Truly National? Social Exclusion and the Ghana@50 Celebrations

Abstract

In 2007, Ghana celebrated fifty years as an independent nation. The program drawn up to commemorate this occasion, dubbed Ghana@50, was described as an opportunity to “celebrate, reflect and look forward.”2 Thus, while much was written and said about the Ghana@50 program—especially about the composition and work of the National Planning Committee and the decision to spend twenty million dollars on the celebrations—members of the public also took the occasion of the jubilee to reflect on the state of the Ghanaian nation over the past fifty years and to project its future. This paper makes use of the concept of social exclusion to analyze public perspectives and experiences of the Ghana@50 celebrations. Social exclusion as an analytical tool has gained popularity in recent years in policy circles. However, the phenomena that it describes are not new (Jehoel-Gijsbers and Vrooman 2007), nor is the concept, which goes back to sociologist Max Weber’s theory of social closure or the “attempt of one group to secure for itself a privileged position [in society] at the expense of some other group through a process of subordination” (Parkin 1979 in Todman 2004: 2).