Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Tsikata

Inaugural Lecture

by

Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

Topic:
The Road has Many Stories: Encounters between the State

and Citizens of the Different Ghanas

Chairperson:
Professor Nana Aba Appiah Amfo

Vice-Chancellor

2 Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

ORDER OF PROCEEDINGS

4.30 p.m. – Arrival of Guests

– Procession

– Welcome Remarks/
Introduction of Chairperson:
Mrs. Emelia N.K. Agyei-Mensah, Registrar

– Introduction of Lecturer:
Professor Nana Aba Appiah Amfo
Vice-Chancellor

– Seprewa

– Inaugural Lecture:
Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

– Musical Interlude:

Ghana Dance Ensemble

– Presentations

– Chairperson’s Closing Remarks:
Professor Nana Aba Appiah Amfo
Vice-Chancellor

– University Anthem
(Page 12)

– Recession

– Reception

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata 3

ABSTRACT

My work over the last thirty years has involved fieldwork combining
qualitative research with small surveys of communities across
thirteen of Ghana’s sixteen regions. Travelling through various
parts of rural and urban Ghana has been instructive. Beyond what
I have found through the application of research methods, I have
become familiar with the conditions of everyday life and witnessed
extraordinary events. There have been opportunities and moments
of serendipity which have allowed me to pose larger questions
beyond the specific concerns of my research projects. One such
question, which is the subject of this lecture, is how the state in
Ghana is experienced by citizens, and how its acts of commission
and omission affect class, gender, and spatial differences in Ghana.
Studies of the state in Africa have sought to answer these questions
for both the colonial and post-colonial states. There is a body of
work which has had various priorities and debates on this subject.
While some of it has highlighted the class character of the state
and the structural nature of its interactions with citizens, others
have stressed the state’s developmental agenda, while still others
have either focused on its depredations, or more recently, on the
elite consensus underpinning state action. A neglected dimension
in these efforts to theorise the post-colonial state has been the lack
of sufficient attention to its patriarchal character.
Using the insights from debates about the post-colonial state in
the literature in conversation with my observations in the field, I
examine the different faces of the Ghanaian state that fisherfolk
of the Volta Lake, smallholder farmers, small-scale miners, cattle
herders, and domestic workers encounter in their everyday lives. I
also explore how these citizens have responded, and the ways in
which their interactions with the state have created the different
Ghanas I witnessed on the road.
The research I draw on for this lecture includes a) the long-
term livelihood implications of the Volta River Project for dam
affected communities (1998-2002); b) work as a pathway of

4 Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

Women’s Empowerment (2006-2014); c) changes in women’s
work as represented by domestic and bank work (2008-2011);
d) the livelihood implication of gendered land and agricultural
commercialisation (2016-2022); and e) the policing of domestic
resource conflicts between farmers and cattle herders and
between the state and small-scale miners (2018-2023).
My main arguments are that the social contract between the
Ghanaian state and its citizens at independence - while ambitious
in its vision of opportunities for all, and its agenda to defeat the
trinity of ignorance, disease, and hunger - was imperfect. The
modernisation paradigm which underpinned this contract reduced
large segments of the population, particularly those in rural areas,
to backward people in need of education, welfare charity and
integration into modern society under the driving leadership of the
State. While this approach privileged the rural and urban male elite,
worse was to come with its replacement by a more laissez-faire
approach to development and a minimalist agenda for the state
that accompanied economic liberalisation. This shift accentuated
the more negative faces of the State while muting its more positive
interactions with the citizenry.
My observations reveal different faces of the state - at once
developmental, present, absent, distant, ineffectual, discriminatory,
patriarchal, prone to violence, neglectful and exclusionary. Which of
these faces of the State citizens experience depends on who they
are, the intersections of their class, gender, kinship, and location,
what is at stake, and how non-state institutions such as the family,
the community and the market mediate their experiences.
My hope is that my observations contribute to recent studies that
have drawn attention to growing inequalities in Ghana and citizens’
increasing dissatisfaction with and mistrust of the Ghanaian state.
This situation threatens national cohesion, peace, and security. It
demands an urgent change of course that promotes positive and
meaningful relations between the state and diverse groups of
citizens - especially working people, women, and young people.
Only then would the post-colonial project regain its early promise
of one Ghana.

