Guns in Ghana

Enough with forests and landfills and forced evictions! How about something sexy? Yes, its time to talk about guns. Or, if you want to get specific, a meeting I attended last week with the very formal title of “The October 18, 2007 Validation Meeting for the Draft Report on the Supplementary Study on Local Arms Production in Ghana.” Meetings around here sort of take on a life of their own, when they actually happen, but I’ll get back to that later.

It seems that Ghana is awash in guns. Who knew? Importing guns is tightly controlled, and save for some ambitious types the trek through the jungle or desert with a pickup truck full of guns, smuggling is not a big problem. The problem is blacksmiths who make hand crafted guns in underground workshops and supplying a robust market. Many tribes view gun ownership as a right of passage for young men, and incorporate guns into their ritual life. However, the home made guns also find their way into the hands of criminals. And with all those guns around, when the tribes decide to fight each other, which happens every 15 years or so I’m told, things get messy. I assume that is the Development Institute’s interest in local arms production, since people with homemade guns that they assume are superior to their neighbor’s homemade guns (and every tribe thinks they make the best guns, not only the best in Ghana, but the best in the world) are more apt to get into land disputes that need to be mediated. Or maybe we just went for the free lunch, which was pretty damn good.

Everyone knows the government is too weak in most places, or too damn lazy, to do anything about the local production of guns. That’s not exactly right—you can get a permit to repair guns and to make some guns, but, as the representative from the national police (or something like that) told everyone, the police have never actually granted a permit to make guns, even thought its conceivably possible that some one could get such a permit. (No one at the meeting except me thought that was funny). In the absence of law enforcement, the idea is to liberalize the regulations to make gun manufacturing legal and regulated. Then the government can know exactly who is making guns, how many they are making, and where they are going. Incentives can be offered to register older, illegally produced guns, and everyone would be happy. Sounds great, right?

Well, its complicated. For one, Ghana is part of some very sensible treaties that prohibit domestic manufacture of small in West Africa. Sensible because small arms are endemic in Ghana’s neighbors, like Liberia and Sierra Lone and Ivory Coast, and those are not very pleasant places these days. Assuming no one cares about those treaties, and I don’t think anyone does, developing an arms industry is not a smart thing to do.

However, at the meeting were representatives of the blacksmith associations from all over Ghana. Their interest goes beyond coming in from the bush: they want the government to partner with them to develop a domestic gun industry. They might not realize it, but what they are is supply siders because they want to lower the barriers to production (i.e. the illegality) which will promote production, bring down prices overall and put a gun in every bedroom. That might work well (in theory) for washing machines and radios, but its positively stupid when it comes to guns.

If Ghana can walk the tricky line of legalizing gun manufacturing without attracting additional production, then they should go for it. But I don’t see that happening. My opinion was that they should pick another industry to develop and just try to get as many illegal guns registered as possible. But I kept my mouth shut, which is a smart thing to do when a room is half filled with gun nuts.

For me, the meeting was really interesting. For one, there were some pretty important people there—the former head of the national security service, a few MPs (congressmen of sorts), a tribal chief, some academics and the aforementioned blacksmiths. Note, however, that some heavies that were listed as attending (Ministers and the like) did not show up, and did not send their regards or send a minion to attend just to show they cared. Meanwhile, some people who announced they had to leave ended up staying the whole time. I think that’s in keeping with the general Ghanaian idea about meetings: plan them, and then forget them. It happens all the time around here, and if I was trying to earn a living as opposed to just doing something interesting and doing some good for 10 weeks, I would be pissed.

I’m told that what is actually going on is everyone always plans for the best case scenario. See, when some says “lets have a meeting tomorrow morning to talk about what we want you to do for the next two months” what they really mean is “if everything goes perfectly, and there is no traffic and my kid does all his homework and my wife does not burn dinner and England beats South Africa in the Rugby World Cup, we will have a meeting.” But that’s all wishful thinking because, indeed, South Africa won the Rugby World Cup and, thus, no one showed up to talk about what I’m supposed to be doing here for the next two months.

(South Africa really did win the Rugby World Cup, by the way, and all the drunk South Africans made an ass of themselves on Saturday night at the expat bars, but that’s another story).

I’m not alone in my frustration: Accra is full of underutilized volunteers. Since I don’t have much going on in NYC at the moment (at the moment!) its not that big a deal and I’m learning a lot of interesting things and helping however I can. But the phenomena of underutilized volunteers and how foreigners moved from god fearing missionaries and sadistic colonizers to working 15 hours a week and blogging (or worse in many cases) for the balance of the week is one that needs to be told. I’ll get to that some other time.