The confidence in ICTs as instruments of democracy and development is a global one. And this was particularly evident at the 1994 ITU conference in Buenos Aires, where the then US Vice President, Al Gore inaugurated the American idea of Global Information Infrastructure (GII) as the amalgam of various National Information Infrastructures (NII). “The GII will not only be a metaphor for a functioning democracy”, he enthused, “it will in fact promote the functioning of democracy by greatly enhancing the participation of citizens in decision-making. And it will greatly promote the ability of nations to cooperate with each other. I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create” (Gore 1994). I guess it will be in order to remark in passing that in the old Athenian democracy slaves and women were disenfranchised. And by a remarkable coincidence, it is its postmodern version, the illiteracy of blacks in Florida and outdated ballot punching machines that worked in concert to deny him the presidency in the 2000 elections in a country that is leader of ICTs. But this is not why I introduced his speech. The statement by Al Gore represents the conventional understanding and confidence that policy makers invoke to justify the promise of technology.
All the key words – sustainable development and participatory democracy – were alluded to in this landmark speech. The ITU conference itself was important because it was the first ever
“World Telecommunication Development” conference since the world body was set up in 1865.
While governments all over the world tend to glorify the potential of ICTs for the twin dreams of democracy and development, they expect the private sector to lead in the provision of the infrastructure. And Hamelink (1995, 16) is justifiably cautious when he asks: “can the undemocratic sort of capitalism that will finance the GII in fact produce a genuine participatory democratic arrangement?” Nordic Africanist, Ullamaija Kivikuru, on her part has cautioned that while new ICTs have a great potential for the democratization of communication, the experience so far in Africa is not encouraging. Arguing from her research experience on the continent, she points out that those who tend to acquire new information technologies are those who are privileged by the existing imbalance (Kivikuru 2000, 34). In the face of this development, policy direction tends to be generously oriented towards free market in the hope of leapfrogging or through economic growth. But this quest for leapfrogging through economic growth and accumulation that in turn leads to exclusion of larger portions of the
political community needs to be questioned. We have to revisit the mandate of the state, which it claims to be nation building, and point out the centrality of access and participation as the key foundations of the modernization project. Otherwise, if modernization leads to exclusion, we may end up with a subversion of the postcolonial nation-state as a political community, and ultimately a legitimation crisis for the state.
It is pertinent to make a categorical statement on the stand of this project on technology and development. The democratic potential of technologies of communication, especially their ability to facilitate participation, their space-binding power and the virtual undisputable function as the fabric upon which a civil society can operate require that we acknowledge the central place they should be accorded in modernization. But that should not preclude an interrogation of the political allocative practice of deploying the technologies nor should we acquiesce with any analogical understanding of civil society. What I mean by an analogical conception of civil society is a reading of the occidental understanding and experience of civil society within the African context, for instance.
Depending on when and which society is under discussion, civil society, as a concept seems to have acquired different meanings and interpretations. For ancient Greeks civil society was the arena of the politically active citizens and carried with it the idea of being civilized. It was the 18th Century thinkers such as John Locke, Tom Paine, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson who discussed civil society as distinct from the state. Krishan Kumar (1993;
1996, 86) points out that the contemporary understanding of civil society as the sphere of life between the family and the state is Hegelian. “Hegel sees the content of civil society as largely determined by the free play of economic forces and individual self-seeking.” Kumar then argues that the civic and social institutions that regulate economic life should also be thought of as being part of civil society. “So the particularity of civil society passes over into the universality of the state” (Kumar 1996, 86). Such a shift Kumar points out is derived from Gramsci who developed the Hegelian conception. For Gramsci civil society is not conceptually limited to the economy but to the realm of cultural politics. The institutions of civil society therefore include the church, schools, trade unions and other organizations that facilitate the ruling class’ ability to exercise hegemony. Ankie Hoogvelt (1997, 233) reports that in Latin America, influenced by the Hegelian definition of civil society as everything “beyond the family but short of the state,” terms such as NGOs, popular movements, voluntary organizations and grassroots organizations are used interchangeably with civil society. But the trouble is some of these organizations astride beyond the postcolonial state because they have international sources of funding and they are neither accountable to their beneficiaries nor can they be regulated by the state.6 DANIDA is an example. Its funding is provided by the Danish State through the Danish Parliament yet it is positioned in Ghana as an NGO.
6 For instance, there are about 1,300 local and international NGO operating in Ghana and the Department of Social Welfare in Accra, responsible for regulating NGOs says it lack the resources to monitor their activities to ensure they operate within the law (“No Efficient monitoring of NGOs” www.ghanaweb.com News archives 20 March 2001).
