TEMA HARBOUR IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In the heady days of African independence, Ghana's port and city of Tema, like the country more generally, stood as a beacon of prosperity and promise. Initiated by the British colonial administration and substantially reconceived by Africa's first independent head of state, Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, a few years later, Tema's industrial–commercial–residential complex at the edge of the Atlantic began operation in 1962. A model of technological sophistication and massive infrastructural innovation among the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa, the port consisted of an artificially enclosed harbour and state of the art maritime trade depot. Funded by internal revenue and imperial aid, armies of civil engineers and labourers built roads, railways, bridges, breakwaters, warehouses, waterworks, and deepwater berths and quays to mark the new nation's economic promise.

Located 20 miles east of Ghana's capital, Accra, Tema replaced the colonial era Roadstead Port. The old port was situated off the shores of central Accra's ethnically Ga James Town and Ussher Town neighbourhoods (and respective James and Ussher Forts), prime sites of British and Dutch occupation during the seventeenth–nineteenth-century period of European mercantile rule along West Atlantic coast (Parker Reference Parker2000). As Accra turned from colonial administrative seat into the national capital, the harbour proved inadequate for landing larger vessels and the city's densely populated core curbed the possibility for further growth (Hilling Reference Hilling1969; Robertson Reference Robertson1984). Tema was not the colonial government's first commercial port project. Takoradi harbour in what is now Ghana's Western Region, ‘the first completely artificial harbour on the West African coast, was opened in 1928’ (Hilling Reference Hilling1969: 370), and presented an important alternative to the older surf ports for the evacuation of cocoa and minerals. Although it too was revamped in the 1950s, far from the capital and the country's commercial centre, it received far less investment or fanfare than Tema.

With Ghana vying with Côte d'Ivoire to maintain the position of the world's leading producer of cocoa, the new port at Tema was deemed essential for the evacuation of the country's cocoa crop, in addition to the import and export of industrial raw materials and the delivery of consumer goods to meet the needs of Ghana's increasingly middle-class public (Leubuscher Reference Leubuscher1963). Tema was also made home to heavy industry for the nation as a whole, notably the VALCO Aluminum Smelter owned by the US-based Kaiser Corporation (Davidson Reference Davidson1954), along with textile mills and food processing plants. Though the establishment of the port's industrial–commercial core required the displacement of the Ga fishing community inhabiting the site (along with the rerouting of a sacred lagoon), a new fishing harbour accommodating local canoes and foreign trawlers was built in its stead. Supplanting this older mode of living, the port zone was flanked by miles of newly constructed residential areas. Cutting through the coastal landscape, the resulting housing estates and apartment complexes reflected a combined vision of American suburbanisation, British New Towns and Soviet state planning forged by a succession of expatriate and national bodies.Footnote ¹ As one commentator described it, ‘at no place in West Africa is the relationship between port facilities and economic growth as obvious as at Tema. From a fishing village of 3,000 inhabitants in 1954 Tema has become a town of 80,000 and Ghana's foremost industrial region’ by the mid-1960s' (Hilling Reference Hilling1969: 375). Growth continued apace, and by 1980 the population reached 250,000.

In the race to capture the spoils of post-WWII economic expansion, the Gold Coast/Ghana governments were not alone in West African port development (Leubuscher Reference Leubuscher1963). Standing at the apex of a regional trend in terms of scale, cost and ambition, the founding of Tema both paralleled and surpassed French investment in the port of Abidjan and American sponsorship of Liberia's port of Monrovia (Hilling Reference Hilling1969). Spurred by much more than economic exigency, the interlocking features of Tema's port, industrial complex and residential zone represented a totalising vision of national life and prosperity. A handbook published for Ghana's Development Secretariat by the Ministry of Information (1961: 6) recounts the scope of this development agenda:

Reflecting utopian ideals of social order and technologically based notions of progress, Tema stands as a clear example of high modernist planning discussed by James Scott (Reference Scott1998). And like the cases recounted by Scott, Tema's conceptualisation and actualisation were premised on the aspirations and abilities of a strong state, from a colonial regime seeking to mark its twilight years to the history-making objectives of Nkrumah and the continent's first independent post-colonial government (Agyeman-Duah Reference Agyeman-Duah2008; Mkandawire Reference Mkandawire1998).

Tema in this way did not just reflect but remade the political landscape, with the creation of a fully modern maritime zone contributing on ideological, institutional and material fronts to the process of nation and state-building more broadly. The Tema port complex stood at the foundation of the country's programme of economic nationalism. Though furthering Ghana's economic extraversion, the creation of Tema embodied a nationalist ideology of independence. In contrast to the control of overseas trade, shipping and port zones by private companies in the colonial era and the preceding period of imperial expansion (Tresselt Reference Tresselt1967: 52),Footnote ² ‘with the coming of independence, cargo handling and port operations were taken over by governmental authorities in most of the West African ports’. At its founding, Tema's administration was split between the Tema Development Corporation, in charge of the residential zones, and the Gold Coast (later Ghana) Railways and Harbour Administration, for the port area. State oversight of the port was accompanied by the founding of a national shipping line, Ghana's Black Star Line, incorporated in 1957. Challenging foreign shipping monopolies, the Black Star Line was considered the ‘standard bearer of African maritime enterprises’ (ibid.: 47; Iheduru Reference Iheduru1996). A State Shipping Corporation was likewise established, with the legal stipulation that Ghanaian labourers and state liners serve the nation's maritime trade (Tresselt Reference Tresselt1967). Overseen by President Nkrumah, it would become a formidable political base.

