Plutocratic State. Elite Privilege and Bungled Identity Management at the Jugular of Democracy in Ghana

Abstract

Ghana’s identity management is in peril. Just a year ago, government pulled the rug from under the country’s Births and Deaths Registry through passing a new civil registration law. Civil registration provides the essential foundation for identity management at large; national ID, passport issuance, voter registration, as well as thorough identity verification where needed. Thus far BDR operated as a deconcentrated organization, a required organizational choice when delegation to local government is unrealistic — as it is in Ghana. Ghanaian local government is extremely weak, and being kept so. BDR has managed to lift birth registration coverage from about 25% twenty years ago to 70% currently. Death registration has remained stuck at about 25% though. In 2015 BDR introduced the promising use of mobile phone to overcome a universal service accessibility problem for, mainly, the rural population. The “m-birth project” was evaluated in 2018. A paper “twinned” to this paper (“Mobile phonicide in identity management”) includes a re-assessment that finds that the evaluation was of mediocre quality and has overstated the project’s outcomes. As an essential digitization project, judged on what was accomplished, m-birth may actually have been “good enough”, but judging from the absence of vital signs the approach may have been abandoned (as applies to so many mobile phone projects for development). In the meantime, the current government launched an exceptionally expensive national ID project costing USD 1.22 billion in 2017, through a single source award—cum—BOT contract, at a global record per person cost. By October 2020 70% of the eligible population (15 years and older) had been enrolled (not independently confirmed), skewed more towards the better-off than in any other country’s documented case. It will be hard to achieve universal enrolment. Uganda has run into a brick wall, because of the same flawed approach as Ghana has adopted. Also, recently, Ghana’s Supreme Court ruled that birth certificates are not proof of citizenship. This cannot but spring major popular reaction, e.g., in the form of the wide popular unrest in India by end of 2019. This paper also probes the excessive election administration cost in Ghana. Had the country prioritized laying a strong civil registration foundation (as in South Africa and some other African countries such as Botswana, Egypt and Tunisia), both national ID and election administration would have been in a much better condition now. At the root of this slowly but surely moving train wreck is plutocratic rule sliding towards kakistocracy. Organizational unravelling of both civil registration and national ID (the country’s second serious attempt) is now all but certain, which will imperil Ghana’s grand digital ambition, its economy and democracy. This paper makes suggestions what could and should now be done in identity management, some of it urgently. Because that implies a U-turn for both national ID and civil registration decentralization, and loss of reputational capital, the political will to conduct this volte face may not be there.

Keywords: identity management, civil registration, national ID, elections, decentralisation, democracy