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Little violence, no blatant vote manipulation, and probably no surprises: Monday’s presidential election in Ghana is shaping up to be Africa’s most boring election this year. But on a continent that many experts say has slipped into a “democratic recession,” the absence of incidents marks Ghana as a rare example where democratic principles are seen as holding firm.
“Here in Ghana, whoever wins, wins,” said Mavis Nai, a 23-year-old who works in a bar in Ghana’s capital, Accra. Contrasting his country’s electoral process with disputed polls in Africa and the recent election in the United States, where President Donald Trump has persisted with claims of vote manipulation, he said: “No one says, ‘I’m not accepting it. Whoever wins accepts it. And the one who loses accepts it ”.
In Monday’s elections, incumbent Nana Akufo-Addo of the center-right Nuevo Patriótico party is seeking a second four-year term. He is expected to defeat his opponent, John Mahama, a former president of the opposition Democratic National Congress who served from 2012 to January 2017.
Chidi Odinkalu, senior manager for Africa at the Open Society Foundations, which provides grants to organizations that promote democracy, said Ghana had a well-deserved reputation for strong democratic norms. “If you look across the continent, this is the least dramatic and most boring choice, and that’s an absolutely great story.”
Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, co-founder of Afrobarometer, a polling organization, said Ghana had a well-established two-party system in which power changed hands regularly. However, he cautioned against complacency and urged Ghanaians to “give democracy a good look in the mirror to capture its many flaws and imperfections.”
Gyimah-Boadi said that both major parties should do more to curb gangs of youths that they used as proxy to intimidate each other’s supporters. He stressed the corrosive effect of money on politics, saying that the government’s access to untethered financing from oil, commercial loans and China was dangerous in the absence of meaningful campaign finance laws.
In the past, when Ghana borrowed primarily from multilateral and Western donors, there were more controls on election-related spending, he said. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, which oversees governance, ranked Ghana eighth out of 54 countries in Africa on its overall index, a broad measure of the provision of political, social and economic public goods.
However, he said Ghana’s score had been dropping since 2015. Just weeks before Monday’s elections, Ghana’s special counsel Martin Amidu resigned after accusing the government of obstructing his investigation into a controversial plan to secure future gold earnings. Wunpini Mohammed, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, cautioned that Ghana’s democracy looked better than it really was.
“When we talk about democracy, it should not be limited to holding peaceful elections, but to how the most marginalized in society benefit,” he said. By that score, democracy had failed many Ghanaians, he said. “Africans tend to put Ghana’s democracy on a pedestal,” said Ms Mohammed.
“But that’s not necessarily how Ghanaians see it.” However, Odinkalu contrasted the Ghana poll against a series of elections in Africa this year. Across the continent, rulers had learned to use violence, money and constitutional tricks to play with the electoral process, he said.
In Tanzania, John Magufuli won 84 percent of the vote in October after the opposition candidate was subjected to death threats. That same month, Alpha Condé, 82, won a third term in Guinea in an election marked by violence after a new constitution allowed him to reset his presidency clock, overturning a two-term limit.
In Uganda, last week, opposition candidate Bobi Wine suspended his campaign after an escalation of violence in which at least 16 of his supporters were killed and Mr. Wine was repeatedly arrested and beaten. Yoweri Museveni, 76, president for 34 years, is seeking another term after removing a constitutional age limit. In Ghana, by contrast, there have been regular peaceful power shifts since the country returned to a multi-party system in 1992, Gyimah-Boadi said.
“In the minds of most politically educated Ghanaians, it has been understood that democracy is the normal form of government,” he said. Akufo-Addo has a record of perceived competition after the economy, which has benefited from the discovery of oil and high gold prices, racked up three years of growth above 6 percent until Covid-19 hit.
The government has also earned praise for its relatively strong response to the pandemic and for implementing free secondary education, despite problems of quality, capacity, and lack of funding.
Mahama’s campaign has been hampered by allegations of corruption during his previous administration and memories of persistent power outages. But his party is backed by roughly 40 percent of the electorate, meaning it only needs to win in two of the three shifting regions, which cover 20 percent of the 17 million eligible voters, to stand a chance.
“Ghana’s economy is not working for the people,” Mahama said recently, taking advantage of popular discontent over what many describe as stagnant living standards. A survey by the University of Ghana found that although party loyalty was strong, voters were willing to change allegiance, 54 percent said they would vote in accordance with the policies, and only 7 percent said they would vote for ethnic motifs.
Odinkalu said that Ghana’s democracy, while imperfect, was something other countries could aspire to. “It is a policy [race] so there will surely be some bruising, ”he said. “But most of what you are seeing falls within the [realm] of a civil and civilized strife. ”
