1States of crisis describe moments of fragmentation of the everyday, crucial turning points, which cause the re-ordering of social, economic, cultural and political relationships (Vigh 2008; Roitman 2013). Across the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about severe transformations in all of these realms, compelling States to respond in drastic ways to curb the spread of infection and its effects on socio-economic conditions. Such efforts have taken on largely datafied forms, including the production of key indicators, such as reproduction rates, number of confirmed cases, hospital admissions, death tolls, or number of administered vaccine doses. As Rottenburg (2020) notes, the speed and professionalism with which health systems across the world kicked into action in response to Covid-19 could be at least partly attributed to the international agreement on scientific methods and representations. At the same time, as classic scholarly work in the sociology of quantification has shown (Desrosières 2010), the production of quantitative knowledge about populations always carries political implications. By taking the critical function of knowledge production about the pandemic as a lens, this article examines Ghana’s crisis response and the composition of the contemporary Ghanaian political landscape it revealed.
2Since the return to democratic rule in 1992, the Republic of Ghana has undergone substantial transformations in the area of democratic governance (Gyimah-Boadi 2009; Abdulai & Crawford 2010), the security sector (Agyekum 2019), and more recently, evidence-based governance rooted in the substantial reorganisation of population registers (Thiel 2020). Nonetheless, as Bob-Milliar and Lauterbach (2021) have noted, Ghanaian public institutions are faced with widespread distrust of the population, which often more readily places its trust in religious and traditional leaders than elected officials. Technologies, such as Ghana’s 2020 biometric voter registration, generally seek to capture fluidity by harnessing the potential of data about individuals and populations. These emerging information infrastructures aiming at the datafication of the Ghanaian population for purposes of development, governance and control, we argue here, are integral components in the Constitution of Ghana’s Covid-19 policy and central to the surveillant assemblage informing it. However, they are themselves also subject to potentially fragile “trust in numbers,” as coined by Porter (1995) regarding the historical construction of the power of quantitative forms.
3We mobilize the theoretical perspective of the surveillant assemblage to explore the Ghanaian government’s effort to capture uncertain and unstable knowledge about the pandemic. To demonstrate our argument, we zoom in on the 2020 Imposition of Restrictions Act (ira) as a focal point of various flows and captures of competing claims to knowledge about the pandemic and interventions in the fight against it. The article is structured into observations of discrete component parts of what we perceive as the Covid-19 surveillant assemblage—loosely following the heuristic proposed by Murray Li (2007)—which we combine in our discussion of the intersecting strands of Ghanaian crisis politics.
4Detecting this multiplicity of transitions, we found, required a dialogue of disciplinary lenses from anthropology and science and technology studies-informed political research, as well as across methods and empirical sources. Methodologically, the risk of the spread of the Covid-19 virus fundamentally altered our relationship with our long-term field sites in Ghana. As international travel was restricted, technologies for remote interaction were adopted for our research purposes. We carried out research for this publication through media observations as well as the mobilization of long-term field contacts. In addition, both authors draw on long-term archives of ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with actors from the Ghanaian political landscape, focusing on various security institutions in the country over the last decade.
5In their now widely cited text on the contemporary condition of states of surveillance, Haggerty and Ericson (2000: 605) note how “once discrete surveillance systems” have converged into shifting arrangements of people, devices, signs, knowledge and organizations, which “transcend institutional boundaries” (ibid.: 605) and can thus no longer be perceived as a “discretely bounded, structured and stable” entity or phenomenon (ibid.: 608). Instead, the authors caution, the study of surveillance requires careful attention for its emergence out of limitless flows and combinations of component practices and technologies into a larger, integrated whole. This article rearticulates the theoretical perspective of emerging surveillant assemblages in the moment of uncertainty produced by the global spread of sars-cov2.
- 1 See also Taylor et al. (2020) on issues of data justice in global Covid-19 responses.
