Invitation to an Inaugural Lecture to be delivered by Prof. Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata (Director of the Institute of African Studies)
Topic: The Road has Many Stories: Encounters between the State and Citizens of the Different Ghanas.
Date: May 12, 2022
Time: 5:00 pm
Venue: Great Hall, University of Ghana
You may join online here: https://youtu.be/VQEOGOgtUpw
Chairperson: Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, Vice-Chancellor
The Road has Many Stories: Encounters between the State and Citizens of the Different Ghanas.
My work over the last thirty years has involved fieldwork combining qualitative research with small surveys of communities across thirteen of Ghana’s sixteen regions. Travelling through various parts of rural and urban Ghana has been instructive. Beyond what I have found through the application of research methods, I have become familiar with the conditions of everyday life and witnessed extraordinary events. There have been opportunities and moments of serendipity which have allowed me to pose larger questions beyond the specific concerns of my research projects. One such question, which is the subject of this lecture, is how the state in Ghana is experienced by citizens, and how its acts of commission and omission affect class, gender, and spatial differences in Ghana.
Studies of the state in Africa have sought to answer these questions for both the colonial and post-colonial states. There is a body of work which has had various priorities and debates on this subject. While some of it has highlighted the class character of the state and the structural nature of its interactions with citizens, others have stressed the state’s developmental agenda, while still others have either focused on its depredations, or more recently, on the elite consensus underpinning state action. A neglected dimension in these efforts to theorise the post-colonial state has been the lack of sufficient attention to its patriarchal character.
Using the insights from debates about the post-colonial state in the literature in conversation with my observations in the field, I examine the different faces of the Ghanaian state that fisherfolk of the Volta Lake, smallholder farmers, small-scale miners, cattle herders, and domestic workers encounter in their everyday lives. I also explore how these citizens have responded, and the ways in which their interactions with the state have created the different Ghanas I witnessed on the road.
The research I draw on for this lecture includes
a) the long-term livelihood implications of the Volta River Project for dam affected communities (1998-2002);
b) Work as a pathway of Women’s Empowerment (2006-2014);
c) Changes in women’s work as represented by domestic and bank work (2008-2011)
d) the livelihood implication of gendered land and agricultural commercialisation (2016-2022); and e) the policing of domestic resource conflicts between farmers and cattle herders and between the state and small-scale miners (2018-2023).
My main arguments are that the social contract between the Ghanaian state and its citizens at independence--while ambitious in its vision of opportunities for all, and its agenda to defeat the trinity of ignorance, disease, and hunger--was imperfect. The modernisation paradigm which underpinned this contract reduced large segments of the population, particularly those in rural areas, to backward people in need of education, welfare charity and integration into modern society under the driving leadership of the State. While this approach privileged the rural and urban male elite, worse was to come with its replacement by a more laissez-faire approach to development and a minimalist agenda for the state that accompanied economic liberalisation. This shift accentuated the more negative faces of the State while muting its more positive interactions with the citizenry.
My observations reveal different faces of the state- at once developmental, present, absent, distant, ineffectual, discriminatory, patriarchal, prone to violence, neglectful and exclusionary. Which of these faces of the State citizens experience depends on who they are, the intersections of their class, gender, kinship, and location, what is at stake, and how non-state institutions such as the family, the community and the market mediate their experiences.
My hope is that my observations contribute to recent studies that have drawn attention to growing inequalities in Ghana and citizens’ increasing dissatisfaction with and mistrust of the Ghanaian state. This situation threatens national cohesion, peace, and security. It demands an urgent change of course that promotes positive and meaningful relations between the state and diverse groups of citizens—especially working people, women, and young people. Only then would the post-colonial project regain its early promise of one Ghana.
PROFILE: PROFESSOR DZODZI AKUYO TSIKATA, FGA
Professor Dzodzi Tsikata (Ph.D.), Professor of Development Sociology, is coming to the end of her six-year tenure as the Director of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana at the end of July 2022. She started her academic career at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) in October 1991 as a Junior Research Fellow and rose to the position of Associate Research Professor in 2010. During this period, she served as Deputy Head and then Director of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (CEGENSA) from 2005 to 2012. She was promoted to the rank of Professor from 16th July 2016. Dzodzi was elected a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Professor Tsikata attended the Accra New Town Experimental Primary School and Achimota School in her formative years. She holds an LL.B. (University of Ghana), B.L. (Ghana Law School), M.A. Development Studies (Institute of Social Studies, Den Haag); M.Phil. Sociology (University of Ghana); and a Ph.D, Social Science (cum laude) (Leiden University).
Research Areas and Current Projects
In a research career spanning almost 30 years, Professor Tsikata developed four broad interconnected strands of inquiry, namely, Agrarian Change and Rural Livelihoods; Informal Labour Relations and Conditions of Work; Gender and Development Policies and Practices; and Social Policy and Social Development in Ghana and Africa. Her research is situated within an inter-disciplinary feminist political economy intellectual tradition. She is the author of over seventy publications, which include a monograph, guest edited special issues of journals, edited books, journal articles, book chapters and technical and working papers.
She is currently engaged in four major research projects. First, she is co-PI and leader of the eight person Ghana team of the DEMETER Project, a six-year research partnership (2016-2022) among scholars from Cambodia, Ghana, and Switzerland. The project, which examines the gendered processes of land and agricultural commercialization, combines studies of livelihood trajectories of smallholder farmers with an exploration of global, regional, and national policy discourses, policies and laws accompanying agrarian change in Ghana and Cambodia.
