Growing but not maturing

On December 7, 2024, Ghanaians will go to the polls to exercise what would have been their power if their nation’s democracy had accountability and good governance. In the absence of those key elements, citizens are set to empower a president and 275 parliamentarians who will likely continue the race to the bottom—a trend that has been noted in recent Afrobarometer surveys and good governance indices emphasizing Ghana’s declining democratic fortunes.

Saturday’s election will be the ninth uninterrupted time Ghanaians go to the polls since the return to multiparty democracy and the introduction of the current constitution in 1992. The two main political parties in this election—the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP)—have each won four of the previous eight contests.

The NDC began the eight-year cycle in 1992, when its founder and charismatic military ruler, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings hung his uniform and put on civilian attire to campaign for the people’s mandate—after having seized power in a coup in December 1981 and held on to it till 1992. Following his electoral victory that year, Rawlings was reelected in 1996 and stepped down after the two four-year mandates allowable by the constitution.

Following this, the NPP, led by John Agyekum Kufuor, won the 2000 election, occasioning the first power transfer from one elected president to another since Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957. Kufuor won his second term in 2004, and when his term ended in 2008, Ghanaians felt the need to switch.

Then came Professor John Evans Atta Mills, who led the NDC to win the 2008 election. Atta Mills campaigned for a second term in the December 2012 election but died four months before the polls opened. His vice president, John Dramani Mahama, succeeded him as the NDC’s candidate. Mahama won the 2012 election, becoming the fourth substantive president of Ghana’s Fourth Republic and the fourth successive “John” to occupy that office.

The dynasty of the Johns ended in 2016 when Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the NPP’s candidate, who had lost the 2008 and 2012 elections, upstaged John Mahama’s attempt at a second term and the NDC’s desire to break the eight-year cycle of the two dominant parties. Nana Akufo-Addo won a second term in 2020 and will hand over leadership to the winner of Saturday’s election after a rather disappointing show.

The NPP has its umbilical cord attached to the political tradition that opposed Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, and his socialist-inclined ideology. The party describes itself as a “centre-right and liberal-conservative party.” The NDC, on the other hand, was formed by Rawlings and co-opted a great number of the pro-Nkrumah loyalists following the fragmentation of Nkrumah’s political base that followed the long ban on the independence leader’s party by various military regimes. The NDC professes social democratic ideals.

That said, the ideological differences between the two parties exist largely on paper—in practice, they are indistinguishable. They compete with promises of social interventions and populist policies with immediate gratification that can translate into votes. They also enjoy an almost unbreakable duopoly because the two biggest ethnic groups in Ghana are two parties’ core support: the NPP commands a massive following from the Asante and Twi-speaking ethnic groups, while the Ewe ethnic group backs the NDC.

Credible predictions point to a victory for the NDC in the 2024 election, and there might be more to this than the usual tendency of Ghanaians to oscillate between the two barely tolerable alternatives every eight years. All indicators of good governance point to a bleak performance of the NPP under Akufo-Addo, and Ghanaians may be seeking respite from the suffocation they have endured, especially in Akufo-Addo’s second term.

Ghana’s economy has suffered the worst crisis in living memory, with inflation jumping to 54.1 percent in December 2022. Some Ghanaians believed the reality was worse than the government statistician’s estimate. When Akufo-Addo became president in January 2017, Ghanaians needed four cedis to purchase one US dollar. Now they need 16 cedis to get a dollar. In an economy that depends heavily on imports, traders must constantly cough up more cedis to get foreign currencies for their imports. And since they’re not running charities, the consumer bears the brunt of the depreciation of the local currency.

For the first time, Ghana defaulted on its internal and external debt repayment and was compelled to make another unholy pilgrimage to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for policy credibility and economic stability. That ritual journey to the IMF, the eighteenth since independence, was accompanied by domestic and foreign debt restructuring, which scarred many investors in securities and government bonds. Pensioners picketed at the Ministry of Finance for weeks because they could not access their savings. While the country reeled in debt, the president’s cousin who headed the finance ministry, Ken Ofori-Atta, was laughing to the bank—with his company providing financial services to the government and quietly cashing out with each subsequent loan.

Unfortunately for Ghana’s economy, it doesn’t seem the next president will provide an immediate remedy. The current vice president and presidential candidate of the NPP, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, was touted as an economic whiz kid before the NPP took over in 2017. Tellingly, he has fled from his area of expertise in this election and is instead focusing his campaign on touting his initiatives related to digitalization. That is a tacit admission of the NPP’s failure on the economy, giving the NDC an unchallenged playing field to woo Ghanaians with its policies. The NDC, on the other hand, is campaigning with the vague policy of introducing a 24-hour economy. If that means anything, the party struggles to explain it to voters.