6While closely related to established approaches to infectious diseases as concerns of biosecurity (Collier & Lakoff 2008), we here perceive the Ghanaian governmental response to Covid-19 in light of official attempts to capture uncertainty through truth claims and datafication (Pelizza 2020; Leonelli 2021).1 Studying fragmentations and subsequent re-fragmentations of knowledge about Covid-19 through the lens of assemblage thinking, we argue, allows us to trace the unintended intersections of components and constituent parts, as well as their mobilizations and navigations by competing interested parties.
7Assemblage theory has long rejected the reductionist “presumption of coherence and determination [by a single logic] that reigns in certain quarters of contemporary policy studies” (Buchanan 2017: 460) in favour of observing practice, agency and multiplicity functioning together. Hence, what one may conventionally perceive as stable and bounded, becomes visible in its multiple constituting parts and components, tensions and contradictions, contestations and stabilizations in light of assemblage thinking. While authors such as Rosenthal, ‘t Hart and Kouzmin (1991) have previously pointed to the administrative, “bureau-political tensions” in crisis management, we adopt the lens of assemblage thinking as a glance at the constitutive elements of emerging order (MacFarlane 2009), including “discourses, institutions, forms of expertise” (Murray Li 2007: 263), as well as “humans, materials, technologies, organizations, techniques, procedures, norms, and events”—“all of which have the capacity for agency within and beyond the assemblage” (Baker & McGuirk 2016: 4). Assemblage theory, in this sense, is particularly suited for the study of moments of transformation and uncertainty as it reveals the constant arranging and re-arranging of these heterogeneous fragments through which assemblages are made into “identifiable terrains of action and debate” (ibid.).
8We concentrate here on the surveillant assemblage that constituted itself around the Ghanaian State’s desire to capture various uncertainties arising from the public health crisis. While surveillant assemblages, by definition, do not have any fixed content or quality, their intersection with power and control has “the tendency to create bounded physical and cognitive spaces, and introduce processes designed to capture flows” (Haggerty &Ericson 2000: 608). This has shown itself to be particularly relevant for the production of evidence and truth about the pandemic and the counter-surveillant assemblages taking shape in light of navigation, contestation and (de)mobilization of its effects.
- 2 In comparison, countries such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, South Sudan and South Africa have intr (...)
9In response to the novel coronavirus, many African countries initially resorted to a wide variety of measures, including sweeping legal measures, in an effort to quell the pandemic. Contrary to expectation, Ghana initially did not introduce the severe measures implemented elsewhere on the continent under the label of a state of emergency:2 Ghana recorded its first two Covid-19 cases on 12th March 2020. Although these cases were all imported, the disease spread quickly and within a week of the first cases, the country confirmed cases in individuals with no links to foreign travel. Most infections were recorded in the most populated urban centers, Accra and Kumasi. Measures taken to prevent and contain the spread of the disease included a ban on all public gatherings and the closure of schools, churches, mosques and other places of worship from 16th March. A ban on entry for travelers coming from a country with more than 200 confirmed Covid-19 cases within the previous 14 days was initiated on 17th March, and a mandatory quarantine for all travelers arriving in the country 48 hours prior to the closure of the country’s borders came into force on 22nd March. On 30th March 2020, the most populated urban centers in the Greater Accra region, Kasoa in the Central region and Kumasi were placed under partial lockdown (the restrictions were lifted on 20th April). On 26th April, the use of face masks was made mandatory. Post-lockdown measures to control the spread of the infection continued way into 2022 (Ayisi-Boateng et al. 2020; Kenu et al. 2020). Ghana’s land borders only reopened after two years on 28th March 2022.
- 3 The formulation of the law is accessible online: “Imposition of Restriction Act,” 2020, <https://g (...)
- 4 See Alesu-Dordzi (2020).
