some extent, is also dependent on the question of which of the political parties is in power. So different neighbourhoods would be subjected to different kinds of politics, depending on which of the parties in power is the dominant, which of the two dominant political parties is in power at the national level. So you see rather strong, clear linkages between what happens at the national level and what happens at the city level. Of course, occasionally there have been some slight differences, because there have been several moments when the city authorities would try, for example, to decongest the city, clear the central business district of hawkers, and so on and so forth. But central government will intervene. They say, “look, you are taking initiatives that are undermining my chances of securing power”. So there were moments when you see some visionary mayors try to do something that is not entirely in the interest of national elites. And you will see direct intervention, sometimes reportedly from the president himself, giving orders to put a halt or stop to some of these things that city authorities sometimes try to do. So by and large, city politics is significantly determined by politics at the national level. 

Chris Jordan [00:24:50] And I know as you’ve been doing this research and all the other researchers who were working on it in Accra have been engaging, or trying to engage quite regularly, quite strongly with city authorities, with national authorities. Could you summarise what sort of response, what sort of attitude you’ve been picking up as you’ve been doing the research? Is there interest in the kind of work, in the kind of issues that we’ve been looking at? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:25:17] Yeah, we’ve done a lot of engagement and all the domain researchers did engage with national and city-level authorities. What I picked up in the conversations that I had with a lot of city authorities, one thing that struck me a lot, which is part of the reason why we thought it was important to define Accra in a relatively broader sense, in terms of the GAMA as opposed to a very narrow sense of defining it as the Accra Metropolitan Assembly – it’s the fact that, then again, this has to do with the extent to which what happens at the city level is so subjected to national- level elites’ political interest. One of the challenges that came up in many of the conversations that I had with city authorities is the manner in which the several local government units tend to operate autonomously in silos, with very little co-creation and collaboration. So I made a point that the government is made up of 25 urban councils. Each of these has its own mayor operating independently. And each of these councils operates as an independent planning unit. But here is the case. You have problems that cut across. So you have a problem that to address it, you will probably need all the 25 local councils to come together. But the incentives to come together are weak or probably non-existent. In fact, there remain some district boundary disputes among them. There have been occasions when you see them competing for revenue. So, for example, between Council A and Council B, who is more qualified to take the revenue from this particular jurisdiction? So you have a situation where power tends to be so dispersed among so many potential, and not even potential, but actual veto players. So cooperation is somewhat limited. There is a greater metropolitan assembly that is set up, like the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council. It’s supposed to make sure that these assemblies work in cooperation, in collaboration with each other. But its role is merely one of coordination. It is underresourced. It doesn’t have the power to enforce decisions, for example, on these independent units. So you have a situation where bureaucrats within the assembly – I mean, there is the interest to get things going, but at the end of the day, politics comes in the way, in the sense that literally every decision, even by city authorities, is viewed with a political lens. So it is not all the time, or even in most cases, that decisions or governance decisions are taken on the basis of technocratic expertise. There are technocrats within the assemblies. We have district coordinating directors, for example. We have planning officers and so on and so forth. The unfortunate thing is that final decisions, lie in the hands of the politically appointed mayor, whose main preoccupation is to make sure that the governing party stays in power. So, you see in many cases, tension between what is technocratically sound, on the one hand, and between what is politically sensible or desirable, on the other. And in these tensions, it is the politics that actually wins. So there are some other forms of challenges with regards to issues of staffing and technocratic expertise. But what I see as probably a much bigger issue is not just about limited staffing or limited knowledge on the part of technocrats or bureaucrats. But what I see as the biggest issue is the question of whether bureaucrats have sufficient operational autonomy to be able to do things and drive development processes on the basis of the kind of technocratic expertise that they have. So you see politics infiltrating at almost every stage in life. 

Chris Jordan [00:30:34] Yeah. No surprise there then. And, you mentioned briefly of raising revenues. And I think in pretty much every single city that ACRC has looked at, we found that city authorities are just working without even nearly the amount of financing that they need to really make a transformative change, or even just to keep up with population growth. Is that the case in Accra? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:30:58] Its absolutely the case in Accra. So, on the one hand, city authorities lack the capacity to mobilise sufficient revenues for development and are therefore heavily dependent on central government transfers. But again, partly because of the desire to control what happens at the city or subnational level, fiscal decentralisation in Ghana is very weak. So a lot of city authorities depend quite substantially on what is referred to as the District Assembly Common Fund, which is a statutory fund that government allocates to all municipal metropolitan councils across the country, beyond Accra and so on. There are several problems with this. One of the problems is that it’s inadequate, it’s irregular, and city authorities have no autonomy over it. In many cases, central government directives will dictate as to how not less than 70% of that transfer should be used. In other words, central government transfers the resources to city authorities, but dictates to them to use it for implementing certain national- level priorities. So the issue of autonomy there is lacking. But what is particularly striking, probably more striking, is that city authorities don’t have the capacity to borrow substantial sums of money for development purposes. I read a story around South Africa, how municipal authorities are able to go to the markets, borrow substantial resources to do infrastructure development and so on and so forth. City authorities in Ghana don’t have that autonomy. You do have the capacity to borrow without central government approval, but you’ll be shocked to hear that, by law, to date, city authorities cannot borrow the equivalent of something around 500 USD without the approval of the Finance Ministry, without the approval of central government authority. So, literally, you are not an autonomous local government entity. So you don’t have the capacity to borrow, you don’t have the capacity to mobilise enough revenues and the transfer that you gain from central government, you have no autonomy over it. So the problem about decentralisation in Ghana is not just about the lack of devolution of political decentralisation, but fiscal decentralisation also tends to be significantly weak. There have been efforts as far back as the 2000s to change the laws to allow or to enhance the borrowing capacities of municipal authorities and so on. But to date it’s not been put into practice, it’s not been passed, and it remains on paper and they’re compelling city authorities to remain heavily reliant on central government transfers that are insufficient, that are irregular, and that are actually unreliable. In many cases, it takes forever for these authorities to receive the funds. 

