Kilowatts, megawatts and power: electric territorialities of the state in the peripheries of Ghana and Tanzania
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Date
27/11/2018Author
Cuesta Fernández, Iván
Metadata
Abstract
Recent years have brought a resurgence of state-led plans to expand access to electricity
over African polities. Nonetheless, and in line with deep-seated patterns of infrastructural
and general abandonment by the centre, very few of those plans have seriously addressed
poor, distant, sparse and scarcely endowed peripheral regions. Those rare instances have
received scant attention in the literature, despite their precious value to single out key
interactions between national electricity regimes and core-periphery political linkages.
Addressing that gap, this thesis pays attention to schemes of peripheral electrification to
better understand how African states govern their peripheries. To that end, it scrutinizes two
schemes of electrification: northern Ghana from 1989 to 2012, and southeastern Tanzania
from 2004 to 2015. The thesis argues that in northern Ghana central rulers embarked upon
electrification against the odds of geographical determinism, guided as they were by political
motivations, chief amongst them the extraction of narrow electoral rents. By contrast, in
southeastern Tanzania central rulers endeavoured to tap into the abundance of gas,
governed by a determination to advance business models inscribed in the national electricity
regime. Ultimately though, the central rulers in Tanzania were forced to re-politicize
electrification to appease the deep local resentment caused by the very extraction of gas
flowing toward the capital. Both cases thus illuminate varying trajectories in the interplay
between national electricity regimes and core-periphery political linkages, that shaped the
territorial strategies of electrification. In addition, this thesis also offers two revelations. One
first revelation is that sub-national units exert significant mediations in the linkages between
core and periphery, via alterations of distributional settlements. This goes against a stream
of literature that pays attention exclusively to vertical strategies engineered from political
rulers in the centre. The second revelation is that over the long-term electrification alters the
political linkages between core and periphery. This squares well with the predictions of
theories about the infrastructural power of the state. All in all, this work affords an embryonic
analytical elaboration on the strategies of territoriality in the electrification of regional
peripheries in Africa. From a political geography perspective, this helps to illuminate how
sub-national electrification can simultaneously redraw and reinforce long-entrenched
political linkages between core and periphery.