The concept of civil society is appealing because it maps out the arena in which citizens can actively participate in the affairs of the polity, for the idea of civil society automatically positions the individual as a rights bearing member of the society (citizenship). As Yusuf Bangura (1999) points out, the popularity of the concept in Africa was because of its promise for empowerment, democratization and participation for members of social groups who were previously excluded from policymaking process. Both the theory and practice of civil society has acquired its manifestation from societies that have experienced modernity. While we can talk of a possibility of civil society in non-modern societies, the contemporary understanding that civil society is incompatible with despotism and absolutism suggest that we limit the discussion to modern and modernizing societies. As John Hall (1995, 18) points out, any attempt to universalize the occidental experience of civil society should be resisted. Civil society in Europe for instance is founded on a certain level of economic prosperity the absence of which would have made civil society, as we know it today unthinkable.
Thus what infrastructural prerequisites are needed to allow one to talk of the possibility of civil society? Can we talk of a developing civil society in a country where the very institutions that define civil society exist but are inaccessible to the rights bearing citizens not because of dictatorship or despotism, but because of lack of technical means? Discussions on civil society in Africa that give conceptual attention to democratization, such as Mamdani (1996), Ake (1997), Bangura (1999), tend to focus on the political concerns of participation in decision making. Such a focus is important. But what we hardly see is a discussion on the communicative infrastructure that would allow participation in the first place. I am here referring to the fabric upon which modern societies are built upon (Deutsch 1966, Carey 1981, Warner 1990). This question is crucial one for nation-states that are in the process of becoming. This is also the reason why civil society is only thinkable under conditions of modernity, for the project of modernity in the occident was a type of social mobilization and inclusion to redefine the relationship between citizens and the national center. The discussion on civil society in Africa has led to the demand for restructuring of the state to make it more responsive to civil society. But the problem of the state is not just about opening it up to actors in civil society, but more importantly, it has more fundamental issues at stake. These include its three major crises, which Bangura lists as “a crisis of capacity; a crisis of governance; and a crisis of security” (1999, 4). I consider the crisis of capacity to be one that is critical to the realization of the others because it is foundational to the state’s ability to operate. This includes the lack of a communicative fabric upon which nations are defined.
Thus what are the implications of this short overview of civil society for contemporary Africa and Ghana in particular? First of all, it requires that we define civil society contextually as one that is coming into being in late postcolonial societies. Given the theoretical insights offered by Mamdani we have to define the project of modernization as one of a process of extending civil society to include people who hitherto had no access to that privilege though were members of the common imagined community called the nation. Currently, developing countries have at best, weak or emerging civil society. But the tendency to read civil society as having emerged in the last decade or so is misleading. The struggle for civil society in Africa dates back to the precolonial nationalist struggle, which could only materialize after the
initiation of material and infrastructural modernization of the colony. For those struggles in the 1940s and 50s were demands for the extension of the rights of residents of the small civil societies reserved for expatriates. And the struggle assumed a new dimension with departure of the white colonialist. The emerging civil society then is one of facilitating and enabling access and participation. That is why the material foundations such as communication technologies are thought of are very crucial to the process. Policy actors therefore think of these communication technologies, as just some needed material resources for the dream of modernization. That is why research in communication studies that tend to highlight the cultural dimensions of borrowing technology are often slighted by policy actors.
As already discussed, the developmental state thinks of the nation-state as in a process of becoming. Thus the issue of mediation is of paramount importance in its modernization project. As former Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere is reported to have said that while the developed world is trying to reach the inner depths of space, we are trying to reach the next village (Kivikuru 1994). This is a humbling admission of what the developmental state is all about. Thus the state and nation nexus is more about how both relate in a burgeoning civic community. The democratization of the communicative fabric of the nation is not only central to the mediation of a commonly shared imagination of a political community. It is also fundamental to the possibility of interpenetrated and articulated publics. When Jurgen Habermas discusses a discourse theory and the public sphere, he stresses the communicative aspects of civil society:
The social substratum for the realization of the system of rights consists neither in spontaneous market forces nor in the deliberate measure of the welfare state but in the currents of communication and public opinion that, emerging from civil society and the public sphere are converted into communicative power through democratic procedures.
The fostering of autonomous public spheres, an expanded citizen participation, curbs on the power of the media and the mediating function of political parties are not simply elements of the state are of central significance for this (Habermas 1996, 217).
Writing about developed democracies, there is an inherent taken for granted-ness about the “currents of communication and public opinion.” In discussing modernizing or burgeoning democracies, this aspect of flows cannot be assumed to happen automatically if some of the publics are cut out by the mere fact of access, hence the technological imperative. But the discussion on the causal relationship between technology and society is not that straight and simple. There are several levels of discourses on the relationship between technology and society in general and the specific relationship between communication technologies and society.