Chris Jordan [00:34:42] Yeah. It’s a slightly grim picture. I wanted to ask you about informal settlements, and obviously there are some extremely large informal settlements across Accra, Old Fadama being possibly the most well-known. What did you pick up as the attitudes of politicians and local authorities towards informal settlements? And are they sympathetic to upgrading settlements as they are, or is the agenda different? 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:35:16] Okay, so you are asking about what is the attitude of political elites towards informal settlements? I think my main observation is that the attitude is changing for a significant part. For example, I would say from the 2000s all the way to I would say the 2010s, you would have been absolutely right to characterise the relationship between political elites and informal settlements as one of neglect, one of sheer neglect and one of harassment. I did hear you mention Old Fadama. I’m sure you probably would have heard of the uncountable number of times that residents of Old Fadama have been subjected to eviction efforts, forced eviction attempts. So for a very long period of time, the residents were subjected to neglect, no access to basic services. And city authority’s position about Old Fadama had a particular hand in that – this is an illegal settlement so how do you extend services to people resided in a place illegally? And the argument had been that extending basic services like water, like electricity, working on their roads and so forth is more or less an indirect way of legalising their illegalities. So you’d better not recognise them. And one of the interviewees, I remember one respondent telling me that if you look at the map of Accra in the eyes of city authorities, Old Fadama doesn’t exist. They don’t appear in the map because this is an illegal settlement. So that is the neglect aspect. And the harassment is essentially the issue of forced evictions. But of course there is clear evidence that things are changing. I made a point about the importance of Accra to national elites and that to win elections in Ghana, you actually ought to win in the Greater Accra Region, partly because of its populated nature, but also largely because it seems majority or a significant proportion of voters are swing voters. They are contingently loyal to parties, in the sense that whether they vote for you or not depends on how they assess your policies, your attitude towards them. And informal settlements, just as the population of the city has grown over time, so has the population of residents of informal settlements. I think presently its estimated that Old Fadama has over 200,000 residents. And let’s put this in a broader perspective. In 2008, the party that won the presidential elections won by a margin of around 40,000 votes nationally. So imagine what the population of Old Fadama can do. Again, just beyond the issue of votes, many of these settlements are the places where parties go to recruit youthful energetic people to protect their ballots. And therefore places like Old Fadama and other informal settlements are the sources where party footsoldiers are recruited. So again, meaning that their importance is not just about votes, but also the protection of the votes that national elites so much like, desire. So probably partly as a result of this and the fact that various international and local agencies like People’s Dialogue, like Slum Dwellers International, they work rather collaboratively with residents to help propel against these eviction attempts. My sense, and actually the sense of some residents at the moment, is that national elites are no more considering the possibility of evicting residents. To the extent that the current vice president has actually made some efforts to enhance access to some basic services within the settlement. They have streetlights now. I do understand their roads are being worked on. There was an attempt to construct a hostel facility for female migrants within the settlements. So this is what I mean by saying that there is some evidence of change – of course, again at a very slow pace, because the magnitude of the problem in these settlements is so significant that the kind of changes that would be needed to bring about the transformation that everyone would desire is not the kind of changes that we are seeing. We are seeing progress at a very snail’s slow pace. But of course things are changing. 

Chris Jordan [00:40:52] Well, I think it’s always nice to leave things on a somewhat positive note, even if there are big challenges ahead. So thank you so much, Abdul-Gafaru, for sharing all those insights and giving us a glimpse into the world and then the politics of Accra. Look forward to reading the full city synthesis paper that you’re busy finalising. And thank you very much for joining us today. 

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai [00:41:16] Thanks Chris. Thanks for having me. 

Outro [00:41:21] You have been listening to the African Cities podcast. Remember to subscribe for more urban development insights and interviews from the African Cities Research Consortium.