“Being Blessed” With a Crisis: Exploring the Rhetoric of Crisis Exploitation in the Mepe Flood in Ghana

A crisis is recognized as a focusing event that brings attention to a particular situation and the actors involved. In young democracies where equitable access to media coverage for opposition politicians and parties is limited, crisis presents a unique rhetorical situation for affected opposition politicians when strategically handled. Using Crisis Exploitation based on Nord and Olsson’s tripartite model as a framework, this paper explores how a member of parliament in Ghana belonging to the opposition party frames the Akosombo and Kpong Hydro-electric dams spillage that affected his constituency using X rather than traditional mass media platforms. Existing literature on crisis communication in Africa focuses on actors who are directly involved or responsible for the crisis and how they can manage information and their reputation. We contend that in young democracies where political obligations are not clearly demarcated, opposition political actors can leverage a crisis to set national agendas, exert their managerial competence, and enhance their image in the public consciousness. Through textual analysis of posts from the MP, the study identifies the parliamentarian’s use of attributional, managerial, and morality frames in the context of social media logic while handling the Mepe flood incident as tools to directly engage state institutions and the incumbent party while promoting his party and himself. This study’s contribution challenges African traditional notions of crisis being a moment of solidarity devoid of partisanship and self-promotion as well as providing additional positionalities from which crisis communication can be explored in Africa.