On a late evening in October 2011, exceptionally heavy rains poured down over Accra. Worst affected were the areas adjacent to the infamous Odaw River, the ‘dead river’ as local newspapers dubbed it after the flood. Engorged with debris, plastic, and human excreta, the river began spilling over just moments after the rain had commenced, with flash floods causing damage far beyond its banks. At the Neoplan Station, which is located right at the riverside, the floodwater wreaked havoc. Its basin-like shape was fatal in that respect. First, the floodwater accumulated at its outer wall. It then deluged the station, swamping shops and stores, destroying goods and property, and creating panic. Much property fell prey to the water. Bank notes worth millions hoarded in the nooks of the station offices were allegedly putrefied. Dozens of vehicles were demolished; many more vehicle engines were damaged. Six people were believed to have been killed by the sudden flood. Many of those who survived sustained severe injuries; many others were left traumatised.
For the first time in years, the station traffic was brought to a halt, but only for that one night. At dawn, the station workers recommenced their operations. While some toiled to make the yard accessible again, collecting scrap and rubbish, others arranged new loading bays on the main road in front of the station and behind the yard. Mechanics and craftsmen gathered in great numbers and started repairs at a brisk pace. New buses (and drivers) had been called in from other stations. Some even managed to bring in vehicles from outside Accra. Where buses were in short supply, private cars and taxis were deployed to replace them on the required routes. Outside operators from other stations, who usually compete with Neoplan for passengers, left their yards and joined in by allying themselves with groups of Neoplan workers or by loading in parallel (and in competition) on their own terms. Despite all calamities, both human and material, business was ramped up again in a matter of hours. As summarised baldly by one station worker with hindsight: ‘There was no time for sorrow. People demand movement.’
The mechanisms put in place for coping with the emergency were neither planned nor prepared for. There was no emergency action plan whatsoever. Rather, they were crafted via a combination of self-regulating arrangements, ad hoc combinations, and opportunistic collaborations between various groups of station workers. Their actions and heterogeneous strategies were nevertheless all geared towards one main goal: to make ends meet by immediately adapting their capacities to the changed circumstances. These were not mere acts of making do, however. By acting on volatility in such ways as to retain operational capability, they turned flexibility into a resource for economic survival and, ultimately, returns. Manifest in the station workers’ drawing together of different resources – human, material, mechanical, financial, and spatial – was a vigorous form of mobility of practice that looms large in their understanding of hustle as prowess in mastering shifting situations.
Once the yard was cleared, these arrangements were dissolved. By and large, the collaboration that had emerged in the immediate aftermath of the flood remained limited to the necessities of re-establishing operations, which revealed another basic idea behind hustle as an orientation and livelihood logic: namely, that ultimately everyone depends on their own resources. The unfortunate ones who were put out of business (above all, storekeepers and ‘owner-drivers’ whose vehicles suffered total loss) received no help or assistance. They had to start from scratch or relocate to other places. Deserted shops were taken over by new vendors. Dilapidated vehicles were replaced by those of other owners. Some people called on God, praying for dispensation. Others sought reimbursement from their insurance agency, which mostly turned out to be as futile as divine invocations. Notably, no one made claims against the city authorities or the government. Not only was the state absent in all of these rearrangements, the station workers did not even perceive this as a lack.
The self-reliant and instrumental practices by which Neoplan’s workers responded to the havoc caused by the flood are indicative of a deeply sedimented mode of social organisation structured by tenets of entrepreneurial utility wedded to both cooperation and competition. With the need to restore operations taking precedence, little attention was paid to internal tragedies or external agencies. Similar to what Kristin Peterson (Reference Peterson2014: 112–14) describes as the entrepreneurship-centred ‘Igbo market theory’, the station workers’ dispersed and self-regulated actions were made cohesive by collectively performed realignments to extremely sudden changes in their capacities to meet (people’s) demands.
These entrepreneurial modes are a far cry from communalistic views of African local economic practices, which are characterised by an emphasis on moral economies, and related, often invoked (but also challenged; see Green Reference Green2014, for instance), notions of risk-mitigating, retributive mechanisms ascribed to ‘economies of affection’ (Hydén Reference Hydén1980). Unlike the peasant in James Scott’s (Reference Scott1976: 1) famous metaphor, who is likely to be drowned by just a ripple of water, at the Neoplan Station the (literal) floodwaters could not restrain the majority of workers from continuing their ventures, even though some of their co-workers actually drowned. While this is not exactly an ‘economy of disaffection’ (Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1989), as forms of mutuality and patronage are also involved, I suggest that risk, competition, and shrewd resourcefulness are the principal modes that structure the workers’ group economic endeavour.
However, this is not to reproduce postulates of some kind of ‘disembeddedness’ of the economic practices of the station workers. Nor is it to relate their calculative attitudes and risk-embracing actions primarily or even exclusively to external structural forces and the pressures of global capitalism – or, more specifically, of neoliberalism – which would effectively explain away their salient agency. This is not to deny that certain changes in the national and global political economy, especially those promoting the deregulation and privatisation of road transport provisions, have had a significant impact on the practices, outlooks, and position of private transport operators, as has been suggested with regard to Ghana and other African contexts (Godard and Turnier Reference Godard and Turnier1992; Mwase Reference Mwase2003; Obeng-Odoom Reference Obeng-Odoom2009; Rizzo Reference Rizzo2017).