Analysts of the day note the unprecedented turn of public attention to port and shipping matters, stating that ‘the ownership and organization of ocean shipping has become a matter of public concern to a degree unknown before the countries had attained self-governance or independence’ (Leubuscher Reference Leubuscher1963: 76). Attesting to the rise of what has been termed ‘maritime nationalism’ (Iheduru Reference Iheduru1996: 197), the harbour brought together public attention, state monopoly, and the grip of the ruling group. As a clear sign of Tema's economic success in the midst of these circumstances, in the first five years of operation, from 1962 to 1967, traffic at Tema more than doubled, with imports growing from 622,035 tons to 1,410,626, and exports (formerly the primary purview of Takoradi) from 206,787 to 565,043 tons (Hilling Reference Hilling1969: 375).

Despite the achievements of the independence era, following the fall of Nkrumah in 1966 and the calamitous drop in cocoa prices and thus foreign exchange earnings (Price Reference Price1984), through the 1970s Tema languished, aggravated by drought, agricultural crisis and an overall climate of political instability. These challenges persisted through the following decade, even as International Monetary Fund/World Bank structural adjustment loans and conditionalities were put in place to jumpstart the economy (Rothchild Reference Rothchild1991; UNCTAD 2008). While signs of recovery could be identified in other economic sectors, port industries were marked by stagnation and inefficiency into the 1990s. The port itself harboured a vast underground economy of casual labour and unregulated commerce, with byzantine customs regulations rendering corruption easier and cheaper than following the rules. Port infrastructure, once the harbinger of national promise, fell into disrepair. Tema's new residential zone became home to an aspiring middle class who looked towards the capital of Accra 20 miles away for work and leisure, but little acknowledged the nearby harbour. Those who earned their livelihood from the port were pushed into the shantytowns of Ashaiman or the already overcrowed fishing settlement of Manhean at the port's edge.

TEMA'S POST-MILLENNIAL REBIRTH AND THE NEO-DEVELOPMENTAL STATE

In the second half of the 1990s, signalling a reversal of a long era of commercial decline, Tema experienced a boost in port traffic. With a growth rate of 14% in 2000, the port of Tema gradually re-established its reputation as a stronghold of African commercial intensification and innovation. Tema's rapidly expanding commercial stream included imports and exports, as well as an upsurge of transit cargo destined for Ghana's landlocked neighbours to the north, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali. In a clear indication of the scope and pace of Tema's commercial revival, in 2007 Ghana claimed the rank of Africa's third busiest container-shipping centre, after Egypt and South Africa. In close competition with its rivals Côte d'Ivoire and Kenya, Tema's through-put for the year was well over half a million TEU (shorthand for a twenty-foot cargo container).Footnote ³

What accounts for the seemingly spectacular turnaround of Ghana's maritime frontier? More specifically, what political claims and contentions are at stake in the port's revival, and where and how does the state figure in this mix? What do these dynamics reveal about the changing character and capacity of state institutions in the context of globalisation and the untrammelled flow of resources across the world's territories and sea lanes?

Going hand in hand with the upgrading of port infrastructure the world over in the face of the pressures of economic globalisation, Tema's dramatic comeback can be swiftly attributed to a series of factors shaping the supply and demand for West African port facilities.Footnote ⁴ Foremost is the worldwide growth in seaborne trade occurring over the past two decades, with raw materials and finished and unfinished goods circulating across the globe at an ever-expanding speed, frequency and volume.Footnote ⁵ In the context of the continent-wide trend of neo-liberal economic reform, Africa partakes in these networks of circulation through the provisioning of agricultural commodities and natural resources (predominantly mineral wealth), a rather limited involvement in the production or finishing of manufactures for the international market (spurred in some cases by the US Africa Growth and Opportunity Act), and the growing consumption of consumer items of all casts, from staple foods and new and used luxury items to industrial inputs. From this vantage point, more maritime traffic is both cause and effect of more ports.

In Ghana, the demand for port services is additionally affected by the regional context. After a long stretch of prosperity, nearly a decade of political instability in neighbouring Côte d'Ivoire to the west has reduced the viability of the port of Abidjan (Soule Reference Soule2003), for long the West African region's prime shipping centre. Commercial life in Togo, to the east, has also been compromised by a repressive political climate, curbing usage of the freeport of Lomé. Likewise, the chaotic conditions of political and economic life in Nigeria contribute to the diversion of regional trade to Ghana. These political currents no doubt increase the use and attractiveness of Ghana's harbours. Yet except for a brief hiatus in Abidjan, trade in neighbouring ports has continued to grow too, a clear indication that Tema's expansion derives from more than siphoning regional traffic.

In this regard, to understand why Tema is growing, it is necessary to consider how the port has come to attract and accommodate the spectacular rise in maritime traffic. Not sufficiently explained by supply and demand alone, I argue that Tema's comeback is decisively impacted by the distinctive nationalist legacy of the port and the irrefutable grip of state actors and institutions since the port's founding. Specifically, while Tema's renewal is part of a general global trajectory of port growth and development, the deeply statist and nationalist terms of Tema's resurgence represent a notable departure from the widespread tendency towards multinational corporate supremacy and maritime economic consolidation overwhelming ports and port services in both more and less developed areas of the world.