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata 5

Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

LL.B. (University of Ghana), B.L. (Ghana Law School), M.A. (Institute of Social
Studies, Den Haag);M.Phil (University of Ghana); PhD (Leiden University)
Director of the Institute of African Studies

6 Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

PROFILE

Professor Dzodzi Tsikata (Ph.D.), Professor of Development
Sociology, is coming to the end of her six-year tenure as the
Director of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of
Ghana at the end of July 2022. She started her academic career at
the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) in
October 1991 as a Junior Research Fellow and rose to the position
of Associate Research Professor in 2010. During this period, she
served as Deputy Head and then Director of the Centre for Gender
Studies and Advocacy (CEGENSA) from 2005 to 2012. She was
promoted to the rank of Professor on 16th July, 2016. Dzodzi was
elected a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in
2016.
Professor Tsikata attended the Accra New Town Experimental
Primary School and Achimota School in her formative years. She
holds an LL.B. (University of Ghana), B.L. (Ghana Law School), M.A.
Development Studies (Institute of Social Studies, Den Haag); M.Phil.
Sociology (University of Ghana); and a Ph.D, Social Science (cum
laude) (Leiden University).
Research Areas and Current Projects
In a research career spanning almost 30 years, Professor Tsikata
developed four broad interconnected strands of inquiry, namely,
Agrarian Change and Rural Livelihoods; Informal Labour Relations
and Conditions of Work; Gender and Development Policies and
Practices; and Social Policy and Social Development in Ghana and
Africa. Her research is situated within an inter-disciplinary feminist
political economy intellectual tradition. She is the author of over
seventy publications, which include a monograph, guest edited
special issues of journals, edited books, journal articles, book
chapters and technical and working papers.
She is currently engaged in four major research projects. First, she
is co-PI and leader of the eight person Ghana team of the DEMETER
Project, a six-year research partnership (2016-2022) among
scholars from Cambodia, Ghana, and Switzerland. The project,

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata 7

which examines the gendered processes of land and agricultural
commercialization, combines studies of livelihood trajectories
of smallholder farmers with an exploration of global, regional,
and national policy discourses, policies and laws accompanying
agrarian change in Ghana and Cambodia.
Professor Tsikata also leads a team of seven researchers from the
Institute of African Studies in a research consortium known as the
domestic security implications of international peacekeeping in
Ghana (D-SIP). D-SIP is a five-year (2018-2023) research project
of a consortium made up of researchers from the Danish Institute
for International Studies (DIIS), the Danish Institute Against Torture
(DIGNITY), the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training
Centre (KAIPTC) and the Institute of African Studies that examines
how Ghana’s participation in peacekeeping abroad shapes the
effectiveness and legitimacy of the police and military in their
policing of domestic conflicts. The IAS team’s focus is on the
policing of two significant resource conflicts - between sedentary
farmers and itinerant herders and between the state and small-
scale miners.
Since 2020, she has been the principal investigator (PI) of a
transnational team of researchers that won a competitive grant
from Carnegie Corporation to research the distinctive character
of precarious work in different contexts in the global South. This
project brings together about twenty researchers from three
countries representing three distinct regions in Africa-Egypt,
Ghana, and Kenya. The project is exploring the changing contours
of precarious work, its gendered features and effects, and the
implications for the culture of work in the 21st Century.
Professor Tsikata’s work on social policy explores the contribution
of social and economic policies to social development, citizenship,
and societal change. She is currently the PI of a pan-African
research and advocacy project on building knowledge and
constituencies for Gender Equitable and Transformative Social
Policy for Post-COVID-19 Africa (GETSPA). In the project’s first year,
researchers from across Africa are engaged in retrospective studies

8 Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

of the social policy trajectories of thirty-one African countries as a
basis for future work on critical assessments of promising social
policy initiatives. This work builds on her long-term involvement
in the work of the United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development (UNRISD) and with ISSER’s policy work on social
development. She coordinated the first edition of ISSER’s Ghana
Social Development Outlook 2012, a biennial report that assesses
the state of social development in Ghana. Since then, she has
contributed to the chapter on work and employment for all three
editions of this report.
Teaching and Mentoring
Professor Tsikata developed and for several years taught ISSER’s
M.A. course on gender and development. She now teaches
the advanced gender and women’s studies course in the Ph.D.
Programme at ISSER. She has also mentored a new generation
of scholars. In addition to involving emerging scholars, post-
doctoral fellows, and Ph.D. students in her research teams, she
has served on the supervisory teams of eighteen Ph.D. students,
seven of whom have graduated, and the remaining eleven at
various stages of completion. She also supervised thirty-two M.A.
and M.Phil. students over the same period and served as external
examiner for nine Ph.D. candidates in universities in South Africa,
the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Institution Building, Leadership and Research Networks
Various scholarly networks have been pivotal in Professor Tsikata’s
research career. She joined the Council for the Development of
Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in the early 1990s and
became Vice President and then president of the Council between
2012 and 2018. She is also a founding member of the tri-continental
network, the Agrarian South Network (ASN). Established in 2012 by
a small group of scholars and activists from Africa, Asia, and Latin
America, the ASN organises an annual summer school, publishes
edited volumes and has successfully published a journal for more
than ten years. She currently serves on the Steering Committee of
the Network.