As I argue in this chapter, the economic practices of Neoplan’s station workers, along with the norms and orientations that inform these practices – captured in the notion of hustle – reach further back into the history of Ghanaian road transport entrepreneurship and policies. The hustle that characterises Neoplan’s workings, and which, in the aftermath of the flood, revealed a salient adeptness in dealing with contingency, displays strong continuity with a long-established set of self-enterprising, yet collective and competitive, economic endeavours of local transport operators. As I will show, these endeavours were largely of an indigenous kind, and they were decisively formed by a frictional, often clashing, relationship with the state authorities and, in particular, with their variously crafted attempts at regulatory intervention.
My primary aim for this chapter is to establish the historical context from which today’s station hustles – as a distinct economic logic and mode of production – emerged. I relate the modes and conditions of operation that characterise the private road transport sector in contemporary Ghana to the entangled history of local economic practices and of larger-scale political and economic changes that have shaped it since the first days of motorisation in the early twentieth century. Touching down at key moments in the history of private public transport ventures in the Gold Coast and Ghana, I pay close attention to the role that bus stations played in these developments. In doing so, I introduce some of the key groups and the organisational structures they have created. Delineating the back story of the political economy of today’s station hustle, this chapter sets the stage for understanding the dynamics of the operational and occupational organisation of Accra’s Neoplan Station, which I examine in Chapter 3.
The Lorry Age: Indigenous Road Transport Ventures and Colonial Regulations
With the onset of what Polly Hill (Reference Hill1963b: 234) called ‘the lorry age’ – alluding to the great transformations brought about by the motorisation of Ghanaian society from the second decade of the twentieth century – public transport in Ghana (and the Gold Coast) largely became a private enterprise. The first to realise the potentials, and profits, looming in the motorised road transport business were local cocoa farmers, famously described by Hill (Reference Hill1963b) as ‘rural capitalists’. Using money derived from long-term ventures in land cultivation, the farmers reinvested in lorries and engaged in the construction of road networks, much of which happened without government support, direction, or even notice.Footnote 1 ‘Soon after 1918,’ adds Hill (ibid.: 234), ‘it became the fashion, for those who could afford it, to travel by lorry for most of the way – the lorry age had dawned.’
These early ventures led on to what Elizabeth Wrangham (Reference Wrangham2004) describes as an ‘African road revolution’. Complementing, and also competing with, colonial efforts directed at the development of railways, the lorry business became rapidly established as the main mode of motorised transportation both for passengers and, from the mid-1920s onwards, for cargo, cocoa in particular (Heap Reference Heap1990: 25). Lebanese traders ran an elaborate ‘hire-purchase system’ (Hill Reference Hill1963a) that facilitated immediate access to vehicles, and hence to the market. Largely based on this brokerage, the prolific growth of the Gold Coast’s private transport industry gave rise to a ‘new kind of African entrepreneur’ (Hawkins Reference Hawkins1958: 4, cited in Hill Reference Hill1963b: 215): the commercial lorry driver, who was able to invest in fixed capital (a motor vehicle), who worked on his own terms (thus outside the structures of wage labour), and who was able to collect profits daily (in fact, after every single trip).
Key to success was the drivers’ flexibility compared with the rudimentary public transport provisions of the colonial state.Footnote 2 Characterised by high levels of adaptability to passengers’ needs and enabling connections to areas previously accessible to human carriers only, the motorcar not only conquered new markets but created them. Innovations in automobile technologies dovetailed with emergent entrepreneurial activities and were promptly translated into business opportunities. Of great importance in this respect was the relatively easy handling of these early types of vehicles, mostly American Ford lorries with high road clearance.Footnote 3 Both the affordability and the relative mechanical simplicity of the vehicles gave each owner-driver a high degree of operational independence. This independence, in turn, paved the way for a markedly decentralised organisation of the emergent privately run road transport sector. Ghana’s lorry age was characterised by venturesome indigenous economic initiative from the outset.
The Establishment of Lorry Parks
As the volume of motorised traffic increased, the roads in the commercial centres of coastal towns, especially in Accra, underwent a thorough change. In his The Red Book of West Africa of 1920, Alastair Macmillan gives a vivid description of the scene in central Accra:
Innumerable motor lorries, with trailers attached, laden to the utmost with bags of the precious beans, roar, rattle, and rush, interrupted with equally numerous motor cars in the feverish haste of the cocoa season, and provide a spectacle of activity such as cannot be seen elsewhere in West Africa.