Attesting to the overarching global trend of multinational monopolisation of maritime commerce, according to reports from UNCTAD (2008: 80, 86, 98), the top three private shipping lines own nearly 30% of the world fleet; the top four liner conferences control nearly 50% of available capacity; and the top five terminal operators control 50% of world container through-put. In turn, the share of state-owned port operations worldwide has declined dramatically over recent decades, representing only 19% of market share in 2006, a steep decline from 43% in 1993. Indeed, in container shipping alone, 80% of the cargo in the world's top hundred container ports moves through private hands – primarily those of multinational shipping and logistics conglomerates (ibid.: 97). Yet, proving the contention argued more than a decade ago by Okechukwu Iheduru (Reference Iheduru1994), the leading scholar of Africa's maritime political economy, that incentives for maritime privatisation in Africa lag far behind other regions of the world, the notable fact remains that Africa at 68% retains the highest levels of state-owned container terminals. Indeed, Tema stands with South Africa's port of Durban and Kenya's Mombasa, the ranking ports in sub-Saharan Africa, in avoiding all-out privatisation and maintaining a strong national grip on port affairs, as does Sudan's Port Sudan on the Red Sea shipping corridor.

As Ghana's escalating trade volumes make clear, it is not that Africa is marginal to the multinationals dominating global shipping, logistics and port and terminal operations. Indeed, Ghana, like the continent more generally, represents a huge market highly attractive to this economic sector. But instead of being overshadowed by multinational firms, the redevelopment of the Port of Tema is revitalising historically induced state agendas as it engages strongly globalised entities and objectives. The result is a port dominated by what can be described as a neo(-liberal) developmental state maintaining select features of an earlier statism rooted in the expansion of bureaucratic oversight and the protection of national interests and market share, now repurposed in line with a neo-liberal agenda focused on trade facilitation, multinational corporate advantage, and financial speculation.

Hence, Tema port remains an economic frontier that is substantially nationalised, at the same time that it is decidedly extraverted in function, financial foundation and future vision. Like other government entities (whether agricultural enterprise, apparatuses of fiscal administration, or utilities) drawn into the net of the global market and market-oriented reform in Africa (see Blundo & Olivier de Sardan Reference Blundo and Olivier de Sardan2006; Chalfin Reference Chalfin1996, Reference Chalfin2010),Footnote ⁶ port reform in Ghana provides a compelling example of how the commercialisation of key state assets and services may well strengthen the state apparatus in unexpected ways. With maritime restructuring playing out differently in different regions and places, the case of Tema points to a specific set of historical and institutional conditions, rooted in the port's enduring position as a paragon of economic nationalism and the multi-purpose authority of its governing agency, that enable the resurgence of state authority in the face of global assimilation. Indicative of the broader paradoxes of the statecraft in late-modern Africa, this situation is not without contradiction or contention.

At Tema, the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority (GPHA) stands as an engine of state reproduction and the arbiter of neo-liberal privatisation and multinationalised investment. GPHA was formally established as a government corporation in 1986 (PNDC 1986), with the mandate to own and operate the ports of Tema and Takoradi along with Tema Fishing Harbour, but its pedigree is far older than this, tracing its roots to the Gold Coast Railways and Harbours Administration founded in the early years of colonial rule. Beyond a long-standing situation of nationalisation, the creation of GPHA in 1986 represented the national consolidation of site-specific services, involving the merger of the port authority with the major providers of port services: the Takoradi Lightering Company (a hold-over from the creation of Takoradi Harbour in 1928) and the Ghana Cargo Handling Company (established during the Nkrumah era as the national stevedoring monopoly).

TEMA AS LANDLORD PORT

The founding of GPHA, tied to the early (if largely unsuccessful) investment of the three-year old PNDC regime in upgrading the nation's ports just as the first IMF structural adjustment loans were being dispersed in the mid 1980s, was for long more aspirational than actual in impact. Only with the government's articulation of the trade-based Vision 2020 development plan in 1995 did GPHA rise to its new mandate. Explicitly addressing the operations of the ports and harbours authority, a central pillar of Vision 2020 was the Ghana Trade and Investment Gateway Project, focused on trade-based growth, foreign-direct investment, industrialisation, and the infrastructure necessary for the economic servicing of the sub-region. With the Gateway Project came a new master plan for the port (funded through the EU) calling for comprehensive investment in the port premises to serve the growth in ship and cargo traffic. The plan also advocated the further restructuring of GPHA and the wider task of port management. Under its aegis, GPHA was to operate as a landlord port authority, inviting, overseeing and generating revenue through the privatisation of port activities (WIN 1999).

A prominent trend in the new millennium, Tema is not alone in its move to a landlord port system. The landlord model is common across the major ports of world, in large, well-established ports as well as in developing states and economies. In the latter locales, as in Ghana, it is strongly promoted by organisations such as the World Bank and UNCTAD as a way for developing economies to keep up with a dynamic global trading system and ensure efficient operations. Market-oriented but not always market-based in an orthodox neo-liberal mould, landlord port authorities may be public or private in character, yet they are typically corporate in form and commercial in outlook (van der Lugt & de Langen Reference van der Lugt and de Langen2007). Under this rubric, GPHA, for instance, though situated within the Ministry of Harbours and Railways, operates as a 100% government-owned company and is fully responsible for generating income without any state subvention.

Within a typical landlord port system, the port authority is the overseer of port territory and shoreline, and essentially claims ownership in perpetuity of the fixed property making up the port, from roadways and quays to breakwaters and floodgates. Rather than providing all port services, the port authority leases port assets for a fee and for a specified (usually long-term) duration. Contracted service providers may further invest in port premises (Turnbull Reference Turnbull2006). While some investments remain the property of the consignee, others revert to the port authority. The landlord is ultimately responsible for coordinating the port's multiple functions, anticipating its future needs, and generating revenue for the port authority and its shareholders (van der Lugt & de Langen Reference van der Lugt and de Langen2007).

