The Volta River Project

For at least the past 15 years, to the date of Ghana's achievement of Independence as a starting point, the whole issue as to how a newly independent country should allocate its resources so as to foster growth has been one which has lent itself too easily to the making of emotional appeals, and of costly mistakes, in the execution of assorted plans, as the various new nations have attempted to achieve a take off towards Rostow's promised land. Partly this has been the case because the citizens of each fledgling polity have been inclined to see the presence or absence of tangible as reflecting on the polity's own worth, and on the right of the current regime to remain in office. In consequence, grandiose projects and schemes have been a hallmark of the era. 2 The emphasis of new regimes often seems to have been on the accumulating of concentrated capital, in the form of prestige highways, State buildings, etc., rather than having been on the encouraging of accretionary capital formation in the agricultural sector. There seemed to be a tendency for new ruling elites to equate economic development with industrialization, to see the one as but a synonym for the other, thereby underestimating the importance of the agricultural sector. Disillusionment with such an equation is now rife. Indeed; the expressed negative feelings of experts towards there being any further large-scale, irreversible commitments of Third World countries' scarce resources to the building of flashy and expensive schemes have now found a reasonably receptive audience amongst laymen. This is a feeling well-caught by a

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• Newly independent nations and large engineering projects

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• Where nothing was before”

  Laura B Johnson, Jordan P Howell et al.•Journal of Cultural Geography•2015

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