10Our observations focus on the political events that unfolded in relation with the passing of the Imposition of Restrictions Act on 21st March 2020. The Imposition of Restrictions Act, 2020 (Act 1012)3 is the legal instrument the Ghanaian government initiated and used in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Act 1012 relies on Article 21 (4) (c), (d), and (e) of the 1992 Constitution for its constitutionality and validity. Article 21 (4) (c), (d), and (e) essentially permit parliament to pass laws to restrict the general rights and freedoms enjoyed under the 1992 Constitution on specific grounds. These grounds include (a) defense of public safety; (b) public health; and (c) running of essential services. Ghana’s President may also (a) impose restrictions on the movement or residence within Ghana of any person or class of persons; (b) restrict movement in Ghana of a person who is not a citizen; (c) restrict the freedom of entry into Ghana or movement in Ghana, of a person who is not a citizen. Section 3 (2) of Act 1012 provides further that the imposition of restriction shall be reasonably justifiable in accordance with the spirit of the Constitution. A restriction imposed may not exceed three months, and the President has the power to either shorten or extend the duration of the restriction for not more than one month at a time.4
- 5 The previous address on March 12 focused on explaining new regulations relating to international t (...)
11In his address to the nation on 15th March 2020, Ghanaian president Akufo-Addo first announced “measures taken against the spread of the coronavirus” and the passing of the Imposition of Restrictions Act in parliament.5 The presidential Address to the Nation stated:
- 6 “Paragraphs (c), (d) and (e) of Clause (4) of Article 21 of the Constitution provides that (4) Not (...)
- 7 See Ministry of Health (2020).
I have directed the Attorney General to submit, immediately, to Parliament emergency legislation, in accordance with Article 21 (4) (c) & (d) of the Constitution of the Republic,6 to embody these measures, and I have further directed the Minister for Health to exercise his powers, under section 169 of the Public Health Act, 2012 (Act 851), by the immediate issuance of an Executive Instrument, to govern the relevant measures […]. We are determined to do whatever we can to prevent the spread of the virus, and protect the population. All the measures that have been announced will be subject to constant review and enhancement, if necessary. Fellow Ghanaians, these are not ordinary times, so, let us all put our shoulders to the wheel, and I am confident that, together, by the Grace of God, we shall overcome this challenge. May God bless us all, and our homeland Ghana, and make her great and strong.7
- 8 See Larte Lartey (2020).
- 9 See Konadu Agyeman (2020).
- 10 See Larte Lartey (2020).
- 11 See also Agyeman-Budu (2020) and Prempeh (2020).
12On 18th March 2020, Ghanaian news media reported that Attorney General and Minister of Justice Gloria Akuffo, in line with the presidential instruction, had presented the Imposition of Restrictions Act to Parliament under a certificate of urgency. The purpose of the act was described as “provid[ing] powers to impose restrictions on persons in the event of a disaster, emergency or similar circumstance, to ensure public safety and protection”.8 In addition, the act was “to provide a legislative framework, in consonance with the Constitution, for the imposition of restrictions as a quick and effective means of intervention to address emergencies”.9 The speed at which the government passed the bill, at the very least, triggered suspicion, further undermining thus fragile trust in Ghanaian State institutions and—we will show—in official truth claims about the pandemic. Quite quickly after the act’s passing, news reports indicated that the legal basis of the legislation was subject to heated debate, triggering the referral of the act to the Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee. Questions of procedure were raised as Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu claimed that the urgency of the act had not been correctly determined by the Speaker of Parliament.10 Simultaneously, several voices in civil society and academia discussed the constitutionality of the ira (Addadzi-Koom 2020).11 We argue here that the 2020 ira did not simply provide Ghanaian president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo with the power to impose restrictions on the movement of people in the event of a disaster or an emergency. In addition, it must be read in conjunction with further efforts to capture the (initially highly unstable) knowledge about the virus and the flows and contradictions emerging from Ghana’s deeply rooted partisan contestation. In the next section, we summarize voices from the opposition of the ira before further exploring elements of the Ghanaian Covid-19 policy assemblage in the subsequent sections.
- 12 See Ibrahim (2020).
- 13 Ibid.