It is against this background of a perpetually growing ‘spectacle’ of (motorised) activities that the colonial administration felt compelled to intervene. In this context, the establishment of lorry parks in the centres of urban conurbations – combined with the legal obligation on commercial lorry drivers to use the parks – appeared to be a promising device for regulatory intervention. Similar to other technologies for controlling motorised traffic, such as roundabouts, one-way traffic, and a comprehensive traffic code, the establishment of lorry parks resulted from the transfer of a British-bred socio-technological model to its colony.Footnote 4 The first main lorry parks were opened in 1929 in Accra, Sekondi, and Koforidua, followed by Kumasi in 1930 and Cape Coast in 1931.Footnote 5
The requirements for the establishment of a lorry park were quite simple and involved low costs. A centrally located, vacant plot of land was leased (usually for a period of 99 years) and declared an ‘official parking place for motor vehicles’. For the supervision of the park, a lorry park clerk, a policeman, and a night watchman were employed.Footnote 6 Most of the early lorry parks were of a simple design. As James Jordan writes:
what is variously referred to as a Central Lorry Park, Central Truck Park, Lorry Station, Transport Station, or other of a variety of names … usually denotes a large empty field (often an acre or more in sizeable towns) near the center of the town. In smaller villages it may simply be an open place near the gas pumping station. Typically, there is no shelter from sun or rain, but women and children will be found selling food to passengers. This service, plus its central location, are the sole functions of the park. It is almost never organized in the sense of having specific stalls for lorries or trucks with certain destinations. Rather they are found parked in random directions and at various stages of loading or unloading.
Along with the opening of each town’s lorry park came the introduction of a set of by-laws that local drivers were obliged to abide by. The most crucial regulation, as listed in the Accra Lorry Park by-laws of 1929 (see Appendix A for the full wording), was that all journeys should begin and end in the park, which effectively compelled drivers to abandon their loading practices in the streets of downtown Accra and other cities, and forced potential travellers to converge in the station.Footnote 7 Resonant of what Heinrich Popitz (Reference Popitz1992: 30–4) termed the ‘power to set data’ (‘datensetzende Macht’), the newly installed lorry parks bore the potential to control and determine road users’ practices, compensating for a lack of ‘horizontal’ state control over a largely diffuse system of transport operations involving indigenous economic actors.
Figure 2.1 Lorry park, c.1932.
The Drivers’ Associations
At the same time as lorry parks became established in towns across the Gold Coast, the many individual operators began organising themselves in local drivers’ associations.Footnote 8 Most of these associations appear to have originated in earlier coalitions of drivers. Although archival sources are inconclusive in this regard, the salient concurrence of the enforced establishment of lorry parks and the emergence of the associations suggests a causal rather than a coincidental relationship. That is to say, the government’s efforts to increase its regulatory leverage over commercial motor transport by way of a concentrated, ‘vertical’ spatial intervention triggered the formation of a concentrated organisation of those who were subjected to the regulations: commercial transport operators.Footnote 9 Their prime bases of operations became the lorry parks, with the result that a formal technology of regulatory control by the state (i.e. the parks) was transformed into a stronghold of opposition to this control.
Many of these associations labelled themselves ‘unions’. Yet they had little in common with trade unions for employees but rather resembled guilds (see also Hart Reference Hart2014). The main function of each of these associations was to protect the economic interests of their members against competitive forays by other drivers’ associations, and to regulate the internal relations of a heterogeneous group of individual entrepreneurs – comprising principally lorry owners, drivers, mechanics, and the local lorry park personnel, who simultaneously acted as their main representatives.
Just as the structures of the associations were decentralised, there was no overall route licensing system. The distribution of routes came to be structured by market demand and by the capacities of each association’s drivers to meet these demands and withstand competitive pressures. And as most routes (that is, journeys) began and ended in the lorry parks, control over access to the parks came to constitute the only effective entry control to the public transport market. This control was effected through the registration of vehicles by the associations that based their operations in the respective park. Because drivers had to move their vehicles between different parks, a complex system evolved in which the associations created branches in parks controlled by other associations.Footnote 10 Here, cooperation evolved as a means to facilitate competition.
By way of these interleaving arrangements, the privately run motor transport industry established a highly fragmented and decentralised system of operations, which became as powerful in generating returns as it was divided over the distribution of gains. Ultimately, the institutionalised fragmentation that underlay the sector became a mechanism to immunise it against attempts to curb, regulate, or monopolise its operations.
The efficacy of this immunity has been demonstrated repeatedly in the successful defiance of various attempts by successive administrations – under both colonial and postcolonial regimes – to restrict the sector’s latitude of self-rule. One example of this defiance during colonial times followed the introduction of the Motor Traffic Ordinance in 1934. As the first comprehensive traffic code, the Ordinance established various restrictive clauses concerning commercial driving.Footnote 11 At first, many drivers appeared to simply ignore the new statutes, calculating the risk of punishment (and of getting caught in the first place) against the gains derived from operations in grey areas of legality.Footnote 12
As conflicts over the enforcement of discipline increased and as more and more drivers saw their commercial activities restricted, tensions culminated in a nationwide strike in November 1937.Footnote 13 The scope of the strike was limited in that many drivers abstained from it, with many others being exempted in order to convey foodstuffs (and to prevent ‘a great famine’, as worded by one drivers’ association).Footnote 14 Yet the sheer threat of a full-blown stoppage of commercial road transport appeared to serve the purpose sufficiently. The authorities responded to the drivers’ demands and passed a series of amendments (Hart Reference Hart2014: 203–5).
