Maintaining independence : the moral ambiguities of personal relations amongst Ghanaian Development Workers.

Abstract

Lucas and I are on our way to the headquarters of the NGO he has just set-up in one of the rapidly expanding suburbs of Ghana"s capital, Accra i .We pick our way slowly along the heavily rutted road in his large red pick-up and he starts to tell me more about his new NGO.For some time now the New Patriotic Party has been pursuing a policy of water privatization.His NGO is going to protest against this policy.With a steely sense of purpose he outlines the inequities that will result from the "neoliberal travesty" this will unleash, and the measures his organization will take to try to stop the policy.Lucas, in his early fifties, is dressed in a local batik smock that seems purposefully chosen to understate the power and influence he wealds as a public figure of considerable repute.Like many others in Ghana"s NGO movement, he spent much of his youth engaged in socialist political movementsactivities that led him into exile and subsequently prison.The ideological legacy of these engagements is clear in the orientation of the NGO he now runs.What I have also come to realize through over a year of ethnographic research amongst Ghanaian NGO workersis the ongoing significance of the personal relations that developed alongside these political engagements.As Lucas explicitly puts it to me "The mobilization we did in the eighties remains relevant to Ghanaian politics today.There"s hardly any town I"ve been to where I am not able to identify somebody who was a student during those days and that took part in those actions."For Lucas, as for many Ghanaian NGO workers, personal relationships were thus seen as the very means by which civil society could function effectively, enabling consensus to be built and allowing resources to be effectively marshaled so as to hold the government, donors and powerful organizations to account.

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