With the rise of Ghana's free-market oriented National Patriotic Party to national leadership in 2001, the new vision of Tema harbour as an expanding trade gateway and landlord port finally gained momentum and precipitated the proposal of a Landlord Port Bill to Parliament (Donkor Reference Donkor2007). This overarching initiative has been characterised by a double vision, both forward-looking, partaking of new models, new service economies and new forms of trade and transit, and looking backwards, in its appeal to earlier established modalities. The former is rooted in notions of privatisation, profit, capital and commercial intensification, the latter in ideas of debt, dependence and developmentalism – whether the totalising schemes of Nkrumahist national modernisation or the international development aid dependence of the post-Nkrumah period of decline.

THE GHANA PORTS AND HARBOURS AUTHORITY DEVELOPMENT NEXUS

In assuming the landlord role, GPHA has accrued notable authority, expanding rather than reducing its capacities. Foremost is the concerted cultivation of Tema harbour and the port authority as an autonomous zone in both geographic and operational terms (see Ong Reference Ong2006). The harbour is increasingly separate from the surrounding area in terms of function, access and governance, and independent from other sectors of the state apparatus with regard to management, objectives and financing. Here we see a curious parallel with the concession or trading-post economies of the imperial and early colonial era, with port zones operating as separate political jurisdictions with well-protected strategies of accumulation (see Hibou Reference Hibou and Hibou2004). The all-important difference in this case is its investiture in the national state.

The reascendance of GPHA in this regard hinges most of all on its role as port developer, responsible for plotting the port's future – a task typical of landlord authorities (Brooks Reference Brooks2004). Paradoxically, the means of port development hark back to an earlier phase of Ghana's political economic history (initiated in the 1980s), marked by the dependence of state bodies on bi- and multilateral development aid. Although GPHA aspires to economic and managerial self-sufficiency within the state apparatus and is ever more corporate and commercial in orientation, it has deepened its reliance on the resources and expertise of donor agencies. But different from earlier arrangements mediated by national governments and ministries, GPHA has a one-to-one relationship with its donors, disembedding it from the wider state apparatus and endowing it with autonomy in the international development sphere. This is strikingly evident in the development assistance partnership between GPHA and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), for long one of Ghana's leading foreign donors.

Though executed by GPHA, port planning and expansion in Tema is in many ways master-minded by JICA. A powerful form of in-kind aid obviating the payment of private consulting fees or the cultivation of in-house expertise, JICA, in conjunction with the Overseas Coastal Area Development Institute of Japan, researched and drew up a succession of ‘master plans’ for the port (JICA 2002). By no means relegated to bureaucratic back files, the JICA proposals serve as the formative template for port expansion. Contributing to an impression of GPHA autonomy, such policy subvention is largely unpublicised and offers little opportunity for public discussion of the interests or outcomes driving the plan. This means that GPHA is at once increasingly market-oriented and externally enabled, a situation ratcheting up GPHA's independence from the public and other wings of the state, while benefitting GPHA from its status as a state agency.

The GPHA/JICA master-planning goals are strongly technocratic and managerial in orientation. JICA proposals endorse a view of infrastructure as the foundation for development in broad terms. This is evident for example in the devotion of the heart of the master-planning report to the drawing-up and detailed assessment (on financial as well as maritime engineering terms) of three different options for expansion (ibid.). But marking a departure from previous interventions where ‘the Japanese never insisted on non-technical conditions’ (Aryeetey & Quartey Reference Aryeetey and Quartey2008: 39), JICA's technical approach to Tema is supplemented by a series of managerial recommendations. JICA's managerial guidelines run the gamut from rather obvious injunctions such as ‘fair treatment of port users’ and the institution of policies to monitor port and worker efficiency, to those that are largely impractical or downright contradictory. For instance, while the plan stresses fairness and a competitive business plan for the port authority, GPHA is instructed to play the dual role of port overseer and port business in its own right, independently running port services and facilities. Not only are the challenges of marshalling capacity on all these fronts all but ignored, even more so are the attendant political impediments, leaving the details of implementation to GPHA employees and their allies in the state and private sector.

Of significance in this regard, despite the initial proposal of a Landlord Port Bill in 2002 during the early years of the NPP government and port expansion, the official ratification of Landlord Port was still under discussion as of mid 2009.Footnote ⁷ Demonstrating a de facto presumption of port ownership in expectation of official legal instrumentalisation, GPHA in the meantime has taken charge of most landlord functions. It would not be surprising if the managerial imperative availed by the JICA plan spurred GPHA assertion of its pending landlord status. Indeed, this example suggests a striking nexus of an older system of entitlement inherited by the port authority from the colonial and early post-colonial state, allowing for the near-automatic creation of state property, with a newer mandate of managerial efficiency and oversight gained from the manuals of neo-liberal development consultancy. Of particular salience to the crafting of neo-liberal modalities of rule, it also signals the ascendance of specialised contractually based practices of governance over legislative mandates.

Tema's ascendance and GPHA's concomitant realisation of landlord port model cannot be fully understood without considering the port and port authority's financial foundation. Like other features of the port's recent expansion, Tema's financial underpinnings actualise an unprecedented blend of older forms of public financing and newer private financial relations. In this case Tema, like other ports around the world, serves as a site of financial innovation. Two factors explain this trend. First, ports' extensive infrastructure, by definition, makes them capital intensive. With the automation of port technology now at the fore for reasons of efficiency as well as security, this is ever more so. The port's demand for capital is matched by its supply. The second and equally important factor explaining the financial intensification of maritime economies is the basic fact that the past two decades of financial deregulation (Harvey Reference Harvey2005; Palan Reference Palan2003) make more financial capital available for investment in ports. To paraphrase an UNCTAD (2008: 99) report (compiled prior to the 2008–9 global financial implosion), during this era ‘ports [began] attracting the interest of investors, and so for developing economies the main issue [was] no longer how to finance new infrastructure projects but which partner to choose’.