13The passing of the Imposition of Restrictions Act attracted stiff resistance from the opposition in the Ghanaian parliament, the National Democratic Congress (ndc). The ndc argued that the law was disproportionate and at the same time, circumvented numerous constitutional procedures, particularly the forfeiting of extensive reading and debate in parliament under the argument of urgency.12 The presentation of the act to parliament by the Attorney General under a certificate of emergency meant that the passing of the legislation was fast-tracked. With the command of a comfortable majority of the New Patriotic Party (npp) in parliament, the legislation was passed into law after just three hours of debate,13 based on what was later criticized as merely a voice count (Addadzi-Koom 2020).
14Further straining the already fragile trust between government and the opposition party, ndc, critics further argued that the act sought to arrogate unlimited powers to the President, which could be detrimental to the checks and balances placed in the Constitution, therefore regressing the progress booked in Ghana’s burgeoning democracy. The opposition threatened to sue the npp at Ghana’s Supreme Court, arguing that the new act did not deal with the issue of the coronavirus. Former Deputy Attorney General Dr Dominic Ayine, and current Deputy Minority Spokesperson on Legal Affairs, noted that the “government used the Coronavirus as an opportunistic window to bring this act to parliament. All the justification was about Coronavirus. But there was no mention of Coronavirus in the bill”.14 In other words, although the new law was framed and presented as seeking to cater for combatting the pandemic, critics interpreted it as generic and broadly restricting the freedom of movement of the citizenry (Addadzi-Koom 2020).
15One component in the act received particular opposition as it allegedly allowed the executive to demand communication data of the citizenry (arguing that this measure is necessary regarding contact tracing) from the country’s telecommunications providers without resorting to the courts for a warrant for a committed crime. The opposition lawmakers objected to this element of the act noting that it was disproportionate as the government could abuse it to stifle dissident views. At the same time, to the opposition, this component of the act was reminiscent of a law the ndc proposed when it was in government, the so-called “Spy Bill,” which the npp and civil society organizations rallied, agitated against and sued for it to be shelved.15
16The majority and minority in Ghana’s parliament further disagreed on the necessity of the new legal instrument altogether. Contrary to the governing party’s argument that the act would assist the government in the fight against the coronavirus, the ndc opined that the new law was unnecessary as there were other provisions already in place in Ghana’s Constitution, such as the Public Order Act 2012 and Public Health Act, which could have allowed the government to deal with the pandemic without any further expansion of the executive powers of the presidency.16
17The discussion further escalated when minority leader Haruna Iddrisu criticized that the “Bill smells like the pda [Preventive Detention Act]” (ibid.) The Preventive Detention Act, which was passed by the Convention Peoples Party of Dr Kwame Nkrumah as early as in 1958, following growing protest in Ashanti (led by the National Liberation Movement [nlm]) and the declaration of the state of emergency in this region (Mensa-Bonsu 2007: 245 sq., 249) allowed the State to detain and hold citizens without trial for up to four years. Following Ghana’s first coup in 1966, nlc Decree No. 2 (“On Preventive Detention”) also “gave the military the right to imprison any person without charge and an open trial,” in particular the members of the previous parliament and other opposition members (Petchenkine 1993: 35). References to the Preventive Detention Act hence echo fears that the Imposition of Restrictions Act would open the door to abuse as a result of the broadness of the boundaries of the law, the lack of checks and balances, and finally, the absence of an expiry date of the act. Legal scholars, in particular, noted that a person restricted or detained under a state of emergency would be released immediately after the expiration of the state of emergency. However, under the ira, such a person could be incarcerated for up to four years.17
- 18 Ibid.
- 19 As a result of Ghana’s history of coups and military rules, Prempeh (2020) notes, the Ghanaian Con (...)
