The Social Injustices of Ghana’s Oil Industry

All over the world, the dynamics shaping oil and gas industries are thoroughly capitalist in form and thrust, characterised by the relentless chase for super-profits by transnational oil companies and other cognate profit-seeking elements—what Michael Watts conceptualises as the ‘oil assemblage’. The imperatives, actors and processes of the oil assemblage are intrinsically exploitative and dispossessive and are often characterised by social injustices and inequities. Being part of the global oil assemblage, the Ghanaian oil and gas industry is shaped by these characteristics, hence, emerging as an unjust and inequitable development industry. Against this dystopian backdrop, this chapter formulates a radical perspective of social justice and equity, upon which it documents and elaborates the injustices and inequities within the Ghanaian oil and gas industry at two interrelated levels: global (international) and national (local). It explores the critical political-economic literature on extractive industries, zeroing into an analysis of both secondary quantitative and qualitative data on the inequities and injustices that pervade Ghana’s oil and gas industry. The chapter aims to contribute to the literature on the development prospects and challenges of the Ghanaian oil and gas industry in a fresh way: namely, by transcending the dominant resource curse framing of these issues in order to bring into the conversation issues of social justice and equity, which are so often given fleeting mention, if at all, in the extant literature on the industry. This chapter concludes by musing on a number of radical interventions to address these inequities and injustices at both the global and national levels.