For Tema, GPHA's solution to the first challenge includes traditional multilateral funding from the likes of the IMF and World Bank; but signalling a surprising turn in financial interests, GPHA and the port of Tema are equally attracting a wide array of commercial investors. Sources of commercial investment in GPHA include domestic banks such as ECOBANK, Agricultural Development Bank and Prudential, specialised international banks such as the UK-based Ghana International Bank (GIB 2008), as well as international financial powerhouses such as HSBC.

As the conventional channels of multinational aid are typically long in coming and rather meagre compared with the offerings of private finance (Callaghy Reference Callaghy, Harbeson and Rothchild2009), these new sources of funds are increasingly attractive to the port authority. They create an arrangement where development capital and commercial capital subsidise each other. What is more, all of these inputs allow GPHA to largely achieve financial self-sufficiency, spurring the port management to disentangle itself from the broader demands of the state apparatus. GPHA, for instance, has proposed reclaiming a share of the corporate tax it annually pays to the government of Ghana in order to finance further port expansion. Blending extraversion and statism in the making of a hybrid economic zone, the success of GPHA in the world of commercial finance further distinguishes it from the wider polity, even as it becomes increasingly critical to national economic development.Footnote ⁸

MULTINATIONALISING PORT OPERATIONS

Commercial finance is only one of the ways in which private investment is crucial to Tema's redevelopment. Despite the ascendancy of GPHA on a managerial and financial front, port expansion still hinges on multinational corporate involvement. As mentioned, within landlord ports service provision is typically accomplished through concession arrangements, where port services are contracted on a long-term basis to private providers. Worldwide, this is often a key area where multinationals situate themselves in the port environment (UNCTAD 2008). Ghana is no exception to this trend. Defining the second phase of Tema's harbour's redevelopment, GPHA has pursued this strategy with vigour, embarking on a series of collaborative ventures with multinational firms. But in contrast to much more common situations of wholly privatised concessions or the wholesale management of a port by private operators, these arrangements promote and preserve a national stake in port operations. For this reason they can be characterised as a remnant, albeit revamped, of earlier nationalist and nationalised claims to commercial opportunity and oversight. Yet more than reproducing old norms, the new arrangements are productive in their own right, fostering a specific set of alliances and opportunities for multinational corporations and enabling modalities of governance that the state could never fully pursue on its own.

The case of Meridian Port Services (MPS), Tema's prime container terminal operator and provider of ‘ship to shore’ services, exemplifies this political–economic configuration. Holding a twenty-year concession initiated in 2004, MPS is a 70:30% joint venture between the UK-registered Meridian Port Holdings Ltd. and Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority. Meridian Port Holdings is itself a conglomerate owned by AP Møller Finance (46·75%), Bolloré (46·75%) and Sutton Investments (6·5%). AP Møller (AP-M) is the parent company of the well-known Maersk Group and the world's third largest terminal operator (after Hutchinson Port Holdings and Port of Singapore Authority) (UNCTAD 2008: 98). A dominant force in maritime trade and transport for the whole of the twentieth century, the Danish AP-M/Maersk is equally prominent in the fields of shipping and logistics, where it stands as the world's leading container ship builder, owner and operator.

Bolloré, a highly aggressive and politically well-connected player on the international trade scene, is a wholly different animal. A French firm founded in the early nineteenth century and for long a leader in paper and plastic film production, Bolloré in the past decade has gone through a wholesale diversification process, moving into the energy and media sectors while seeking prominence in transport and logistics via a hard-hitting acquisition process, buying up a wide array of older firms and properties. Indeed, the decrepit state of Africa's maritime infrastructure, in the early days of liberalisation considered an impediment to private investment (Iheduru Reference Iheduru1994: 403), and now available across the continent at bargain-basement prices, has more recently proved a lure to Bollore's multinational aspirations. As a consequence Bolloré has emerged in a short time as the biggest transport and logistics operator in Africa. Committed to maintaining its lead in this area, Bolloré Africa Logistics division oversees operations in forty-one countries, encompassing everything from terminal operations and stevedoring to warehousing, mining, rail, trucking and military logistics through a labyrinthine complex of contracts, partnerships and subsidiaries (Deltombe Reference Deltombe2009).

In its agreement with Bolloré and AP-M/Maersk, GPHA is savvy to work with a consortium rather than a single firm, more common in port concessions. Not only does the arrangement provide a broad base of capital and expertise, it also opens up the possibility of an easy buy-out if one partner reneges on its commitments. This contractual configuration is also clearly beneficial to the terminal operators. While it allows each company to expand its geographic reach in the race for global coverage, because the port of Tema already hosted an operational container terminal, business was guaranteed, unlike other ports where container operations had to be built from the ground up. Furthermore, since GPHA agreed to construct most of the new berths and quays and owned expensive cargo-handling equipment like gantry cranes, the firms avoided much up-front investment.

While there was clearly infrastructure left to erect and machinery to purchase, much of the consortium's effort has been dedicated to training and management. Spurred by the expectation of corporate leadership that the terminal, though remaining under the multinational banner, could in the span of just a few years operate with limited external input, the foreign nationals in the employ of AP-M are preparing Ghanaians to run the terminal via formal instruction and intensive oversight. Meridian's managerial codes and conventions encompass terminal operations on a grand scale, from the building and operation of machinery to the disposition of labour and other human resources. A central feature of this managerial logic is time management, namely the coordination and speeding up of the temporal rhythms of terminal operations. Based on the premise that ‘time plus motion equals money’, Meridian management assiduously evaluates port operations in terms of moves per hour, comparing Tema's rates to global benchmarks. Workers are urged to improve their rates and organise operations in a manner that keeps containers moving with a minimum of on-site dwell time. Though attributable to the company's wider bid for efficiency and standardisation across its port facilities internationally, these arrangements have notable political implications on a national front.Footnote ⁹ Marking the delegation of power over port operations (including labour) from the state to a multinational corporate body, they transpose the norms of the international realm onto a domestic project.