18In short, opponents of the law preferred that Ghana proclaimed a state of emergency which, with the checks and balances, and time limits laid down in the Ghanaian Constitution, addressed the risks in their own right. While it is the prerogative of the Ghanaian President to proclaim a state of emergency according to Article 31 of the Constitution, parliament would have a controlling role, and the state of emergency would have to be reviewed after three months.18 In the new act, Ghana’s parliament saw itself side-lined, while the executive was seen as accountable only to itself. Considering Ghana’s history of juntas and autocratic rulers, suspicion was raised about the dangerous precedent set in the new law.19 Through the legal, technical maneuver of issuing a new act instead of a state of emergency, critical observers contended, the new law bypassed the safeguards built into the Constitution to avoid violations of civil liberties and abuse while avoiding the tedious and cautious steps that have to be taken in order for a state of emergency to be declared in Ghana.
19The opposition voices summarized here not only raised suspicion about the Ghanaian government’s efforts to capture the pandemic. Simultaneously, these contestations themselves played a central role in the constitution of the Covid-19 surveillant assemblage by “reposing political questions as matters of technique”—in this case, in the form of legalistic and procedural expertise—and hence limiting the debate on “how and what to govern and the distributive effects of particular arrangements by reference to expertise” (Murray Li 2007: 265). In the following sections, we focus on how knowledge about the pandemic has been affected by these elements of Ghanaian crisis politics.
20Assemblages, we have argued in the introduction to this article, are intimately tied into power being made up of different orders of authoritative relations. Power relations thus have concrete effects on the composition of the assemblage, and ultimately shape the ways in which certain truths and knowledge become stabilized. Notably, the case of Ghana has been characterized by intensive efforts to capture the uncertainties generated by the pandemic through the deployment of technologies of surveillance and control.
- 20 See Appiagyei-Atua (2020).
- 21 See StarrFM (2020).
- 22 Ibid.
21Through Executive Instrument (ei) 63, a component of the Imposition of Restrictions Act (ira), the Ghanaian State gained extensive powers to intercept communication and the services of the network provider at the State’s disposal for mass dissemination of information.20 In a bid to impose measures, Ghanaian government collaborated with private company Kelni gvg to gain access to the communications data of the citizenry.21 This move ties into what Haggerty and Ericson (2000) referred to as the surveillant assemblages’ pursuit of oversight and control through the forging of strategic alliances with private technology and service providers. In the ensuing State-corporate nexus, both State and non-State actors engage in the monitoring of the population on a large scale albeit for different ends. Executive Instrument 63 ordered all telecommunication network and service providers to hand over the personal information of all customers and subscribers to the President on the basis of the “urgent need to establish an emergency communication system to trace all contacts of persons suspected of or actually affected by public health emergency and identify the places visited by persons suspected of or actually affected by a public emergency”.22
22Critics note that for contact tracing purposes, the new act was fuzzily formulated, while its powers were too sweeping. Moreover, the ei 63 did allow the State to access a citizen’s telecommunication data without a warrant or without an individual having to have committed a crime, thus circumventing legal requirements placed on the State. The personal information in ei 63 comprised raw subscriber mobile money transfer data, mobile money merchant codes and addresses, but also subscriber cell reference data and other call particulars.
- 23 In view of this, EI 63 has been challenged at the Ghana High Court: ibid.
23Haggerty and Ericson (2000: 696) note that the surveillant assemblage operates by abstracting human bodies and separating them into a series of discrete flows that are then reassembled into distinct “data doubles” which can then be scrutinized for new and potentially unintended purposes and uses. Critics of ei 63 strongly contested this function creep claiming that the instrument allegedly opened avenues for surveillance and datafication of citizens as consumers, which would extend far beyond the intended purpose while also allowing the targeting of opponents of the government.23 Fears of misuse, in short, expressed extant trust issues State institutions faced from the start.
- 24 See Pulse.com.gh (2020).
- 25 Many people on the African continent live on low incomes and are not financially resilient to acco (...)