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata 9

In the last few years, Professor Tsikata has been a member of
the International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs), a
pluralist network of progressive economists engaged in research,
teaching and disseminating critical analyses of economic policy and
development. She currently serves as the Secretary of its Executive
Committee. She is also a founding member of the Labour Law and
Development Research Laboratory (LLDRL) at McGill University’s
Faculty of Law in Montreal, Canada. The LLDRL seeks to contribute
to creating a transnational labour law centred on the Global South,
and on workers and types of work neglected in debates in labour
law and development.
Professor Tsikata played a significant role in the establishment of the
Maria Sybilla Merian Institute of Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA)
at the University of Ghana. She participated in the successful
University of Freiburg led consortium of German scholars, as one
of two representatives of the University of Ghana to present the
proposal to German government officials in Bonn. The consortium
is the recipient of a multi-million euro grant for eight and half years.
Professor Tsikata convened the fifteen-member working group
that established the Merian Institute at the University of Ghana and
served as its Interim Director for six months. She is currently the
President of the MIASA Executive Council.
Advocacy
Professor Tsikata’s work on Gender and Development Policies and
Practices has aimed to produce research that supports the work
of women’s rights activists. As a leading member of the women’s
movement in Ghana, she has played significant roles, including the
convening of the drafting committee of the Women’s Manifesto for
Ghana, and serving as spokesperson of the three women’s rights
coalitions at the hearings of the Constitutional Review Commission.
She is a founding member of two policy advocacy networks, Third
World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa) and the Network for Women’s
Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT) on whose steering committee she
continues to serve, having been its Convenor in the past.
Boards and Committees
In addition to serving on numerous boards and committees at
the University of Ghana over the years, Professor Tsikata is one of

10 Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata

the editors of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy. She is
also one of five editors of Feminist Africa (FA), a journal which the
Institute of African Studies now hosts and publishes on behalf of
an inter-disciplinary pan-African research community. She also
serves on the editorial advisory boards of several international
journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, the Canadian
Journal of Development Studies, Development and Change,
Feminist Economics, Oxford Development Journal, and the Journal
of Modern African Studies.
She was a member of Ghana’s National Development Planning
Commission (NDPC) between 2015 and 2017, and the UN Committee
for Development Policy (CDP) from 2012 to 2018. She currently
serves on various boards - the Ghana National Theatre, the Sam
Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS), Harare, the
Institute of Economic Justice (IEJ), South Africa, and the Centre for
Democratic Development (CDD) in Nigeria.
Consultancies
Professor Tsikata has consulted for the UNECA, ILO, UN-Women,
the INCLUDE Platform of the Netherlands, and PLAAS in South
Africa, as well as for the Ghana TUC and the UNDP office in Ghana,
on a range of issues. She has also served on several evaluation,
review, advisory and expert panels for academic units, research
projects, flagship publications, post-doc and research awarding
projects in Africa and Europe.
Family
Professor Dzodzi Tsikata was born at Akuse General Hospital in
the Eastern Region to Evans Kodzo Tsikata a teacher, and Janet
Fiadzigbe, a nurse-midwife on 25th April 1962. She is third of four
siblings, the first two being Major Retired Senanu Tsikata and
Ambassador Novisi Abaidoo. The fourth, Dr. Setorme Tsikata, is an
Associate Clinical Professor at the University of Alberta. Professor
Tsikata married Dr. Yao Graham in 1992, and they share a home
with three young adults, their son Susu Kobla Graham and nieces,
Deborah Kordah and Sibyl Etornam Agbakpey.

Inaugural Lecture by Professor Dzodzi Akuyo Tsikata 11

UNIVERSITY ANTHEM

Hail University of Ghana
The nation’s hope and glory
The place that bears the star of peace
That bids us all to do our best
Let the great Tower of learning
Inspire both young and old
May we proceed in unity to uphold the public cause.

//: Arise, arise O Legon
Defend the cause of freedom
Proceed in truth and integrity to make
Our nation proud: //

We ask for strength and wisdom
As we climb the hill of learning
May we excel in what’er we do
As we prepare to face the world
With a mind ready at all times
And a conscience quick to feel
May we proceed in unity to uphold the public cause.

//: Arise, arise O Legon
Defend the cause of freedom
Proceed in truth and integrity to make
our nation proud ://

(Prof. Emeritus J. H. Kwabena Nketia)

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