Such political economic permutations are all the more evident in the security rubrics imposed by Meridian. Derived from the International Maritime Organisation International Port Security (ISPS) Code devised in the post 9/11 environment to combat maritime terrorism, their implementation by Meridian achieves additional ends. With a battery of provisions regarding perimeter fencing, employee identification, risk assessment, security certification and on-going site surveillance, the enforcement of the ISPS code by Meridian severely restricts access to the terminal area. Filtering the imperatives of security through a highly bureaucratic logic, the code is grounded in the concept of social sorting (Lyon Reference Lyon2003) and works to firmly differentiate between insiders and outsiders, those with temporary versus on-going access, and civilians from designated (sub-contracted) security personnel. Presented as non-negotiable, the ISPS code furthermore provides MPS with a basis of authority commensurable to, if not greater than, the force of state decree previously exercised by GPHA in the terminal area. Rendering this section of the port an exemplary space of rule, the ISPS code in this way compensates for the withdrawal of the absolutist claims of GPHA.

Meridian's implementation of the code, moreover, stretches the rubric of security to encompass the field of safety more generally. Including requirements as simple as the donning of hard hats and reflective vests at all times, Meridian's security code also allows for drug testing employees at management's discretion. Generating an aura of hyper-vigilance, attention to the conventions of vehicle and machinery operation, from how fast a trucker is driving, to where terminal personnel seek to walk, sit or socialise, equally provides management with infinite opportunity to monitor workers and mete out sanctions. In this context, the global post-millennial security imperative takes up anew the well-tried martial logic of policing, once the hallmark of the colonial state (Killingray Reference Killingray and Mazower1997). But pursued not by the state but by organs of private government, the updated security rubric enables external actors to make claims on the state and civilian subjects at the same time as it legitimises corporate interventions in global terms.

Recalibrating established political hierarchies, the entailments of Meridian's highly technocratic modus operandi have not gone unnoticed. This is evident in the tales of wrangling between Ghana's customs officials and company representatives. Going back to its own colonial era mandate, Ghana's Customs Service has long maintained an active presence in the port, even when the port authority's capacities and status lagged in the period preceding its recent renovation and refunding (Chalfin Reference Chalfin2010). Although Customs remains a major player at Tema, port expansion has upset the established order of things, repositioning Customs as part of the port's ‘service economy’ and circumscribing its claims to authority. One indication of Customs' exclusion from its assumed entitlements is that while in the past Customs could be anywhere on the port at any time, it does not to its chagrin maintain an office at the new MPS facility. With the ‘ship to shore’ off-loading of containerised goods centred at the MPS terminal, Customs is thus beholden to the firm's procedures, with little leeway. According to port ‘hearsay’, MPS habitually refuses Customs' requests to expedite the movement of goods for Customs or the other organs of the state it represents. With GPHA failing to redress Customs' claims and complaints through its tacit deferral to MPS, the port authority not only indirectly reclaims ownership over port premises, but resituates itself in the hierarchy of port actors and activities.

The redistribution of authority at the port of Tema induced by the establishment of the new container terminal with a privatised multinational operating body is most trenchant in the case of labour, specifically with regard to stevedoring. In contrast to GPHA's passive position regarding Customs privileges, contention over stevedoring rights has ignited a dispute from which GPHA has not been able to hide. With the dispute coming to a head in late 2008 and again in mid 2009, Meridian, with GPHA support, sought to enforce its contractual privilege to ‘stevedore ships carrying in excess of 50 containers arriving at any part of the Tema port’ (GNA 2008). Although Meridian had followed this rule at its designated container quay since opening for operation in 2007, the more recent reversion to Meridian's contractual rights gave the firm nearly exclusive access to the rest of the port, spanning berths 9 through 12.

Because the average container ship at Tema carries 2,000–3,000 TEU, with very few below 50 TEU, only the much more limited range of non-containerised general cargo would be exempt from Meridian's monopoly. Adding insult to injury, this portion of Tema's traffic was to be shared among the port's nine remaining stevedoring companies, all of whom were already obliged to pay GPHA 25% of gross handling fees, and ironically enough were formally recognised and licensed by GPHA in the same burst of privatisation that led to the formation of the MPS consortium. With its membership strongly politicised around a common threat, the Ghana Association of Stevedoring Companies vehemently rejected Meridian/GPHA claims and used its legal standing to file an order of injunction against the two firms. Unable to defuse the stevedores' demands, GPHA put off Meridian's claims until the new year. Making matters even more difficult to resolve, a few months later the dispute with management morphed into a dispute among workers and the dock labour union, the outcome of which is still pending (GNA 2009a).

ON THE COUNTER-LOGICS OF PORT PRIVATISATION

As the on-going labour dispute makes clear, though the multinationalisation of the container trade at Tema is transforming the port in countless ways (whether managerial, spatial, political, ideological or financial), it is equally intertwined with an array of counter-logics. This is evident in the case of Tema's growing crop of off-dock terminals.