Although this episode of the transport entrepreneurs’ collectively staged action was rather short, it clearly demonstrated the extensive bargaining power they held in relation to the state. The mechanisms at work behind this power, however, did not relate to their ability to organise collective action so much as to their collectively shared aversion to central regulation. Their agenda was geared towards forcing the state to retreat from their affairs. It was driven, above all, by economic motives.Footnote 15
With the advent of the Second World War, the authorities abated their regulatory counteractions significantly. Because they had to cope with Britain’s war-adjusted colonial policies, the de facto relinquishment of regulatory authority over commercial transport to ‘natives’ turned from a threatening loss of (however frugal) jurisdiction to a veritable option for administrative relief. Emblematic of this turn in policy was the government’s surrender to demands for the ‘native administration of lorry parks’. While the municipalities retained legal entitlement over the acquired land on which lorry parks had been installed, in terms of organisation, conduct, and also the collection of revenues, the parks were fully taken over by local drivers’ associations.Footnote 16
The Collectors
As lorry parks came to serve as primary switchboards for their decentralised economic operations, the lorry park personnel became powerful brokers between passengers, drivers, and vehicle owners. Generally referred to as ‘porters’, following the designation of railway station personnel, in turn derived from the model of ‘the Victorian railway’ (Lacy Reference Lacy1967), central figures among them were the ‘collectors’ (later on referred to as ‘bookmen’). Working on a commission basis for the associations’ branches operating from the parks, collectors supervised the loading of vehicles and issued tickets to the passengers.
In 1947, the collectors became the target of a renewed attempt at regulatory intervention. Because the colonial administration sought to capitalise on their strategic function in the organisation of the parks, and of the transport sector at large, the collectors were to be put under the control of municipal authorities or replaced by official clerks. As this directive unleashed great unrest among the drivers’ associations, which bluntly warned the administration ‘not to interfere in union affairs’,Footnote 17 the case was presented to the government’s Commissioner of Labour. Preceding the decision of the Commissioner, a petition had been presented by representatives of the Ashanti Motor Union in which the function of collectors was explained:
Collectors are the people who carry passengers’ goods into lorries and pack them in good order just the same way and manner the Porters of the Railways do their work … no Lorry Park in the Gold Coast can function or move on alright or properly without the assistance of Collectors … Because of the good work done for us by our Collectors, we pay them a commission of 2/– [two shillings] in the pound according to the number of passengers and goods collected which however does not in any way affect the passengers.Footnote 18
The Commissioner of Labour, ‘after considerable investigation’, vouched for maintaining the local system. The summary of his report reads:
[The collector’s] objects and actions are not always disinterested or necessarily desirable, but the Commissioner of Labour, after considerable investigation, has gained the impression that generally speaking they serve a good purpose, and bring some measure of cooperation and organization into what is very often a disorderly industry. The unions do much to protect the interests of drivers, and also to a lesser extent the African passengers, and the Commissioner of Labour believes that their object of appointing recognized collectors, who are members of the unions, to work in various lorry parks has had a beneficial effect.Footnote 19
During the remaining years of colonial rule, the sector was largely left to its own devices. Reflected in this tacit official recognition was the state’s acknowledgement that the continuously growing demand for transportation could only be met by private enterprise.Footnote 20 This demand was fuelled significantly by the extremely rapid urbanisation that set in after the war. In Accra, for example, where the highest (net) growth rate was registered, the population doubled between 1948 and 1960 to 388,000 (GCO 1962). A salient result of urban growth was the emergence and prompt institutionalisation of private motor transport services within municipal boundaries: urban Ghana’s now famous (and thoroughly studiedFootnote 21) tro-tro industry.Footnote 22
The Post-Independence Era: Predicament and Possibility in the Road Transport Business
With Ghanaian socialism taking hold after independence under Nkrumah’s administration (1957–66), the scope of state intervention in the conduct of private transport entrepreneurs remained remarkably limited.Footnote 23 The revamping of municipal transport services in the late 1950s (under the National Omnibus Service Authority) and the setting up of inter-city transport services in the early 1960s (under the City Express Service) did put some additional pressures on private operators. Yet their competitive position remained largely unchallenged, due to their much more differentiated network of routes and their far greater and continuously growing numbers.Footnote 24
What had a considerable effect, however, was the accumulation of recessionary pressures that troubled the country from the early 1960s onwards, in turn fed by political mismanagement and corruption (Frimpong-Ansah Reference Frimpong-Ansah1992). Subsequently, this led to shortages of vehicles, spare parts, tyres, and petrol. These economic strictures drove many operators out of the market. Overall, however, these processes bolstered the position of Ghana’s private road entrepreneurs in relation to the state. As government provisions for public transport remained largely unable to serve the demand – with state-run enterprises persistently operating in the red (RoG 1967) – the lorry business offered a lucrative, if risky, venture for those who managed to access vehicles and were able to keep them running, foreshadowing contemporary understandings of hustling as founded on the combination of adverse circumstances and shrewd resourcefulness. Using various adaptive solutions, this ‘managing’ involved the creative skills of vulcanisers and mechanics, as well as more clandestine practices, such as the purchase of smuggled petrol. Towards the end of Nkrumah’s reign, state-run road transport services on both inner-city and inter-city routes reached such a level of operational disintegration that private operators virtually became the exclusive providers of public transport.Footnote 25
The post-Nkrumah regimes, faced with a continued downward spiral of economic performance, took on differing stances towards the power that private road operators came to hold over the constituents of public life. With respect to public transport policies, the rule of the National Liberation Council (NLC, 1966–9) has been described as representing ‘purely a period of consolidation and maintenance of existing structures’ (Addo Reference Addo2006: 10). The ‘structural changes’ introduced during the years of the NLC, which mainly followed a programme of divestiture and liberalisation (guided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF); Hutchful Reference Hutchful1973), indeed appeared to have no significant bearing on the private transport sector. Far beyond mere ‘consolidation’, however, was the large-scale insurance scheme that the NLC administration introduced in mid-1967, which imposed particularly high premiums on commercial vehicles. The proposed scheme was challenged vehemently by the drivers’ associations and, upon implementation, resulted in a nationwide strike – at the time, the second general strike action by commercial drivers (after the strike of 1937). Following several weeks of strike and a series of negotiations, the government eventually backed down and revised the scheme.
