Paper short abstract:

The paper reconstructs how development planning and financial auditing shaped political iconographies in 1960s Ghana. It argues that, besides supporting practices of economic management, these tools informed political theologies and constructed alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates the role of development planning and financial auditing in shaping political iconographies and temporalities in 1960s Ghana. I suggest that these tools (and the numbers contained in them) did not simply inform and support practices of economic management. Instead, they contributed to the construction of alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism. The focus is on the last years of Nkrumah’s government, until he was overthrown by a military coup d’état in 1966, and on the National Liberation Council (NLC)’s rule between 1966 and 1969.

The Nkrumaist Seven-Year Plan for National Reconstruction and Development and the financial audits produced by the NLC’s numerous commissions of inquiry embody attempts to build, through numbers, alternative forms of secular eschatology. It is argued that tools like development plans and financial auditing, whose main task is not that of measuring time but are grounded in an idea of linear and homogenous time, created in 1960s Ghana qualitatively different ‘regimes of historicity’. But these become visible only when we reconstruct how these ‘dry’ and technical documents were negotiated, contested, and recast in the public sphere.

This is achieved primarily by following the iconography of economic numbers in the daily press. Drawing on archival evidence gathered in Accra, Cape Coast, Ho and Washington, and informed by ethnographies of planning and social studies of accounting, the paper calls for a more expansive view on what is ‘political’ about economic numbers in the postcolony, and for a recasting of the relationship between quantification and utopianism.