The epitome of high-speed automation, managerial efficiency and international standardisation, Meridian's management of Tema's container traffic stands as the paragon of port modernisation at Tema. Yet the very functionality of the MPS container harbour is thoroughly dependent on the port's growing array of off-dock terminals, gradually coming to fruition since 2001. Located next to the outer boundaries of Tema township's residential and commercial developments, these off-dock installations are situated at the port's inland edge on a swath of territory that was previously undeveloped. While the reform of the inner harbour is premised on mobility, and the swift and largely mechanised disposition of container units, the off-dock areas function as vast storage depots where containers languish as they await clearance and ultimate removal from the port premises.

The release of cargo requires Customs inspection, the payment of duties and numerous fees (the salaries of clearing agents, shipping costs and transfer, handling and security surcharges), as well as amassing the proper documents, permits and arrangements for transport out of the port. This is typically a prolonged process that may take weeks if not months. As a result, as Ghana's commercial traffic expands by leaps and bounds, so too does the need for container depots, putting a premium not only on the port's peripheral space but also on the profits to be made from container handling and storage. In contrast to the merging of time and motion for money-making on Meridian's container quay, the stretching of time and the extended occupation of space prove a source of value in the off-dock areas. Despite the frustration that these requirements and delays pose to the trading public, they represent a lucrative investment option that has not escaped the notice of private interests or the port authority. Providing fertile ground for an array of port contracts and concessions, Tema's off-dock terminals stimulate an unlikely interplay of state and multinational interests, with unexpected results.

Three main entities comprise Tema's total of five off-dock terminal concessions: Tema Container Terminal (TCT), the Golden Jubilee Terminal (GJT), and Safebond. TCT was founded in 2001 by the Ghanaian firm, Antrak, in conjunction with the long-time Africa-based international shipping line, Delmas. This was Tema's first off-dock depot and was initially geared to the storage of empty containers. Within a few years, TCT operations were taken over by Delmas' then parent firm, Bolloré, with Antrak dropping out of the deal to pursue options in air transport. When Delmas was sold to the high-powered CMA-CGM shipping line in 2005, TCT remained under the Bolloré group in anticipation of the firm's development of the MPS terminal. In keeping with Bolloré and AP-M/Maersk's promotion of so-called ‘house to house’ inter-modal logistics services, the close association of the two firms in the Meridian project has created a situation of preferential access to the cargo of Maersk ships and shippers for TCT. Indeed, this sort of partnered multinational division of labour provides the foundation business for the terminal. What is more, with a worldwide operating base deriving from its membership in a sprawling multinational consortium, TCT also has the advantage of setting relatively low clearance rates and fees compared to the neighbouring operators.Footnote ¹⁰

Contrary to the assumption that TCT is a privileged player at the port due to its multinational ties and financial foundation and status as a ‘first-comer’, its bid for ascendancy is heavily compromised by the other firms in the system, none of which share its vast multinational endowments. TCT faces stiff competition from Tema port's new Golden Jubilee Terminal, opened in March 2007 in tandem with the nation's fiftieth anniversary of independence. A subsidiary of GPHA, Golden Jubilee is a state-owned terminal in private guise. GPHA had initially contracted the terminal to a private Ghanaian logistics partnership, Allports Ghana. When Allports pulled out (OT Africa Line 2008), the project had already fallen behind schedule and GPHA stepped in to fill the void.

Though state-owned, Golden Jubilee straddles the public/private divide, bearing the trappings of many private firms of its ilk. With a cost of US$15 million (Jctrans.net 2007), GJT received financing from Barclays. A number of its top management posts are filled by expatriates with substantial experience in private terminal operations around the world.

Contravening JICA's suggestion that GPHA separate its managerial and operational functions, GJT's state foundation is undeniable. Personnel readily flow between the GPHA and GJT. Like Tema port in Nkrumah's heyday, GJT strives for a symbolic nexus of infrastructure and nationalism. Not only does its name commemorate a turning point in the nation's history; the Golden Jubilee opening ceremonies were hosted by then President John Kufuor, adding to its national lustre. An even more important sign of GJT's national privilege on a business front, much to TCT's chagrin, the Ghana Customs Service (GPHA's sometime rival, sometime ally in port governance) ruled that all containerised vehicles coming into Ghana should be handled by GJT, in addition to the terminal's usual intake of regular cargo. With containerised cars both substantial in number and high in value and tonnage, this decision among others has much reduced TCT through-put.

Just as the rise of GJT challenges the assumption of multinational success in port operations, Safebond, a third and highly successful off-dock terminal, complicates the claim that state ties are a ready source of prosperity for port enterprises. Safebond represents an unlikely set of links between Ghanaian, German and Nigerian capital. Its presence in Tema was initially spawned by a partnership between Ghanaian investors and Carl Tiedeman, a leading stevedoring firm at Germany's Hamburg port. This alliance was eventually licensed to provide stevedoring and shore-handling at Tema. Under the leadership of a Ghanaian entrepreneur with strong ties to both German and Nigerian business communities, the Safebond off-dock terminal was born. Occupying a lucrative market niche, it specialises in the clearance and storage of non-containerised vehicles imported to Ghana in addition to the usual container cargo (Chalfin Reference Chalfin2008).

Safebond's rise can only in part be attributed to the mastery of conventional arenas of port operations. Safebond, in contrast to its competitors, thrives on a highly flexible form of diversification, not only moving from one port service industry to another, but exploiting new niches in the port economy. Specifically, it has established a financial services company providing short-term high-interest loans from the premises of its off-dock terminal. A trend building on the experience of neighbouring Nigeria, where the Safebond director worked for many years, this effort replicates the flourishing of financial services elsewhere in Ghana. In an arena where both business people and the public struggle to cover the high cost of merchandise clearance and move their goods before the thirty-day deadline for state warehousing and possible confiscation, Safebond's loan scheme, despite its high risk to subscribers, fills a widespread need among port users.