This strike stood at the beginning of a large wave of politically motived strikes by wage labourers between 1968 and 1971 (Kraus Reference Kraus1979). In a move indicative of the entrepreneurship-centred economic endeavour of Ghana’s private road transport operators, the drivers’ associations abstained from these actions. In the light of these later strikes, a governmental report on the drivers’ strike concluded that there had been ‘no evidence to suggest that the strike was premeditated or had any political overtones’ (RoG 1968: 26). As in the strike 30 years earlier, their agenda appeared to be driven principally by economic motives.
The Busia government (1969–72), with its agenda for promoting indigenous business and economic ‘self-reliance’ (Esseks Reference Esseks1971), sought to straighten out its relations with the transport entrepreneurs along the lines of liberal corporatism, conferring on them the rank of self-deployed public sector workers. This move stood in parallel to Jomo Kenyatta’s famous, and much discussed (Heinze Reference Heinze2018; Rasmussen Reference Rasmussen2012), 1973 decree to exempt Kenya’s matatus from public licensing, which has been interpreted as a pivotal event that heralded the era of deregulation (Mutongi Reference Mutongi2017: 95–7). In the Ghanaian context, the newly formed national umbrella organisation, the Ghana Private Road Transport Union (GPRTU), which followed from a merger of many earlier local drivers’ associations, was allowed considerable latitude in the pursuit of ‘national interests’, particularly as it was commissioned to enforce price controls for transport fares. Despite its unified appearance, however, the GPRTU represented a loose grouping of mere nominal standing. Most regulatory capacities remained at the level of local branches, whose relations were structured by drivers’ competition and of which there were several hundred in the 1970s (according to statements by national executives of the GPRTU in 2012).
The Police I No Fear
The military regime led by Acheampong (1972–8) was characterised by strong inclinations towards hegemonic political control and a corresponding distaste for factionalism and individual ‘profiteering’ (Owusu Reference Owusu1975). It pursued a much more restrictive course of regulatory action. This materialised in particular in a series of laws that conferred the structuring of routes and fares on a newly created licensing authority.Footnote 26 Not surprisingly, these measures brought many transport operators into conflict with state authorities.
Yet on the road and inside the lorry parks, where the statutes were to be implemented by (underpaid) law enforcement agents, the balance of power between state agents and non-state (economic) actors was largely in favour of the latter. Because demand for transportation continued to exceed its supply by far, many drivers and lorry park workers – the collectors in particular – took advantage of the situation and fixed the fares at will. And although some drivers were prosecuted (and occasionally imprisoned), conflicts were generally mediated through routines of everyday corruption. The following statement by a commercial driver, quoted in an interview in an Accra-based student magazine (headlined ‘I know I no fit for heaven’), gives a telling example of this widespread preponderance of ‘practical norms’ (Olivier de Sardan Reference Olivier de Sardan, De Herdt and Olivier de Sardan2015) over legal ones:
For the police I no fear. I give them money for cigarettes and kenkeyFootnote 27 they forget all these rules. The whole of last year me I no renew my driving licence because no policeman dey take me for court when I give am something. Sometimes, too, I dodge them.
These attitudes of bribing and ‘dodging’, and generally of ‘not fearing’ police and prosecution, were confirmed to me in numerous talks I had with retired drivers and station workers who were active in the 1970s. Referring to the years of Acheampong’s rule, former ‘owner-driver’ Atsu summarised the economic position and practices of private transport entrepreneurs as follows:
Many people were going hungry. The country suffered. So they introduced Operation Feed YourselfFootnote 28 to help local farming. But we the drivers usually never felt the hunger. Even if I drove only two days a week, I could make enough money to live well for the whole week. Even if one day the business was not too well, the next day I doubled the fare. And that was that. We were fully committed to feeding ourselves, successfully so, not like the farmers.
