Abochie, Where is my Police? The Police Force and the Political Economy of Ghana

Abstract

Many issues that present themselves in Ghana today as simple issues of institutional dysfunction that need to be reformed, and reformed fast, are not that simple. They are linked to genealogies and trajectories that are heavily embedded in historical institutional development and its highly contested terrain of interest-based politics, economics and research. Without appreciating this fundamental logic of institutional continuity, many persons and groups in Ghana have attempted to institute institutional reform in key sectors, but alas to little avail. This lecture explores this theme using the police in Ghana as a case study. The Lecture concludes that a reform of the police in Ghana will have to be grounded in the reform of the political economy that the police are called upon to police. Any such strategy for institutional redesign has to have a stubborn ability to resist certain dominant interests and discourses; contain a proliferation of alternatives-an inventory of institutional social normative forms on the basis of which contestations and policy decisions will be made; and be situated in the prevailing array of democratic possibilities.