24With varying voices about the pathogen and the government response to it, the implementation of the Ghanaian Covid-19 policy needed to rely on institutions tasked with (re-)imposing order. The introduction of the measures addressing the spread of Covid-19 in Ghana included specifically enforcement through the deployment of the security services, such as the military and police, as essential part of Ghana’s Covid-19 surveillant assemblage. Again, the deployments of the security bodies impacted trust in the State’s capacity to deal with the crisis in a democratic manner. In the early days of implementation of the ira 2020, which formed the basis for the partial lockdown in urban centres, (social) media was awash with reports of security forces allegedly brutalizing civilians found to be breaching the lockdown directives.24 News headlines, such as “Soldier Shoots Man for Forcing His Way through Security Barrier” or “Police in Ghana Accused of Using Fan Belts and Horsewhips on Journalist during Covid-19 Lockdown” drew the population’s attention to simmering tensions between law enforcement agencies and the civilian populace.25
25The wide reporting of these incidents prompted the government and leaders of the security establishment to respond to these claims. Given the sweeping measures issued by the Ghanaian government, the security forces received substantial backing from the political elite; even in view of videos of abuses circulating widely, that seem to incriminate security operatives in violation of the law. Responding to reports of abuses and violations, the Inspector General of Police argued that the people are breaking the country’s laws, resulting in the security services adopting a stiff posture at the various checkpoints when enforcing the lockdown directives. The police chief also stated that some citizens tried to pass through checkpoints without valid reasons for traveling in the first place. He emphasized that such excuses and behaviour if allowed, would mar the directives to combat the novel virus. From the security sector’s perspective, the citizenry needed to abide by the government’s lockdown directives.
26The Ghana Armed Forces, in response to videos circulating on social media allegedly showing military personnel in the act of brutalizing civilians, vehemently denied that their personnel were those in these films.26 The Ghanaian military also stated that their investigations reveal that most of these videos were doctored, showing events that did not occur in Ghana, or of old incidents that are unrelated to the ongoing exercise. The reaction of the Ghana Armed Forces to these allegations was particularly fierce because they feared jeopardizing the efforts invested in a long transformation process away from the institution’s dark past of coups accompanied by human rights violations (Agyekum 2019).
27The government, in turn, labelled the accusations and the circulation of the videos unpatriotic while stating that citizens spreading fake videos of alleged abuses and violations by members of security agencies would be punished by law. Further, the Ghanaian President stated that the security services discharged their mandate with considerable professionalism, thus dismissing calls for more oversight of the security bodies and offering more protection of civil liberties (ibid.).
28At the same time, as the State deployed security agencies to ensure compliance with the measures, citizens were also monitoring the security services. The enforcing of Ghana’s surveillant assemblage, in this sense, also triggered various ways of counter-surveillance. Alternatively, as Haggerty and Ericson (2000: 618) remind us, all forms of “surveillant assemblages” empower bottom-up responses to panoptic forms. As a complement to this observation of the multi-directionality of the surveillant assemblage’s effects, the following section explores how the entanglement of Ghana’s pandemic politics in its crisis response entailed further destabilizing effects.
29Critical voices expressed in opposition to the ira indicated how contestations around approaches to fighting the spread of the coronavirus mobilized different claims to legal “truths” about the extent of constitutionality and parliamentary procedures. In this section, we expand on how different agendas have become entangled in the production of Ghana’s Covid-19 surveillant assemblage. As discussions around the constitutionality of the ira intensified, events in the run-up to the 2020 parliamentary and presidential elections further complicated the multiple and moving constituent parts of the Ghanaian Covid-19 policy assemblage. We will show in this section how the contestation of the Ghanaian voter register intersected with the Covid-19 assemblage and the State’s desire to capture knowledge about the pandemic.
- 27 See Ghanaian Times (2020a).
- 28 See Ghanaian Times (2020b).
- 29 Throughout 2020, the EC compiled the new voters’ register using passport and the national identifi (...)