All cynicism notwithstanding, this kind of savvy and self-interested entrepreneurialism, with its proximity to today’s understanding of the station workers’ hustle, made working in the transport business very appealing. Sjaak van der Geest (Reference van der Geest, Gewald, Luning and van Walraven2009: 266) summarises this appeal in the ‘image of the driver for whom everything seems within reach: money, travel, women – in short, the good life’.
More often than not, however, life as a driver came at a considerable price. Commonly regarded with a ‘mixture of admiration and envy’ (van der Geest Reference van der Geest, Gewald, Luning and van Walraven2009: 265), drivers had to cope not only with anxieties related to witchcraft and other malevolent forces, but also with grave commercial uncertainties due to market volatilities, indebtedness, and reliance on often unreliable vehicles (see Field Reference Field1960; Peace Reference Peace1988; Verrips and Meyer Reference Verrips, Meyer and Miller2000). As Keith Hart (Reference Hart1970: 109) notes in his study of Ghanaian small-scale entrepreneurs, while the lorry business yielded ‘the quickest return’, for many ‘would-be operators’ the intricacies of the business made ‘commercial transport an entrepreneur’s graveyard’. Furthermore, with a general ‘need for speed’ being the most essential commercial imperative (Klaeger Reference Klaeger2014), for many drivers the pursuit of profit led not to ‘the good life’ but to accident, injury, or even death.
The drivers’ associations had little to offer to mitigate the potentially adverse effects of the risky ventures embarked on by their members. Mutual assistance has been (and still is) mostly limited to ‘funeral money’ raised for the bereaved of a deceased member. While this form of help should not be undervalued, especially as Ghanaian funerals can be extremely costly, the sense of safety it provides for the active member is negligible. Apart from funeral money, the associations lack any form of financial security scheme, such as healthcare, pension, or unemployment funds. The constitution of the GPRTU (§30) provides for legal assistance in cases of litigation or dealings with the police. This form of assistance, however, is merely a proforma offer and even appears to be unknown to drivers. In cases of accident, confiscation of their licence or vehicle, or the issuing of fines (and collection of bribes) at the ubiquitous police checkpoints, drivers generally act on their own behalf and on their own account (see also Klaeger Reference Klaeger2014: 124–44).
The Dawn of the Hustle Age: Road Transport During and After Structural Adjustment
Some of the most far-reaching regulatory interventions were realised by the administrations headed by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, Ghana’s last successful coup-maker.Footnote 29 From the first days of the revolution, Rawlings and members of the Revolutionary Council repeatedly claimed that they would provide private transport operators with support, in turn counting on winning their backing. A first manifestation of this promised support materialised in the creation of the Neoplan Station. Only three days after seizing power, coup leader Rawlings ordered that a centrally located yard in Accra owned by a local industrialist should be confiscated and transformed into a new lorry park. The newly established park was to be used by vehicles plying the Accra–Kumasi route, the single most important route in the country. Up to this point, these vehicles had departed from two congested roadside locations. Among veteran workers of the Neoplan Station, Rawlings’ ‘concrete action politics’ (as an older station worker put it) are especially remembered in relation to what became Neoplan’s ‘opening ceremony’: a major from Rawlings’ revolutionary guard opened the yard gate by firing a shot from his machine gun and handed over the confiscated land to the bus operators.Footnote 30 The Neoplan Tropicliner, a coach well adapted to the adverse road conditions of the West African tropics, became its flagship vehicle and gave the yard its name.
Two weeks after the initial 1979 coup, Rawlings’ junta attempted to intervene in the organisation of lorry parks by targeting bookmen, the former ‘collectors’ who had been the target of a (failed) regulatory intervention in 1947. The bookmen were blamed for the inflation of fares, their function was declared ‘unproductive and a nuisance to public interest’, and ‘all bookmen’ were banned from operations with immediate effect (Daily Graphic 1979a). This directive was in line with the junta’s larger and rigorously enforced policy to ‘eliminate all middlemen’, which in turn was related to the militarily backed ‘house-cleaning exercise’ (Pieterse Reference Pieterse1982: 253). It unleashed great unrest among lorry park workers and commercial drivers, who decried the forceful upsetting of a longstanding organisational order. When they threatened to go on strike, the law was revoked just four days after its implementation (Daily Graphic 1979b).
Rawlings’ second regime revised its strategy in relation to the country’s transport operators, especially by giving extensive patronage to the GPRTU. It consolidated the union’s stature as a more coherent organisation while strengthening its position in relation to rival associations that emerged during the 1970s, most significantly the Progressive Transport Owners’ Association (PROTOA).Footnote 31 This system of clientelism proved largely successful. The GPRTU became a ‘prosperous “organ of the PNDC [Provisional National Defence Council] revolution”’ (Gyimah-Boadi Reference Gyimah-Boadi, Harbeson, Rothchild and Chazan1994: 132), with many of its members featuring prominently in political mobilisation activities (Jeffries Reference Jeffries1992: 217).
