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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. STRONGMEN AND DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION:

THE GHANAIAN EXPERIENCE

by

Kevin S. Fridy

submitted to the

Faculty of the School of International Service

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in

International Relations

Committee Chair O' Deborah Bfautigam, PhD

Committee Member

Mark Walker, PhD

Dean of SIS U j CXj6~d Louis Goodman, PhD

Date q L Q Q \______

2001 The American University MSI Washington, DC

AMERICAN W nVtRSftt IB W ®

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UMI*

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Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright © 2001 by Kevin S. Fridy All rights reserved

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to sarah and my parents

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. STRONGMEN AND DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION:

THE GHANAIAN EXPERIENCE

by

Kevin S. Fridy

ABSTRACT

On 7 January 2001, Ghanaians witnessed their first turnover of power within democracy.

Noting this landmark, this thesis offers a comprehensive analysis of democratic

consolidation in Ghana. Is it fair to discuss consolidation in a country whose republic is

so young? Settling on an open-ended process-oriented definition of democratic

consolidation, this thesis concludes that the Ghanaian democracy is indeed strengthening

its defenses against undemocratic forces. What are the factors that have contributed to

Ghana’s democratic consolidation and what are the potential threats? Juan Linz and

Alfred Stepan’s model of consolidation is used to examine the Ghanaian state and polity

for signs of democratic acceptance. This thesis concludes that pro-democratic forces

within Ghanaian society have taken advantage of the stability provided by the republic’s

decidedly undemocratic first president to strengthen their country’s democracy. They

have made significant democratic improvements in civil and political society but

continue to struggle with grinding poverty and an ineffectual civil service.

ii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... ii

List of Tables and Illustrations...... iv

Chapters

One: Introduction...... 1

Two: Definitions and Concepts...... 13

Three: Democratic Transition In Ghana...... 49

Four. Democratic Consolidation In Ghana...... 76

Five: Tentative Conclusions...... 126

Bibliography...... 136

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF TABLES & ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 2.1: Definitions o fDemocratic Consolidation...... 26

Figure 3.1: Rawlings Great Transformation...... 56

Table 3.1: The State o fDemocracy in Ghana (1972 - 2001)...... 72

Table 4.1: The Ethnic Balancing Act (Percentage o f Seats Won by the Major Parties in Ghana's 2?* and 3rd Parliaments o fthe 4* Republic)...... 94

Table 4.2: The Economic Indicators o f Ghana's Economic Recovery Program (ERP)...... 122

iv

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On 7 January 2001, Ghanaians from all walks of life poured onto the streets of Accra to

make their way towards Independence Square. There, they were joined by Members of

Parliament, Supreme Court Justices, notable chiefs, business leaders, President Eyadema

of Togo, President Wade of Slndgal, President Corapaord of Burkina Faso, President

Obasanjo of Nigeria, and Deputy President Zuma of South Africa. While some in

attendance were undoubtedly there to celebrate the electoral victory of their candidate or

the defeat of another, President John Agyekum Kufuor paid homage to the overwhelming

emotion sweeping through the crowd. “We demonstrate today our maturity and our

cohesion as a nation,” Kufuor stated in his inaugural address, “by the smooth transfer of

power from one democratically elected government to another.”1

Such a transfer is unprecedented in Ghanaian history. Ghana’s post independence

period has included four republics separated by long periods of military rule. Democracy

in the First Republic met its end at the hand of its creator. Shortly after gaining

independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah and his cohorts in the

Convention People’s Party (CPP) took a series of steps to entrench themselves in power.

1 John Agyekum Kufuor, ‘Inaugural Speech” (speech delivered at Independence Square in Accra, Ghana on 7 January 2001).

1

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Before their first term had expired, the CPP government had enacted legislation to

emasculate the judiciary, harass political opponents, and suppress dissent. By the time

the military junta calling itself the National Liberation Council overthrew Nkrumah and

the CPP in 1966, even the facade of democratic participation and competition had long

gone by the wayside.2 Ghana’s Second and Third Republics bear little mention as they

lasted a mere 28 months a piece. Both of the short-lived republics had their origins in a

military handover to a civilian government and both were removed from power by coup

d’etat.3 Only the Fourth Republic of Ghana can claim the successful completion of one

democratic term of office and, as of 7 January 2001, a peaceful turnover of power within

democracy.

