“Woyomegate”: the Last Stage of “Competitive Clientelism”?

Public imagination in Ghana has recently been seized by the payment of GHS51 million in judgement debt to Mr. Alfred Woyome, a self-styled financier of Ghanaian politicians, who allegedly did not have any contract with the government of Ghana to deserve such a payout.

The purpose of this short treatise is not to contribute to the public trial of Woyomegate. Instead, it is to analyse the deeper institutional malaise of which "Woyomegate" is only a logical manifestation; for Woyomegate is a symptom of a bigger political economy disease known as "competitive clientelism".

Competitive Clientelism:
“Competitive clientelism” implies the use of electoral competition as a vehicle to gain political control and then distribute patronage to ruling coalitions. This structures a rentier system of mutual expectations in which (a) party foot soldiers expect to disproportionately benefit from the re-allocation of public resources; (b) party officials and financiers pursue rent-seeking, including benefiting from government contracts and graft; and (c) the ruling government expects to be returned to power by the coalition in the next elections.

Because the stability of this coalition is necessary to deliver victory in future elections, government officials can go to great lengths to use state power to transfer public resources to members of this coalition or offer them political protection. Below, I show how various forms of clientelism have persisted in Ghanaian politics over time and why clientelism is a major explanation for Ghana's illusive search for economic transformation since independence.

Genealogy of a Political Culture
Over its post-colonial life, Ghana has gone from electoral autocracy to military dictatorship to market democracy. Despite this apparent political progress, one thing has remained constant: the persistence of clientelism as the glue of political power. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the authoritarian and military regimes maintained political control not only by incarcerating opponents, that is, "instilling a culture of silence," but also distributing patronage resources to buy support.

Building ruling coalitions simultaneously involved strategies to redistribute resources toward members of the coalition while weakening economic classes perceived to be real or potential members of the political opposition. Thus, while remaining antagonistic toward the nascent capitalist class, both the Nkrumah and Rawlings regimes did not prevent their own functionaries from the individual pursuit of wealth, whether through legal or less legal means.

These clientelist political strategies had adverse implications for economic policy and outcomes. Despite Nkrumah's good intentions his ambitious economic programmes had very little to show in terms of growth. The inefficiencies of the Nkrumah era had similar effects as Acheampong's urban bias: both starved industry of much-needed foreign exchange to import raw materials, inputs, and equipment.

Similarly, the crony capitalism of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) under Rawlings proved woefully ineffective as a key to structural transformation. By the early 1990s, supporters and critics of structural adjustment reforms had both converged on the need to bring "the politics back in" in the reform agenda. The thinking here was simple: electoral competition would produce more accountable, efficient, and equitable outcomes.

But just as market reforms were easily internalised in the logic of clientelism to produce crony capitalism, electoral competition only democratised clientelism by extending the opportunities for patronage-clientage beyond an hegemonic authoritarian regime. By sending a different group into government every four or eight years, we may have achieved a more stable political settlement. But the effects of competitive clientelism on overall economic development are not different from those obtained under hegemonic clientelism.

Effects of Competitive Clientelism:
Notwithstanding the consensus on the need for economic transformation, both the NDC and the NPP have failed to come up with policies for any significant economic upgrading or diversification. This is attributable to the nature of the political incentives facing political office holders, who have to favour strategies for short-term electoral victory over long-term development.

Rather than investment in economic transformation, the strategy for short-term electoral victory consists of the redistribution of public resources to (i) benefit the ruling coalition and (ii) bribe the masses with visible assistance focusing on immediate consumption. Plus a heavy dose of propaganda, this strategy requires access to easy rents, such as may be obtained from foreign aid, natural resources, and self-styled party financiers.

Political office holders therefore expend considerable energies on these easy sources of rent and most of their activities are linked to them. Consider the case of the recent social interventions. They more reflect shifts in donor preferences than strategic thinking on the part of local elites, who, nevertheless, benefit from such programmes by helping to extend their patronage reach, such as through cash transfers and other non-tradeable services.

The result is that even when sustained foreign aid and resource windfalls have served to spur growth, this growth has come without employment-generating structural change. The general absence of improvements, coupled with the short-term electoral cycles, then feed into the ruling elites' sense of political vulnerability. In turn, the ruling elites' dependence on the ruling coalition to win the next elections compels them to tolerate high levels of impunity from the lower ranks of the coalition.

The result is constant inter-party and intra-party acrimony. In some cases, impatient party foot soldiers have even seized public facilities, dismissed the previous employees suspected to be members of the opposition, and then installed themselves as the new employees and bosses, while government officials looked on haplessly.

Even so, the recycling of jobs is not enough to satisfy all members of the lower ranks of the coalition. The rest must be placated with other forms of bribes, such as sponsorship to watch football matches abroad or help to travel abroad for religious or other reasons. Those who finance these bribes then have to be more than compensated, through contracts or some other means, in order for them to be able to continue financing the ruling party, critically at the next elections.

All of these, that is, the sudden transformation of party activists into businessmen and women, the seizure of public toilets, the redistribution of public sector jobs to party supporters and cronies, are part of the primitive accumulation critical to ensuring electoral survival.

What makes Woyomegate interesting is the intricate web of beneficiaries that appears to transcend political office holders in both the NDC and NPP to party foot soldiers to civil servants to heaven-knows-who-else. Still, this does not necessarily make Mr. Woyome guilty of a legal offence unless so proved in court. It would also be naive to assume that Woyomegate is the first of its kind. For one such case to come out into the public domain, many more may have gone unnoticed or are yet to be exposed under both the NPP and the NDC.

In fact, there is a dangerous prospect that as political competition intensifies such hasty award of judgment debts, some under very suspicious circumstances, might become the next stage of the primitive accumulation required to build a more decisive electoral war chest.

Kobina Idun-Arkhurst ([email protected])