Ghana, which has just concluded its eighth successive general election since the end of military rule in 1992, is regarded a kind of gold standard for political stability in the region. The election commission took justified pride when it announced that this would be the first election that would be financed without external assistance. The country was the earliest in Sub-Saharan Africa to win freedom from colonial rule in 1957, when the nation’s first Prime Minister and President Kwame Nkrumah championed the cause of pan-African unity. That vision has since enlarged into the current African Union of 55 member states, which recently launched a fledgling free trade area across the continent. The heralding of multi-party democracy in the country, alongside other nations in the continent in more recent years, has been described as Africa’s second liberation.
Smooth handover of power
The largely peaceful general election, held on December 7, could, however, begin to test Accra’s growing reputation for a free and fair poll and a smooth handover of power. President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who was lucky in the 2016 race after contesting unsuccessfully twice earlier, won a re-election in a high turnout contest, heading the centre-right New Patriotic Party (NPP).
In a similarly narrow race, the parliamentary polls have produced a hung legislature, with the National Democratic Congress (NDC), which has its roots in the military-backed Provisional National Defence Council in the 1980s, within touching distance of the NPP. The NDC leader, John Dramani Mahama, who, before the results were declared, had alleged that the vote was rigged, has vowed to mount a legal challenge over the outcome.
Accusations of foul play, even if they did not descend into bitter and bloody acrimony earlier, are not entirely absent in Ghanaian elections. The difference on this occasion is that the two leaders who signed a pledge to abjure violence right through the electoral process were both, paradoxically, involved in a stand-off following the 2012 polls. Back then, as opposition leader, Mr. Akufo-Addo had alleged fraud and the NPP had boycotted Mr. Mahama’s inauguration in January 2013. The widely televised legal battle dragged on for nearly eight months until the Supreme Court upheld the original result. At the time, there was huge relief that the country was spared the kind of bloody mayhem witnessed in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan polls, besides more blatant attempts to circumvent the electoral process in a few other African states.
Shift in the landscape
There are few indications that the current dispute could escalate into a full-blown controversy. All the same, Mr. Mahama’s stance and the previous legal tangle show signs of an apparent shift in the landscape of Ghanaian politics. Former military leader and two-term President Jerry Rawlings, who passed away in November, voluntarily relinquished office in 2000. Another instance of a smooth and seamless succession is the one which followed the sudden demise in 2012 of former President John Evans Atta Mills. Mr. Mahama, then Vice-President, was elevated to the presidency and subsequently confirmed in the elections later that year.
Observers point to strains in Ghana’s two-party system — in part from the competition for control of oil revenues from 2010, in addition to the country’s traditional dominance in cocoa and gold. For a leader whose main plank in the 2016 election was to combat the rampant corruption of the previous government, Mr. Akufo-Addo’s jumbo-sized cabinet was criticised as one intended to reward loyalists. The ex-foreign minister will begin his second term by attempting to redeem his pledge to build a factory for each of Ghana’s 216 districts, a dam in every village in the country’s north, and provide a million dollars for every electoral constituency. That is a tall order at the best of times. During the current pandemic, it seems rather unrealistic.
garimella.subramaniam@thehindu.co.in