30Arguing that the current register was “bloated,” Ghana’s Electoral Commission (ec) announced in late-2019 that a new voter’s register would be compiled for the parliamentary and presidential elections of 7th December 2020.27 The largest opposition party ndc, smaller political parties and several civil society organizations, such as imani Africa and Center for Democratic Development (cdd), criticized the ruling npp for declaring the register incurably defective so close to the elections.28 Framing the compilation of the new voter’s roll as ill-prepared and possibly programmed to exclude eligible voters from specific areas,29 these organizations felt affirmed by the internationally criticized removal of the former chairperson of the ec, Charlotte Osei, following accusations of procurement breaches. The current chairperson, Jean Adukwei Mensah, in turn, was accused by the opposition of being hired to do the bidding of the ruling npp in a ploy to rig the elections for the incumbent. Emphasizing its constitutional independence and right to compile the voter’s register to guarantee free, fair and transparent elections, the ec meanwhile rallied the support of 13 political parties led by the npp for the new biometric voter management system and compilation of the updated register.
31Amidst these criticisms, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic cast a new light on the ec’s insistence on compiling the voter’s register. Based on the new act, a partial lockdown was imposed in areas considered coronavirus epicentres, resulting in public life and business grinding to a halt and forcing people to struggle to maintain their livelihoods. Participation in a mass registration exercise for the new electoral register seemed out of place and very low on people’s priority lists, including supporters of the ruling npp. In the words of an urban trader who supports the npp:
- 30 Personal conversation, Accra (WhatsApp), 16 May 2020.
People are hungry. We need to get ourselves on our feet. We need to get businesses running again. Over the past weeks, business has not been good at all. People were not buying. The last thing on people’s minds is the elections. People are hungry and have worries. They want to deal with that, not politics.30
32With increasingly tight surveillance of epidemiological measures, mobilization for the ec registration raised more sinister questions. While the spread of Covid-19 put an abrupt halt to large-scale projects, such as the 2020 Population and Housing Census of the un 2020 World Round of Population Censuses, registration for the Electoral Register continued as planned. Thus, when at the beginning of the outbreak of the pandemic and despite the President’s directive to social distance, the body continued to register people; the ec’s insistence on continuing the registration of voters intensified doubts about why the new register was needed.31
- 32 See Awotwe Darko (2020).
33More importantly, carrying out voter registration raised issues of trust in public institutions, which appeared to be above the law and the moral commitment to uphold Covid regulations. This became clear when in April 2020, the ec expressed its intentions to conduct a workshop for its officials as part of its preparations for organizing the new voter’s register at a hotel in the Ningo-Prampram District. As noted earlier, the ira prohibited public gatherings, such as workshops, conferences, and church activities, while limiting the number of participants in weddings and burials to groups of 25 people.32 However, when the opposition member of parliament (mp) for the Ningo-Prampram District secured a court injunction to prevent the ec from conducting a meeting of directors of the institution, the ec did not heed to the ban by the court and attempted to hold the meeting in the Ningo-Prampram District nonetheless (ibid.).
- 33 See GhanaWeb (2020).
- 34 See Awotwe Darko (2020).
34News media widely reported on the clash between the ec’s entourage and opposition activists and how upon arrival at the premises, protestors backed by the police found the parking lot of the hotel filled with government vehicles. The ec maintained that it was not conducting a formal meeting, but an informal gathering in the hotel lobby.33 The public protest led the ec officials to leave the hotel premises hurriedly and to reconvene the meeting at the Airport Residential Area instead.34 In the aftermath of the clash, the ec’s approach led to more public condemnation about the behaviour of the ec amidst the global pandemic and the directives issued by the President.
35The contestations around the 2020 voter registration exercise show how efforts at datafying the population further destabilized already fluid knowledge about the pandemic and the official response to it. These effects are indicative in this sense of how various transitions in related assemblages intersect in Ghana’s Covid-19 surveillant assemblage.
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- 35 See MyJoyOnline (2020).
- 36 See MyNewsGH (2020).
- 37 See MyJoyOnline (2020).
- 38 See Salia (2020).