Apart from the economy, whoever wins Saturday’s election would face the daunting task of restoring sanity to Ghana’s battered democratic institutions. The Akufo-Addo administration instituted an aggravated assault on the already shaky pillars of Ghana’s democracy. Even though Akufo-Addo won his election on the promise to fight corruption, his predecessor’s worst performance in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index was his best. Under him, Ghana’s press freedom ranking, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, fell from 30th in 2021 to 62nd in 2023.

Ghana’s judicial impartiality score was 94.1 points in Mo Ibrahim’s Index of African Governance when Akufo-Addo became president in 2017. In 2024, that score fell to 68.3.

In June 2024, the World Bank downgraded the performance of Ghana’s Audit Service from “C” to “D,” citing deficiencies in its independence compared to international standards. It did not surprise Ghanaians, because President Akufo-Addo hounded Ghana’s auditor-general from office in 2020, a move the Supreme Court would later declare unconstitutional.

However, the Supreme Court waited for three years to decide on the matter, when the auditor-general had already reached his mandatory retirement age. That case, per the Supreme Court’s examples in recent pro-NPP cases, could have been decided in three weeks. The delay further deepened concerns that the courts, packed with Akufo-Addo loyalists, do not dispense justice impartially.

Ghanaians are generally losing faith in their nation’s democratic institutions, according to recent findings by Afrobarometer. Afrobarometer’s 2024 report notes that 82 percent of Ghanaians surveyed said the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

In light of this, one might expect John Mahama to campaign on the message that Ghana needs a complete “reset.” The record of his one-term presidency, however, does not inspire hope that the country’s direction would change under his watch. High levels of corruption characterized his presidency and partly accounted for his defeat. His administration presided over the worst power crisis in recent times. During his presidency, Ghana turned to the IMF for economic salvation.

Though the Mahama era was more tolerant of dissent, and the media and civil society operated without fear, many Ghanaians think a reset requires more than that. Ghana’s vibrant media and civil society appear fatigued. And some Ghanaians believe the country probably needs another military regime to reset the country.

Ghana is often considered a gold-standard democracy among African countries, and its decline does not portend well for the general stability of the West African sub-region, which is already rocked by a wave of military regimes that appear to enjoy widespread support from the masses. Unlike citizens of the coup-ravaged Francophone countries who see the coup makers as heroes standing up to neocolonial powers, Ghanaians see their predicaments as the failure of leadership. They are losing hope in democracy.

The voices of the people do not appear to matter. For the past eight years, the media, civil society, and other groups have sustained a campaign against illegal mining, which has polluted major rivers and destroyed forest reserves and cocoa farms, but the destruction persists because politicians are involved.

Protests do not yield much either. They are met with stiffer punishments from the state. Recently, authorities arrested and detained protesters against illegal mining, which human rights activists have condemned as arbitrary. Mahama and Bawumia are known for tolerance, but even in the best of times, Ghanaians believe their politicians will always have their way, even if the people say otherwise.

These developments have attracted keen attention from the international community, especially as Ghanaians prepare for another acrimonious contest. For instance, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a policy in October this year to “restrict US visas for any individual responsible for undermining democracy in Ghana.” The presidential candidates have signed a peace pact ahead of Saturday’s polls, but the fear of violence remains a major concern for watchers of Ghana’s democracy.

The 2024 election, however, presents intriguing firsts in Ghana’s history. Dr. Bawumia is the first Muslim to lead a major political party in the Christian-dominated Ghana. He is also the first “outsider” to lead the NPP, which is dominated by the Akan ethnic group.

The two leading candidates in this election are from economically disadvantaged northern Ghana, another first. In the advent of the Fourth Republic, the two main political parties looked to the north for vice presidential candidates to balance the national equations. Mahama broke the jinx in 2012 when President Mills died, and he stepped into his shoes. Dr. Bawumia came later when he won his party’s primaries in 2023.

Mahama’s father and Bawumia’s father were the first and second ministers of Ghana’s northern region in the First Republic under Kwame Nkrumah. That their sons are making history on the national stage should have generated excitement, but the gloom, hardship, and hopelessness of the nation have extinguished the fervour that should have greeted this election.

Former President Mahama has only one term to serve if he wins Saturday’s election. Without the need to look toward the next election, a second Mahama presidency could allow him to implement tough policies. He could also be less accountable than in his first term since he will not need to win the people’s mandate again.

Dr. Bawumia, who has been Akufo-Addo’s vice president, is tainted with the sins of the regime from which Ghanaians need respite. He could be his own man and do things differently, but some Ghanaians fear his victory will shield elements of Akufo-Addo’s administration from accountability.

Whichever way Saturday’s presidential and parliamentary elections go, the prospects are bleak. As I said in my 2019 book, The Fourth John: Reign, Rejection and Rebound, Ghanaians are presented with either death by firing squad or death by hanging as they once again vote in a democracy that is growing but not maturing.