Settling refugees, unsettling the nation: Ghana's Volta River Project resettlement scheme and the ambiguities of development planning, 1952--1970.

Abstract

On January 22nd, 1966, at Akosombo, president Kwame Nkrumah inaugurated the Volta River dam, centerpiece of Ghana's Volta River Project (VRP). The scheme engendered visions of abundant electricity, profitable industries, efficient transportation networks, and fruitful agriculture. Meanwhile, the waters of the Volta River were rising to form Lake Volta and engulfing 752 nearby villages. That day, Nkrumah paid tribute to their 80,000 inhabitants forced to move from their traditional homes, in the interests of the nation. The nation was doing more than simply acknowledging their sacrifice. For almost 3 1/2 years, the Volta River Authority had been planning and implementing a resettlement project of unprecedented scope. Rather than treating the 80,000 as detritus of the immense undertaking, the government seized upon the crisis of the flood as an opportunity for social intervention and development. Most ended up at 52 government-built and administered resettlement towns where the state furnished them with houses and farmlands. This dissertation tells the story of the preparation, execution, and aftermath of the Volta resettlement. After describing the centrality of the VRP to Nkrumah's visions for Ghana and his own authority, it recounts the planning that transformed the forced evacuation into a forward-looking development project. It traces how the colonial state, independent Ghana, and international experts grappled over conflicting forms of proper treatment of the refugees and fair recompense for their losses. This process was complicated by the shifting politics behind national development initiatives. Official efforts succeeded at subsuming matters of fairness under larger questions of national development. The execution and aftermath of resettlement marked a dynamic by which development and fairness emerged as touchstones for competing ways to articulate the role of the state in relation to its people. The terms moved from a means for the state to assert and justify domestic authority, in part by articulating its citizens' responsibilities, to a means for settlers and others to claim their own rights. As well, various intermediaries articulated these contested and shifting versions of just compensation and development: bureaucrats balancing state aims and local constraints, and field workers applying the plans on the ground, all mediated the impact of the government's scheme on the settlers and others involved.