Sympathetic Magic/Contagious Corruption: Sociality, Democracy, and the Press in Ghana
All over the world, corruption is breaking news. Central to the narrative of public opposition to the excesses of political and corporate power, corruption stories dominate the front pages of newspapers in such diverse public spheres as Japan, India, Germany, France, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, and Zambia. Consider the profusion of corruption allegations animating the pages of the private press in Ghana during the summer of 2002. A June 20 report in the Ghanaian Chronicle detailed the suspicious loss of 4.2 billion cedis (US$600,000) by the Ghana Water Company ( Ohene 2002). On July 11, the paper reported on "massive embezzlement" at the nation's premier teaching hospital, Korle-Bu ( Jale 2002). Throughout July and into August, the Chronicle published reports suggesting that President John Agyekum Kufuor had diverted public funds and used the money to refurbish his private house and lawns ( Archer 2002).
Since the 1990s, a free and vigorous press has been seen as central to the expression of civil society and processes of good governance in the newly democratizing states of Africa—and particularly in Ghana.1 Functionally integral to Western models of liberal democracy, the press summons the hidden, obscure operations of power into the critical light of the public sphere, providing the primary means for popular representation and the participation of citizens in political discourse while holding the state accountable to the public good.2 The role of African journalists in these processes of "good governance" has been defined fundamentally through the exposure and critique of corruption, the central theme of political opposition in the Ghanaian private press throughout the 1990s ( Blay-Amihere and Alabi 1996). In liberal discourses of democracy and human rights, Ghanaian journalists would be the valiant watchdogs of the public purse, working bravely and tirelessly to hold politicians to rigorous ethical standards of fiscal accountability and professional integrity.
However, in practice, journalism is more complicated than this heroic narrative would suggest. While the news media is rhetorically critical of power and ostensibly opposed to the state, the realities of everyday journalistic practice position it at the interstices of state and society, the public and the private, interpolating journalists into the everyday practices of power in both spheres. As these practices of power routinely involve informal exchanges of money, favors, and information, such practices have become an everyday part of journalism in Ghana, both efficiently banal and ritually mysterious. This essay will explore these informal exchanges as well as the social, political, and material transformations accomplished through them and the ambivalent discourses they generate.
Between 1995 and 2002, I carried out fifteen months of fieldwork for my dissertation on the press and political culture in Ghana ( Hasty 2001, 2005a,2005b). In addition to interviews and archival research, I worked full-time as a journalist for both state and private newspapers in Accra. Frequently, I was incorporated into the organization of the newsroom alongside student interns from the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ). As neophytes, we were paired with senior reporters to conduct interviews and cover political events and official ceremonies. I also attended classes at GIJ to learn what Ghanaian journalists learn (and also what they don't). To study the specific forms of professionalism that frame the practice of journalism in Ghana, I participated in conferences and programs of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), paying close attention to the articulated concerns and strategic silences of working journalists; the forms of mutuality and contest that shape the professional field of journalism; and the political and regional commitments, romantic intrigues, beer preferences, and dance moves that shape the social field of journalism. For more direct answers to the specific questions raised by participant observation, I conducted extended, tape-recorded interviews with editors and journalists at state and private news organizations. And finally, several Ghanaian journalists became good friends of mine. I spent a great deal of free time hanging out and chatting with them, often about work, our colleagues, and local political happenings.
As a journalist in Ghana, I became immersed in the discourses and practices of corruption. As a member of the state press corps, I went on daily "invited assignments" to state ceremonies and press conferences and wrote perfunctory stories about the successful development projects of the state, stories that participated in a larger patrimonial narrative of state accumulation and distribution. Even as our news stories testified to the state's responsible use of public monies for national development, we enjoyed the many informal, off-the-record benefits of life as a state functionary as we were routinely incorporated into the material plenty of state ceremony and conviviality. I also worked for oppositional private newspapers that specialized in investigative stories exposing corruption among government officials. In contrast to the patrimonial narrative of the state media, corruption stories in the private press alleged the widespread abuse of office and diversion of public funds by state officials (embezzlement, licensing fraud, tax evasion, election rigging, and divestiture kickbacks) while detailing the conspicuously lavish lifestyles of several government ministers, in particular. Both inside the newsroom and out on assignment, a constant flow of letters, phone calls, rumors, anonymous tips, and conversational innuendo directed our professional attention to the ubiquitous forces of political criminality in Ghana, a "culture of corruption" impervious to the corrective regimes of revolution, democratization, and structural adjustment. Pursuing these leads, private journalists frequently offer cash gifts and other favors to reluctant sources in exchange for official documents and anonymous information.
Informal exchanges of money, food, and favors are common among journalists and official sources, though the structure and context of such exchanges are often clearly defined and serve to determine specific interpersonal relationships. The scale of these informal exchanges is generally quite modest, though rumors of large payoffs—particularly in the realm of financial journalism—do circulate among Ghanaian journalists. For the political reporter, routine gifts of soft drinks or taxi fares may seem quite trivial compared to the magnitude of the corruption scandals they work so diligently to expose—schemes at the very highest levels of government, involving billions of cedis, luxurious cars, Jacuzzis, airplanes, and Ivy League tuition for children living abroad. Regardless of scale, however, both the everyday giving of small sums for taxi fare and the periodic acceptance of lucrative kickbacks constitute "the private regarding behavior of public officials for money or status gains" and therefore qualify as instances of corruption, in the technical sense of the term ( Nye 1967: 420). Even small gifts from state officials to journalists are intended to exercise influence; that is, they can be technically defined as bribes, criminalized in the giving and the taking. As a form of corruption, bribery operates in a liminal space of sociality between public and private realms. Among state officials, bribery involves the appropriation of public resources or the abuse of public office for private ends; while among journalists, bribery involves the extraction of public resources (accepting money from the state) or the prestation of private resources for public access (giving money for access to state information). Strictly speaking, journalists are not public officials, even though their work is crucial to the constitution of the public sphere of political discourse; encompasses public and private realms; and depends on relations of trust among journalists, sources, and readers. Consequently, any form of bribery, however small, is explicitly forbidden on professional grounds. In this essay, I view instances of corruption involving lesser and greater forms of value on a continuum between "petty" and "grand" corruption ( Doig and Theobald 1999). I argue that within this continuum, the ubiquitous banality of petty corruption performs mimetic and contagious relations with the episodic spectacles of grand corruption—and vice versa. This enchanted relation is essential to the durability and proliferation of corruption.
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Notes
- Célestin Monga (1996), among others, examines the crucial role of the press in processes of democratization and liberalization throughout Africa. This is a common argument in media studies scholarship, and it is echoed in the professional discourse of journalism. However, the African media are oddly neglected by the massive political science literature emerging around the notion of civil society. See Harsch 1993: 47 for a brief but suggestive discussion of the ambivalent role of the press in the contemporary emergence of civil society in Africa.
- For Jürgen Habermas (1989), the mass media in general provide for the very emergence of the public sphere—an enlightening space of critical debate among citizens in a democratic dispensation. See Peters 1993 for an analysis of this aspect of Habermas's work.