36We observed, throughout the pandemic, how various quarters of Ghanaian society, including the public, civil society organizations and opposition parties, missed trust in the official response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Issues such as occasional delays in the presentation of the infection numbers35 resulted in suspicion around the statistics as Ghanaians began questioning the credibility of the figures published. Critics claimed that citizens were deliberately kept in the dark about the true nature of the infections.36 Public debates alleged that such delays had to do with political agendas and instrumental events, such as the presidential address to the nation, and were hence mobilized to play down the seriousness of the pandemic.37 These developments led critics to believe that the government was preparing the citizenry for its political agenda, including the continued registration for the new voter’s register.38 Concerns were further fueled by the government, suspecting that the fear of infections would deter citizens from the voter’s registration exercise, sending out its communications officers to downplay the seriousness of the Covid-19 infections, while emphasizing the safety protocols in place to ensure public health safety.
37Datafication of Covid-19 shaped political communication and, unfortunately, undermined the credibility of Covid-19 data in the process. Throughout this article, we argued that the Covid-19 surveillant assemblage seeks to capture competing truths about the pandemic and its responses. Datafication, it comes as no surprise, has played a central role in this endeavour. At the same time, the public’s monitoring of State interventions eased dramatically with the proliferation of social media and other inexpensive technologies, opening ways for counter-surveillance.
38We have positioned this article in assemblage theory’s central claim that policy, despite its ordering character, is never predetermined but emerges out of contradictory and heterogeneous sets of actors, settings and material objects while constantly responding to changes in related assemblages. We advanced that, particularly in times of crisis, a broader view is required to understand how necessarily unstable arrangements of various kinds of experts and elites, infrastructures of knowledge production and competing assumptions, evaluations, interests and alliances work to define (public health) contexts and their adequate interventions.
39The case of Ghana shows how emerging contexts of data-driven governance, material technologies involved in the production of data about emerging crises, as well as the organization of institutions and personnel into assemblages around them, are as intimately invoked in the fight against Covid-19 as are parliamentary procedures, historical assumptions about specific political interventions, and the complex State-industrial relations that bring about the surveillance of populations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, partisan alignments represented the most pronounced factor in the Ghanaian Covid-19 surveillant assemblage as it vehemently voiced opposing views, re-articulated perceptions and outlooks on the fight against Covid-19. While both the military and police deployed to implement the contested policy agenda suffered allegations of abuse and violations of citizens’ rights in the public discourse, they received strong support from the government. This played out in the context of repeated references to historical antecedents of previous Ghanaian governments infringing on citizens’ rights, including the atrocities carried out by past military regimes. The surveillant assemblage, constituted of these parts, triggered counter-surveillance by different publics benefiting from innovations in media technologies, datafication and the visual representation of the pandemic. Finally, datafication of Covid-19 in relation to internationally standardized conventions and local adaptations of specific risk scenarios contributed to the structuration of the debate while itself being affected in its credibility by association with the political tensions. Throughout these contestations, the alternative of the state of emergency presented the backdrop against which ideas of order and disorder were discussed in relation to the temporalities of exception as well as notions of limiting executive power.
40Two general points emerge from our discussion. First, taking seriously the multiple transitions in the fields of governance, metricization, and surveillance that accompany Ghana’s Covid-19 policy response revealed the instabilities around knowledge about Covid-19 and its datafied representations more generally. As Murray Li (2007) notes, policy assemblages are intrinsically concerned with managing contradictions. Moreover, while the conceptual vocabulary of the surveillant assemblage illuminates how actors in centers of power seek to address these instabilities, it simultaneously pinpoints to the very roots of competing claims to truth and evidence.
41Second, taking the global spread of Covid-19 as a lens might shed new light on current political relations in Ghana. The Covid-19 crisis has brought to the fore the ways in which surveillant assemblages need to re-arrange themselves around the pathogen as a novel component which, along with other agents involved in the dynamics of production, circulation, contestation and re-alignment of knowledge, has come to re-order social and political life. Drawing on the processual and agency-centred approach of assemblage theory, this article thus sought to cast more generalizable questions about what happens to the surveillant assemblage when an unprecedented element—such as the Covid-19 pathogen—is introduced.
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