Democracy in postcolonial Ghana: tropes, state power and the defence committees

This article examines how the Jerry Rawlings military government, the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in Ghana, framed its political agenda using liberal tropes about participatory democracy as a strategy to manufacture legitimacy and mediate political-economic crisis. The People’s Defence Committees (PDCs) and Workers’ Defence Committees (WDCs), created in 1981 and dissolved in 1984, were presented by the PNDC as innovative programmes aimed at nurturing citizen participation representative of the highest form of democracy. However, the introduction of these reforms came at a time when the ruling PNDC faced critical problems of legitimacy, administrative incapability and popular opposition to austerity measures associated with structural adjustment programs (SAPs). We utilise primary source material from the University of Ghana National Reconciliation Commission collection to argue that the discourses and practice of the PDCs/WDCs functioned simultaneously to violently consolidate state power, depoliticise alternatives, and manufacture legitimacy to mediate political-economic crisis while simultaneously being a vehicle for illegitimacy by providing constrained opportunities for individual nepotism, grassroots empowerment and claim-making against the state.