Ghana imposed lockdowns in the Accra and Kumasi districts on 30 March 2020 to limit community transmission of the new coronavirus. But members of the public found ways to evade the restrictions, making them ineffective. People went about their daily lives as usual, where they could, and avoided checkpoints. Police were sometimes seen humiliating or violently handling people they caught breaking the rules. Eventually the government suspended the restrictions.
Various public commentators – from the media to politicians – attributed the mass defiance of the restrictions to indiscipline. Some even applauded the police for treating “offenders” harshly. This way of seeing “wrong” behaviour, whether it’s bad driving or poor academic performance among students, has become widespread in Ghana. The behaviour is put down to individuals’ bad attitudes, irresponsibility and stubborn defiance.
On the other hand, a growing number of studies have shown that limited compliance with lockdown measures was connected to broader social issues. These include the informal structure of Ghana’s economy, inequalities in access to housing and public services, and the lack of well-developed infrastructure to deliver welfare.
Less has been said about the historical and institutional roots of the inequalities – the processes and factors that created the conditions that made it difficult to contain the crisis. It’s important to understand these so as to be better prepared to deal with any similar future crisis.
My colleagues and I took a closer look at this in a recent paper. Using media, scholarly and institutional sources, we unravelled how unresolved historical injustices, deepened in new forms, undermined effective containment of the pandemic.
We found a clear picture of people responding to the restrictions in different ways that were driven by their socio-economic status. We believe that seeing their behaviour as indiscipline deflects attention from the deeper determinants of these responses. It also serves to legitimise police violence.
A history of inequality
It’s helpful to look at the example of head porters, popularly called “kayayes” in Ghana. These working class people, mainly young female migrants from the poorer parts of northern Ghana, make a living by carting the goods of customers and traders in Ghana’s busiest southern cities – mainly Accra, Tema and Kumasi.
They featured heavily in the violation of the lockdown restrictions. Close to 30 of the kayayes decided to evade the lockdown restrictions and the hardships that would follow by smuggling themselves in a cargo truck to their home towns. They risked spreading COVID-19 from a hotspot area to poor parts of the country where healthcare facilities had few resources. The police arrested them on their journey.
One kayaye was quoted as saying:
We came to Accra to look for something to eat. We don’t have anyone in Accra to give us shelter, we have been sleeping on the streets. We decided to go back to our hometown, when we were told there is an outbreak of a disease in Ghana and only return when the whole situation is resolved.
The public ridicule and sarcastic commentary on the Kayayes behavior closely followed the popular narrative that blamed the mass-defiance of the lockdown on indiscipline. That narrative, however, hides more than it reveals.
Research has shown that kayayes face severe hardships, including malnutrition and inadequate access to healthcare, education, sanitation and accommodation.
The northern part of Ghana, where most kayayes come from, has long remained the most impoverished part of the country. This has roots in colonial development models which denied the place development resources because they did not have raw materials the colonial government valued. Successive post-colonial governments have not only failed to dismantle these discriminatory structures for delivering socio-economic development, they have actually replicated them.
This favours the southern parts of the country. According to the 1969 industrial enterprises directory, about 59.5% of all industrial establishments in the country were concentrated in Accra-Tema. That of Kumasi and Sekondi-Takoradi stood at some 16.5% and 10.2%, respectively. These three cities combined hosted over 86% of all registered industries in the country.
Those numbers still hold true. Socio-economic developments in Ghana have retained the spatial discrimination and exclusions of the colonial era.
The IMF/World Bank-funded structural adjustment reforms implemented in the country in the 1980s actually deepened these patterns.
The reforms attracted substantial private capital, especially foreign direct investments. But the incentives related to economies of scale and profitability directed the investments to the southern industrial enclaves, where poverty was least endemic. For instance, for close to a decade (2001 to 2009), only one investment project was located in the Upper West region, one of the poorest in Ghana.
The success of the few targeted interventions meant to bridge the development gap between the north and the south has been undermined by corruption and mismanagement.
The result is widening inequality and migration of young people from the north to the southern cities for opportunities. The kayayes are typical among them.
They support the economic development of their host cities by filling market transportation gaps and assisting in market exchange. Thus, kayayes play important roles in the socio-economic life of Ghana’s southern cities. But with their low income (some earn as low as GH₵20 cedi or $4 a week), they are blocked from getting decent housing.
This is because formal housing interventions focus on [high income and middle class people]. And landlords demand several years of advance lump-sum rental payments in the informal housing market.
Accommodation and skills training promises made to kayayes by politicians have gone unfulfilled. They continue to make a living by carting goods in the day and sleeping on the streets at night.
Some find accommodation in the rapidly expanding low-income slum neighbourhoods. But it’s not secure because the city authorities frequently destroy these settlements.
Even while the government was enforcing the “stay at home” restrictions, one of its local agencies, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, made over 1,000 people, including kayayes, homeless by demolishing their houses because they were deemed “illegal”.
These were the conditions prompting the decision of some kayayes to try to get back to the north in a cargo truck, illegally.
Lessons for building back better
Public disapproval of people who resisted lockdown rules was based on the idea that they were just being indiscipline–stubborn to adapt to positive behavioral change.
As our analysis shows, however, that perspective ignores the deeper historical determinants that placed people like the kayayes at the heart of the violation of the restrictions. Inspired by the indiscipline narrative, the government used the violent power of the state to compel compliance. The strategy, as we have shown elsewhere, did not work.
A more sustainable way to contain the next crisis lies with measures that give the majority of Ghanaians a shot at a decent life. Such measures could include:
dealing with corruption and mismanagement so that public resources are available to be used towards employment and housing
moratoriums on evictions
extension of public services to poor neighbourhoods and upgrading slums
directing private capital and public investments to poorer parts of the country
building robust infrastructure and systems for delivering welfare and social support on a large scale.
_Samuel Ametepey and Savior Kusi contributed to this and the original article.
Festival Godwin Boateng does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