Though lacking the deep pockets of the multinational conglomerates or the privileged access of the parastatals, Safebond has proved to be exceptionally agile in opening the market for port services, demonstrating a flexibility that may be difficult for top-heavy multinationals or state enterprises to emulate. What is more, its success derives not only from its flexible outlook towards business opportunity but also from its sensitivity to the desires, mores and dilemmas of the Ghanaian public. In short, in contrast to the statism of GJT and the multinational corporatisation of TCT, Safebond represents an innovative mix of transnational business ties, national values and flexible financialised accumulation.

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Ghana's port of Tema provides a striking example of the persistence of select features of the developmental state in the context of the global neo-liberal turn. Promoting the expansion and acceleration of cross-border and transoceanic trade, multinational corporate consolidation, and the popularisation of finance capital, the neo-liberal political economic climate has substantial ramifications for the form and function of ports the world over. In Ghana, given the strong historical relationship between Tema harbour and nation-building, these movements both contribute to the revitalisation of ports and shipping lanes, and foster the ascendance of port authorities in the hierarchy of state administration. Here, Tema stands as a compelling example of how the shifting contours of global capital remake and renew rather than undermine select state institutions and forms of regulatory authority (Sassen Reference Sassen2000, Reference Sassen2006).

Due to Tema port's importance to the wider regional economy and Ghana's overall embrace of market-oriented reform, not to mention Tema's historical roots as a site of major infrastructural and economic innovation in the era of decolonisation, the government of Ghana is fully engaged via GPHA with the pressures and possibilities of port rehabilitation. At this maritime frontier, market and state are more symbiotic than antagonistic. This is due to the dual imperatives of maintaining order and ensuring flows, significant to any port of trade (Polanyi Reference Polanyi1963), as well as the tendency of multinational firms to outsource risk while extending reach. Creating an effective division of labour between state ownership (of port equipment as well as port premises) on the one hand, and private management on the other, in this arrangement GPHA can maintain its proprietary status at the same time as multinationals like AP-M/Maersk and Bolloré build a sprawling maritime empire and shed risk.

At Tema, Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority, the emblematic state institution in the maritime zone, emerges as more autonomised than privatised, in marked contrast to an increasing number of ports across the continent and the world. What is more, at the forefront of the port complex, GPHA exercises relative independence from other organs of governance, both in its operations and in mapping a future trajectory. By no means isolated, GPHA is closely aligned with global experts and standard-setters, as demonstrated in its relationship with Japan's International Cooperation Agency. Likewise occupying the cusp between national and extranational, public and private, the port authority straddles a historical middle ground, availing it of the developmental options of the past and the future. With the arms of the developmental state evolving in tandem with its financial backers, GPHA relies both on newer forms of project-oriented private finance and on older forms of aid tied to multilateral loan instruments and banks. Contributing to Ghana's neo-developmental state formation, and setting it apart from other instances of maritime reform in Africa, here Ghana's twenty-plus year relationship with donors and multilaterals institutionalises a conduit of support not easily replaced or pushed aside.

Though cultivating a broad arc of dependence on multinational capital, Tema's diversified endowments nevertheless contribute to the self-determination of the port administration within the wider state apparatus. Evidenced in GPHA's partnerships with multinationals such as AP-Moller/Maersk and Bolloré, these arrangements augment the authority of the port's governing body at the same time as they build port capacity and infrastructure. From disciplining labour to controlling the valuation of time and space, multinational alliances supplement the effective power of the state, even if via compromised or compartmentalised means (see Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001). Further contributing to the resilience of Ghana's national port authority in the face of the globalised drive towards port privatisation and conglomeration, GPHA's position as a distinctive sort of state enterprise combining regulatory reach, profit-bearing, and property holding confers the possibility of surviving by ramping up one end of its mission if another wanes. Indeed, in the port setting, the privileges of state-based institutions such as GPHA serve them well, allowing for regulatory leeway and the option to enforce as well as change the rules of the game. Exemplified by the de facto supersession of legislation by contractual agreements, under these conditions whole new possibilities of governance come into being.Footnote ¹¹ The sprawling commercial empires of multinational maritime players are typically advantaged here. So too are more nimble forms of capital such as Safebond, less interested in conquering spaces (as in the case of the state) or economic sectors (as in the case of the maritime mega-corporation), and highly adept at exploiting regulatory voids and suturing the gap between international ideals and on-the-ground realities.

In contrast to private concession agreements selling out the resources of the national state, whether the formal establishment of Export Processing Zones or the clandestine contracting of natural resources concessions (the one giving priority to corporate interests, the other to private political authority) (see Ong Reference Ong2006; Reno Reference Reno1998), in Ghana the port zone and the governmental arrangements which emerge in tandem with it remain vested in the reproduction of a nationalised state apparatus. With the port and its governing complex both embedded within and separate from the national polity, the political–economic configurations of the maritime frontier are poised to follow their own developmental trajectory. Though their sustainability depends on economic extraversion, these arrangements are likely to impinge on other sites and arenas of national governance, extending their web of influence.

In sum, to point to the revival of Ghana's port authority is by no means to deny the force of globalisation. Rather, revealing the strategic alliance between state bodies and transnational corporations at work at the port, the case of Tema suggests that the impacts of global integration on the state project are both highly variegated and historically consistent. In the Ghanaian situation, they build on the state's earlier-established developmental capacities and nationalist claims, utilising them in the service of international exchange and agglomeration.