The Myth of Self-Reliance. Naohiko Omata
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2008 that all Liberian refugees should go back to Liberia (MoI 2008). The government of Ghana subsequently expressed its intention to significantly reduce the residual number of Liberians in the country, as well as to break up Buduburam camp into more manageable, smaller pieces and to disperse the refugees to other parts of Ghana. The Ghanaian government also asked the UNHCR to apply the Cessation Clause to the refugee status of the residual Liberians in the country. Apparently, the protracted life of Liberian refugees in Buduburam was entering its final phase.
Concurrently, a tripartite committee comprising the governments of Ghana and Liberia and the UNHCR was formed in April 2008. By agreement, the UNHCR commenced the orderly voluntary repatriation of camp residents to Liberia in April 2008, involving an increase in the financial incentive offered to returnees, which went from $5 to $100 (for a person below the age of 18, the amount was $50).
Liberian refugees in Buduburam had been unwilling to repatriate to Liberia despite the UNHCR’s previous efforts to promote a repatriation programme (Essuman-Johnson 2011: 117). This time, in 2008, the reaction of the refugees changed after seeing the deployment of much tougher measures by the Ghanaians. Under strong pressure from the national authorities and international refugee regime to repatriate, many Liberian refugees decided to leave Ghana for Liberia. According to UNHCR internal statistics, more than 9,000 Liberians, about 40 per cent of the Buduburam refugee population, returned to Liberia between April 2008 and March 2009 under the UNHCR’s repatriation package (UNHCR 2009).
These policy shifts had an important impact on my research. At the outset of my fieldwork in Ghana, this latest repatriation programme was ongoing, and many of my interviewees were choosing to repatriate. Given the magnitude of repatriation, as noted above, I extended my fieldwork period so as to follow repatriating refugees from Buduburam back to Liberia, allowing me to study their post-return economic reintegration.
My Life as a Researcher in Buduburam
During thirteen months of research between 2008 and 2009, in order to obtain a better understanding of Buduburam refugee life, I lived inside the camp with two male Liberian refugees for over ten months. My co-residents were Philip and Sam. Philip was in his mid thirties and Sam was in his early twenties. Philip ran his own camp-based organization (CBO), providing school education for refugees in Buduburam camp, and also worked as a pastor. Initially I thought that both Philip and Sam were unmarried. Sam was, but later I found out that Philip had a wife and son, even though they had never lived in Ghana as refugees. He had met his wife in Liberia and had got married there before he left the country in 1999. His wife and son had stayed in Liberia throughout the country’s civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003.
The relationship between Philip and Sam was not clear to me at first. Due to their hierarchical relation, I first assumed that they were related. There was, however, no biological tie between them. Sam had at one time been a student at Philip’s school, but he had had to stop his schooling as he was unable to afford to pay his tuition fees. Impressed by Sam’s school performance, Philip had personally helped him continue his schooling. In exchange, Sam had started working for Philip as a housekeeper. When I started fieldwork in 2008, Sam had finished his high-school education in the camp some years earlier, but had continued working for Philip.
During the research, I attempted to adopt a similar lifestyle to that of camp residents. For instance, I always bought daily necessities and food such as vegetables, fish, meat and pasta from shops owned by Liberian refugees. I frequently ate out at canteens and fast-food stands and enjoyed (warm) beer at bars inside the camp. I shared the latrines and open shower space used by refugee residents. I purchased prepaid mobile-phone cards from refugee sellers, and used internet cafés in the camp whenever I needed to access my e-mail. In early 2009, our house faced a shortage of water when the tank we were using ran dry. I could perhaps have purchased water from other tanks but I did not do so. Instead, as my co-residents did, I minimized water usage and only took a bath once in a while.
In addition, I tried to become familiar with the Liberian refugee community as an external researcher. In particular, I did a lot of ‘hanging out’ (Rodgers 2004: 48) with refugees, which was not necessarily directly related to the research project. I participated in a youth football team as an assistant coach. Whenever the team played a game, I went to watch and cheered them on. Together with other football coaches, I occasionally went to a ‘theatre’ in the camp to see international football matches. Watching football was for my personal interest. Nevertheless, as football was undoubtedly the most popular sport for Liberians, I came to meet many refugees there. Also, I joined church prayers on Sundays whenever I was invited by refugees. There was always a moment when new church-goers were introduced to those gathered at the beginning of prayer meetings, and social hours after the meeting. Church visiting was thus a useful way to introduce myself and to explain what I was doing to many refugees at the same time.
Although I encountered numerous inconveniences, living with refugees in the camp returned tremendous rewards. For example, I could expand my contacts with refugees through my co-resident, Philip. Owing to his activities in the camp through his CBO and church, Philip had wide networks including other Liberian residents, and he put me in touch with other key refugee informants. Also, I was able to garner a clear sense of living costs in the camp as I understood the exact prices of household items and services, including food, water, clothing, transportation, internet access and pre-paid phone credit. This local knowledge proved to be essential, especially when I started to gather quantitative data from refugee households.
Data Collection
The main empirical data, including both qualitative and quantitative data, was collected during thirteen months of research in Ghana and Liberia between 2008 and 2009. During this period of fieldwork in West Africa, I conducted a total of some 400 interviews with refugee households and non-refugee stakeholders, including staff members of the UNHCR, government officials in charge of refugee issues and Ghanaian villagers living in the area of the camp.
In addition to a large volume of qualitative data, in the later stages of fieldwork I gathered a significant volume of quantitative data on sources of income and food, and on patterns of expenditure from sample households. As few previous studies of Liberians in Buduburam provide any convincing quantitative data on their economic status and living conditions, I considered it important to complement my qualitative data with numerical evidence.
After my departure from West Africa in late 2009, I maintained regular communication with my refugee interviewees. Especially after the announcement of the Cessation Clause for Liberian refugees, I conducted intensive follow-up interviews by telephone and Skype with residual households in Ghana between 2012 and 2013.
During data collection, I faced myriad ethical dilemmas. Provision of financial reward for interviewees was one of these challenges. Before beginning the fieldwork, I made a clear decision not to give financial compensation to any interviewees for their participation in the study, regardless of their living conditions. At a first interview, I articulated this rule to my interviewees and asked whether they were still comfortable about being interviewed by me. When I explained this no-financial-compensation rule to interviewees, several refugees asked me what benefit my research would bring to them if I was not financially compensating them. In response to such an inquiry, I explained that my research project would in the end aim to generate a better understanding of the present refugee population among external stakeholders, and would eventually contribute to better policies for forced migrants in the future.
As the research progressed, however, I began to feel less comfortable with this prepared explanation. Extended interaction and participation in the daily life of the community deepened my understanding of the imminent and daunting challenges faced by refugees on a day-to-day basis. Importantly, for some households in the poorest economic category, their main concern was how to cope with the day at hand and the next few days. What they needed was immediate access to some material assistance such as cash and food, not vague hints about potential benefits which might in the future be brought to them or others like them as a consequence of my research. This dilemma continued to afflict me throughout fieldwork. In fact, I breached this rule several times with some interviewees.