Professor Tsikata also leads a team of seven researchers from the Institute of African Studies in a research consortium known as the domestic security implications of international peacekeeping in Ghana (D-SIP). D-SIP is a five-year (2018-2023) research project of a consortium made up of researchers from the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY), the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) and the Institute of African Studies that examines how Ghana’s participation in peacekeeping abroad shapes the effectiveness and legitimacy of the police and military in their policing of domestic conflicts. The IAS team’s focus is on the policing of two significant resource conflicts- between sedentary farmers and itinerant herders and between the state and small-scale miners.
Since 2020, she has been the principal investigator (PI) of a transnational team of researchers that won a competitive grant from Carnegie Corporation to research the distinctive character of precarious work in different contexts in the global South. This project brings together about twenty researchers from three countries representing three distinct regions in Africa- Egypt, Ghana, and Kenya. The project is exploring the changing contours of precarious work, its gendered features and effects, and the implications for the culture of work in the 21st Century.
Professor Tsikata’s work on social policy explores the contribution of social and economic policies to social development, citizenship, and societal change. She is currently the PI of a pan-African research and advocacy project on building knowledge and constituencies for Gender Equitable and Transformative Social Policy for Post-COVID-19 Africa (GETSPA). In the project’s first year, researchers from across Africa are engaged in retrospective studies of the social policy trajectories of thirty-one African countries as a basis for future work on critical assessments of promising social policy initiatives. This work builds on her long-term involvement in the work of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and with ISSER’s policy work on social development. She coordinated the first edition of ISSER’s Ghana Social Development Outlook 2012, a biennial report that assess the state of social development in Ghana. Since then, she has contributed to the chapter on work and employment for all three editions of this report.
Teaching and Mentoring
Professor Tsikata developed and for several years taught ISSER’s M.A. course on gender and development. She now teaches the advanced gender and women’s studies course in the Ph.D. Programme at ISSER. She has also mentored a new generation of scholars. In addition to involving emerging scholars, post-doctoral fellows, and Ph.D. students in her research teams, she has served on the supervisory teams of eighteen Ph.D. students, seven of whom have graduated, and the remaining eleven at various stages of completion. She also supervised thirty-two M.A. and M.Phil. Students over the same period and served as external examiner for nine Ph.D. candidates in universities in South Africa, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Institution Building, Leadership and Research Networks
Various scholarly networks have been pivotal in Professor Tsikata’s research career. She joined the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in the early 1990s and became vice president and then president of the Council between 2012 and 2018. She is also a founding member of the tri-continental network, the Agrarian South Network (ASN). Established in 2012 by a small group of scholars and activists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the ASN organises an annual summer school, publishes edited volumes and has successfully published a journal for more than ten years. She currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Network.
In the last few years, Professor Tsikata has been a member of the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs), a pluralist network of progressive economists engaged in research, teaching and disseminating critical analyses of economic policy and development. She currently serves as the Secretary of its Executive Committee. She is also a founding member of the Labour Law and Development Research Laboratory (LLDRL) at McGill University’s Faculty of Law in Montreal, Canada. The LLDRL seeks to contribute to creating a transnational labour law centred on the Global South, and on workers and types of work neglected in debates in labour law and development.
Professor Tsikata played a significant role in the establishment of the Maria Sybilla Merian Institute of Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana. She participated in the successful University of Freiburg led consortium of German scholars, as one of two representatives of the University of Ghana to present the proposal to German government officials in Bonn. The consortium is the recipient of a multi-million euro grant for eight and half years. Professor Tsikata convened the fifteen-member working group that established the Merian Institute at the University of Ghana and served as its interim director for six months. She is currently the President of the MIASA Executive Council.
Advocacy
Professor Tsikata’s work on Gender and Development Policies and Practices has aimed to produce research that supports the work of women’s rights activists. As a leading member of the women’s movement in Ghana, she has played significant roles, including the convening of the drafting committee of the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana, and serving as spokesperson of the three women’s rights coalitions at the hearings of the Constitutional Review Commission. She is a founding member of two policy advocacy networks, Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa) and the Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT) on whose steering committee she continues to serve, having been its Convenor in the past.
Boards and Committees
In addition to serving on numerous boards and committees at the university of Ghana over the years, Professor Tsikata is one of the editors of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. She is also one of five editors of Feminist Africa (FA), a journal which the Institute of African Studies now hosts and publishes on behalf of an inter-disciplinary pan-African research community. She also serves on the editorial advisory boards of several international journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Development and Change, Feminist Economics, Oxford Development Journal, and the Journal of Modern African Studies.
She was a member of Ghana’s National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) between 2015 and 2017, and the UN Committee for Development Policy (CDP) from 2012 to 2018. She currently serves on various boards- the Ghana National Theatre, the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS), Harare, the Institute of Economic Justice (IEJ), South Africa, and the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) in Nigeria.
Consultancies
Professor Tsikata has consulted for the UNECA, ILO, UN-Women, the INCLUDE Platform of the Netherlands, and PLAAS in South Africa, as well as for the Ghana TUC and the UNDP office in Ghana, on a range of issues. She has also served on several evaluation, review, advisory and expert panels for academic units, research projects, flagship publications, post-doc and research awarding projects in Africa and Europe.
Family
Professor Dzodzi Tsikata was born at Akuse General Hospital in the Eastern Region to Evans Kodzo Tsikata a teacher, and Janet Fiadzigbe, a nurse-midwife on 25th April 1962. She is third of four siblings, the first two being Major Retired Senanu Tsikata and Ambassador Novisi Abaidoo. The fourth, Dr. Setorme Tsikata, is an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of Alberta. Professor Tsikata married Dr. Yao Graham in 1992, and they share a home with three young adults, their son Susu Kobla Graham and nieces, Deborah Kordah and Sibyl Etornam Agbakpey.