Concurrently, a series of measures was initiated for enforcing discipline at the country’s main lorry parks. Crucial to this was the introduction of so-called union guards into the system of lorry park management (Cissokho Reference Cissokho2019). Appointed by the GPRTU, the union guards were to supervise the activities of other station workers, including those of other associations. As these newly created paramilitary-like proxies of the GPRTU (instructed by the military and equipped with khaki uniforms) were authorised to collect daily dues from all vehicles entering the stations, the status of the union was upgraded to that of a self-policing organisation (Joshi and Ayee Reference Joshi and Ayee2002). By means of this incisive system evocative of indirect rule, control over Ghana’s main lorry parks was effectively handed over to the GPRTU.
These measures were reinforced by the economic recovery programme, which commenced in 1983 (Agyeman-Duah Reference Agyeman-Duah1987), instantiating the structural adjustment policies launched across the global South. Established to arrest the country’s economic decline and revive the productive sectors, these measures brought drastic cuts to government expenditure, which in turn had grave effects on the lives and living conditions of people across Ghana. In line with the World Bank-promoted idea of increased reliance on market mechanisms, coupled with deregulation and privatisation, the PNDC introduced a range of reforms that favoured the private transport sector in general and the position of the GPRTU in particular. A divestment of state-run bus operations to the private sector was coupled with a favourably adjusted import policy for second-hand passenger vehicles,Footnote 32 an increased availability of spare parts, an almost complete suspension of controls on transport fares, and a massive rehabilitation of road infrastructures (Fouracre et al. Reference Fouracre, Kwakye, Okyere and Silcock1994; Gyimah-Boadi Reference Gyimah-Boadi, Harbeson, Rothchild and Chazan1994: 132–3). These reforms and investments were encouraged significantly (and co-financed) by the World Bank, which, ever since the Berg Report (World Bank 1981), had called for more attention to the causal relationship between development and overcoming distance.
Enclaves of Growth
Framed by this global agenda for road infrastructure investment and the encouragement of private sector performance, the new-found affinity between the government and (GPRTU-aligned) transport entrepreneurs led to a veritable bonanza in Ghana’s private transport sector. According to Jon Kraus (Reference Kraus1991: 30), it grew ‘by roughly 10.7 percent per year during 1983–87’.Footnote 33 The concomitant cutbacks in formal employment structures further fed into this upturn, as did a number of interrelated structural factors. For example, cuts in agricultural subsidies, the drought years of 1982–4, and looming ethnic conflicts in the northern regions catalysed processes of rural flight, while the sustained economic inequality between Ghana’s north and south accounted for the durability of these processes (Brown Reference Brown and Brown1986). In 1983, the expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria (the ‘Agege returnees’, whose number was estimated at roughly one million people; Afolayan Reference Afolayan1988), added further pressures on the growing imbalances of the urban labour market.
During these years, Ghana’s ‘street economies’ (Hansen et al. Reference Hansen, Little and Milgram2014) began to take on the function of a sponge, absorbing many people driven out into the relatively easy to access, yet loose and increasingly competitive, grounds of transport enterprises and adjacent trades. With growing rates of migration to the cities and increasing internal remittances (goods and money sent by city dwellers to their upcountry kin), there was a continuously rising demand for transport services. The effects of these diverging developments – of generally aggregating economic hardships and prospering transport businesses – became most pronounced in Ghana’s lorry parks.
The stations progressively turned into enclave-like locales of condensed economic activities that attracted increasing numbers of small-scale entrepreneurs and labourers. These included lorry owners, drivers, and station personnel, as well as more peripheral engagements within the sector’s bordering micro-economies, such as hawking, trading, and head porterage. About half a century after ‘the lorry age’ had dawned, as phrased by Hill (Reference Hill1963b: 234), hustling found traction as the principal mode of economic sustenance for a fast surging number of people working the lorry business, whether on the road or at the roadsides.
Consolidating the Hustle
With the change of administration in 2001, newly elected President John Kufuor initiated a policy shift regarding the public transport sector. This was in line with the departure from policies of deregulation and liberalisation that had dominated the transport economics of African states during the previous two decades (Mwase Reference Mwase2003). Influenced by the World Bank and IMF-promoted poverty reduction strategies introduced in 1999, which translated into a series of country-specific poverty reduction strategy papers (IMF 2012), the new agenda aimed at increasing state capacities for the regulation of the transport infrastructure in general and of the private road transport sector in particular. The subsequent policies were based on two main approaches. First, the government embarked on a massive overhaul of the existing road network, including the redevelopment of major trunk roads into dual carriageways, newly constructed bypasses meant to ease congestion on urban through roads (Stasik and Klaeger Reference Stasik, Klaeger, Engel, Boeckler and Müller-Mahn2018), a redesigned roadside architecture that accommodates traffic, and above all the construction of centrally regulated ‘transport terminals’ designed to supplant the old-established lorry parks. (I consider the designated function and uses of Accra’s new transport terminal in Chapter 8.)
Second, and complementing these infrastructural reconfigurations, Kufuor’s administration aimed at increasing its regulatory leverage on the private transport sector. The perceived need for these measures was formulated in an analysis of Ghana’s public transport sector carried out by an international transport consultancy (IBIS 2005). Prepared in order to ‘assist with the construction of a “toolkit” on bus transport reform to be financed by PPIAFFootnote 34 under the direction of the World Bank’, the government-commissioned analysis concluded that, because former governments basically ‘abdicated any direct responsibility for either planning or providing public transport services’, ‘a regulatory vacuum exists for the sector’ (ibid.: 12, 27).
