In the postcolonial development history of Ghana, one of the most important policy initiatives was the setting up of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) in April 1990.
It was set up to co-ordinate the new national planning effort and to advise the president on development planning policies and strategies. Ultimately, it was to prepare a comprehensive national development plan that would map out the country’s strategic direction for the next 25 years starting from 1996. The national development plan was initially called National Development Policy Framework and later renamed: Ghana-Vision 2020. According to this vision, the main development goal was to transform Ghana from a poor underdeveloped low-income country that it is now, into a vibrant and prosperous middle-low-income country within a generation.
To make the work of the commission a tenured one, the NDPC was enshrined in the 1992 constitution as article 86 and given legal basis by parliament under the NDPC Act of 1999. The idea of national planning supported by both the constitution and an Act of Parliament in an era where market thinking dominated development policy is quite a curious development. As it is generally understood in the development literature, national development planning is a deliberate effort to identify the most appropriate means and measures for achieving specific development objectives. It is the conscious effort, often led by the state, to influence, direct and sometimes, control changes in the principal economic variables that determine economic development (Martinussen 1999). The arguments in favor of deliberate state intervention into the economy of developing countries dates back to the 1950s. Generally the argument has
been that market mechanisms are simply not capable of handling certain distributive tasks in the economy such as in the area of public goods like electricity, gas and water supply (as well as telephony, until recently).
The argument in favor of deliberate state intervention in the economy by way of planning can be stated thus:
1. That individual preferences and decisions regarding investment do not necessarily lead to an optimum allocation and development, promoting utilization of the scarce resources of society.
2. That the market mechanisms do not function properly in the less developed countries.
3. That where the market mechanisms function well, they do not lead to changes and development, but may simply reproduce equilibrium at a rather low level (Meier 1989;
Roth 1987; Martinussen 1999).
In the recent Ghanaian case, the World Bank, probably the most significant policy actor in the national economy, initially saw the setting up of the NDPC as a strange development. According to Ghanaian political economist, Eboe Hutchful, the World Bank, which had supported Ghana in almost a decade of SAP was rather skeptical about the importance of the NDPC in the scheme of things. “…to the World Bank, a planning organ, given Ghana’s history, raised nightmarish visions of inefficient bureaucratic intervention and controls even before free market mechanisms had had a chance to consolidate themselves” (Hutchful 2002, 112). The idea of setting up a national development planning agency in Ghana dates back to 1987 and its realization was closely associated with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) rather than the more intrusive World Bank and the IMF, which were gaining control over the economy and the policy process. Indeed the World Bank at one point saw the UNDP as a rival in an attempt to influence the course of direction of Ghana’s development (Hutchful 2002).
The setting up of the NDPC is an instance of institutional rivalry in influencing the articulation of national development policy in a postcolony. During interviews I conducted with some current and former staff of the NDPC as well as some officials from the Ministry of Finance, I found out that both the idea of national development planning and the resources to realize it in the form of institutional setup, were directly as a result of the UNDP’s efforts.3 Meanwhile, the World Bank, then with its doctrine of free market and anti-planning considered the UNDP’s influence on the Ghanaian State an unhealthy one. Indeed, Hutchful (2002, 112) said the World Bank was jealous of what it may have considered a coup by the UNDP. The NDPC by its mere existence contradicted the World Bank’s push for the downsizing of government.
Yet the constitutionality of this development planning agency made it difficult for the bank to
3 A regular feature of most of the people I interviewed during my research in Ghana was the request for anonymity. Past governments and the current one often dismiss bureaucrats without any justification. Consequently, bureaucrats are not comfortable with speaking in their official or personal capacities on issues that have political implications since that could spell their doom when it comes to job security. Thus, I had to contend with promising to keep their identities anonymous.
push the Ghanaian state to scrap it. So the Bank’s next strategy was to co-opt the Ghana-Vision 2020 and appropriate its language as speaking what the Bank has been doing all along.
The NDPC had set the frame for discourse on national development. Its mere existence already suggested that the state had admitted to the relevance of development planning and not just the speeding up of privatization as development policy. But as I will show later, the NDPC’s capacity as a state actor would be drastically reduced by the collective efforts of the Bretton Woods institutions to redefine the role of the state.
After a district and region wide consultation and contribution, the NDPC produced its 292 page national plan called Ghana-Vision 2020: the First Step 1996 to 2000. This first five-year plan was approved by parliament in November 1995 after the president made the presentation.
The parliamentary floor debates were combined with parliamentary consultations with stakeholders in the economy. Ghana-Vision 2020 is not the first development plan in postcolonial Ghanaian history. But it does have certain unique features. In the first place, its attempt to collate views and inputs nationwide was unprecedented. According to the Ghana-Vision 2020 document, the national development plan was formulated following the co-ordination of sector plans from 20 Ministries, government departments and agencies. Ghana is divided in 110 administrative districts as local governments. Each of these districts links up to central government through 10 Regional Coordinating Councils (RCC). In the formulation of Ghana-Vision 2020, each of the 10 RCCs submitted harmonized reports of local government development plans from districts within their jurisdiction to the NDPC. These regionally coordinated plans were further harmonized and coordinated with the sector plans from the sector Ministries. The NDPC set up six Cross-Sectoral Planning Groups (CSPG) to handle the various issues raised from the local government level up to the sector ministerial level. These six CSPG were:
• Macro economics and financing
• Production and private sector development
• Human development
• Infrastructure and spatial development
• Rural and urban development
• Enabling Environment
The members of the C.S.P.Gs composed of public-sector policy makers, private consultants, academic dons, Science and technology researchers, business executives, officers from District Assemblies and R.C.Cs and representatives of farmers, fishermen and unionized workers organizations (Ghana-Vision 2020).
The second unique feature of the development plan was that it was the first of its kind in the history of Ghana to receive comprehensive input outside the confines of the government planning machinery. The plan was circulated among the donor community and “benefited from critical comments from distinguished Ghanaians and professionals working in Ghana and overseas” (Ghana-Vision 2020 1997, viii). In all some 174 experts drawn from the government institutions, universities and think tanks, politicians and consultants contributed to this plan.