The proposed ‘toolkit’ reforms aimed to develop a ‘centrally planned and integrated network of state-run services’ (IBIS 2005: 47), which would be tantamount to a complete restructuring of the transport sector. This proved to be of a rather impracticable scope – not least, as mentioned in the analysis, because of ‘the potential opposition of the existing private operators and their controlling unions’ (ibid.: 48), which would most likely be provoked by such reforms. Faced with this discrepancy between the desire for regulatory intervention and the reality of regulatory capacities, the government settled for rather modest measures, principally designed to unfetter the public transport market from the grip of the GPRTU. With an estimated 85 to 90 per cent of Ghana’s transport operators registered with the GPRTU (ibid.: 27), however, it could not (openly) break with the association. It thus re-animated the role of other transport associations, especially by removing the barriers for re-entering the stations, relaxed the conditions for granting concessions to private transport companies, and initiated a major public–private transport undertaking, Metro Mass Transit Ltd, which set out to ‘move the nation’ (as its slogan has it).
Kufuor’s policy change effectuated a significant redistribution of market shares, with dozens of new transport companies and many more individual operators entering the market. When seen from the ground-level perspective, particularly from within Ghana’s main lorry parks, it precipitated the dynamics of fragmentation, decentralised operations, and competitive pressures that have characterised and shaped the sector since its earliest days. For the first time, the public transport market showed signs of saturation and, on various major routes, of oversupply. Rather than leading to a drop in supply, however, this saturation resulted in a general intensification of competitive practices and a resulting increased vulnerability of transport operators, creating conditions that were ripe for hustle.
Conclusion
The relations that structured the balance of power between the state and local road transport entrepreneurs in Ghana (and the Gold Coast) can be described along two main lines. On the one hand, the state’s inability to provide adequate public utility services was both capitalised on and partly compensated for by the economic ventures of local actors. On the other hand, throughout the one hundred years of the sector’s existence, its bottom-line-oriented public transport providers have been subjected to repeatedly staged regulatory interventions on the part of state authorities. Depending on the larger economic and political constellations at the time, these interventions materialised as restraints imposed via legal sanctions, taxation, certification, price controls, import policies, and competition by subsidised parastatals.
Yet in spite of, and in defiance (and partly also mere ignorance) of, these variously configured mechanisms of regulation and coercion – most of which were aimed at restricting the sector’s latitude of self-rule and fill its supposed ‘regulatory vacuum’ – Ghana’s private transport entrepreneurs retained a decisive degree of operational independence. This is not to deny that larger-scale economic restructurings have had a formative influence on the conduct of the operators, as have developments in automobile technologies, especially regarding the introduction of new vehicle models and their appropriation in both technological and commercial terms. Notwithstanding episodic entanglements with political patron–client networks (particularly during Rawlings’ rule), operators adhered to an organisational mode structured according to the tenets of utility and a reciprocal relationship between cooperation and competition, manifest in particular in long-established competitive systems that structured the distribution of routes, as coordinated in the lorry parks since the 1930s.
The highly fragmented and decentralised operations that, from the beginning, characterised the economic practices of transport operators have never been captured by the state, but they also formed the very base from which to repel the state’s regulatory forays. One salient example of the state’s relative absence in the volatile developments of the station is provided by the union guards and their successors. Introduced by Rawlings’ second regime to enforce revenue collection, the union guards were degraded to ordinary branch overseers in 2001; most of their executive powers, however, had already been forfeited with the end of military rule in 1992. Today, there is a small unit of quasi-tax collectors who literally glean marginal gains in the form of tolls which they collect from each vehicle that enters the station. These four municipal clerks, who work in shifts and only during office hours, regularly lose out to the drivers’ reluctance to deliver the required payment. Tellingly, after the October flooding of 2011, the toll collectors did not show up at the station for weeks.
The evasion of state regulation by private transport operators is far from representing a kind of Ghanaian variation on ‘the art of not being governed’ (Scott Reference Scott2009). From the perspective of the individual operators, the constraints following from state interventions were taken mainly as just another element of market volatility, one tantamount to external pressures induced by natural disasters. And more often than not, they were dealt with accordingly, by confronting them, ‘dodging’ them, or simply riding out their repercussions. Some of these individual attempts to confront and withstand volatile situations have been successful, many others less so.
In this sense, the commercial ‘perils and possibilities’ of roads (Klaeger Reference Klaeger2013b) that frame today’s station hustle are nothing new to Ghana’s road transport providers; and neither are matters of risk, uncertainty, and individual striving to maximise commercial opportunities and chances for income and ‘the quickest return’ in the face of weak service provision by the state. In Chapter 3, I look at some of the main effects that follow from the simultaneous embracing and contesting of economic adversity by zeroing in on the changing organisational modes in Accra’s Neoplan Station as they have evolved since the establishment of the station at the beginning of Rawlings’ rule.
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