The rarity of power transfers from one democratically elected government to

another is not unique to Ghana. Africa as a whole has been anything but fertile ground

for democratic turnovers.4 With the exception of the regular parliamentary coalition

shifts in the precocious island nation of Mauritius, there have been only five turnovers of

power within democracy on the continent: Bdnin and Madagascar had turnovers in 1996,

2 Kumi Ansah-Koi, “Safeguarding Human Rights In Ghana’s Fourth Republic,” in Ghana’s Transition to Constitutional Rule: Proceedings o f a Seminar Organised by the Department o f Political Science, University o f Ghana, Legon (Accra, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1991), 119-120.

3 For more on this period of Ghanaian political history, see A. Adu Boahen,The Ghanaian Sphinx: Reflections on the Contemporary History o f Ghana, 1972-1987 (Accra, Ghana: Sankofa Educational Publishers, 1992).

4 Unless otherwise noted, for the purposes of this thesis, Africa refers to the amalgamation of states commonly referred to as Sub-Saharan Africa, blade Africa, or tropical Africa. These states include Angola, Bdnm, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Cfite d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, S3o Tomd, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It is a common practice among scholars researching Africa to make such distinctions.

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S&ggai in 2000, and Ghana and Cape Verde in 2001. A quick glance at a group photo

from any annual Organization of African Unity (OAU) summit hints at the reason why

democratic turnovers have been such a rare species. In a given year one is bound to see

quite a lot of military men, several egoists who have decided their countries will fall into

the ocean if they are not in charge, a handful of rebels straight from the bush, a couple of

kings, and quite possibly an emperor-for-life. There will be few, if any, statesmen

claiming a mandate to rule based on the outcome of a regularly held democratic election.

This thesis contends that the historical transition described in the opening

paragraph is not simply a political anomaly in an out of the way West African nation.

Rather, the peaceful transfer of power from President Rawlings to President Kufuor is a

sign that Ghana is advancing through the complex process of democratic consolidation in

a region where the waters of consolidation are largely uncharted. The nation that set the

trend for self-rule nearly a half century ago is today breaking new ground for democracy

in Africa. This thesis goes further to explain that democratic consolidation in Ghana was

possible because a strongman trying to legitimize his personal rule through a democratic

constitution and elections unwittingly loaned some of his charismatic legitimacy to

fledgling institutions at the same time as society was rapidly moving to increase

democratic acceptance in the polity, especially within civil and political society. On a

continent where guided transitions have not been uncommon thus fer, this finding has a

great deal of potential regional applicability.

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Case Significance

Ghana is not a large country. In area it is slightly smaller than Oregon and in

population it has approximately 19 million people.5 Despite its size, the country has at

times attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. Historian Paul Nugent has attributed

the reoccurring academic interest in Ghana to the country’s willingness to serve as “a

social laboratory for the continent as a whole.”6 Kwame Nkrumah’s impatience with

colonialism resulted in Ghana gaming its independence nearly three years prior to its

neighbors. This boldness earned the country the title, “Black Star of Africa,” and led to

numerous books and articles about Ghana in reference to the Osagyefo, the roots of

African nationalism, and the Pan-Africanist movement.7

Alter years of economic mismanagement, neo-patrimo nialism, and military fiats,

Ghana began to look quite run-of-the-mill and scholars lost interest. Then, a slender

young populist known to the locals as J.J. released the government budget of 1983. The

neo-liberal structural adjustment program that would follow earned Ghana the title

“Africa’s economic miracle” from the Bretton Woods’ lending institutions and sparked a

5 World Factbook, “Ghana,” CIA Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.odci.gov/ria/ publicadons/fiictbook/geos/gh.html; Internet; accessed 2 March 2001.

6 Paul Nugent, Big Men, Small Boys and Politics in Ghana: Power, Ideology and the Burden o f History, 1982-1994 (London, UK: Pinter Publishing Limited, 1995), 10.

7 For example see Kwesi Armah, Ghana: Nkrumah’s Legacy (London, UK: Rex Collin gs, 1974); Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960 (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1964); F.M. Bourret, Ghana—the Road to Independence, 1919-1957 (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1960); Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks: Black Power to Pan-Africanism (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1971); Basil Davidson, Black Star: A view o f the Life and Times o f Kwame Nkrumah (London, UK: Allen Lane, 1973); Ali Mazuri, Towards a Pax Africana (London, UK: Wridenfeld and Nicolson, 1967); Kwame Nkrumah’s various works including I Speak o f Freedom (London, UK: Hrinemann, 1961), Towards Colonial Freedom: African in the Struggle Against World Imperialism (London, UK: Heinemann, 1962), Africa Must Unite (London, UK: Heinemann, 1964); and Yuri Smertin, Kwame Nkrumah (New Yoik, NY: International Publishers Co., 1987).

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lively debate amongst economists and political scientists regarding the costs and benefits

of structural adjustment on the African continent.8 With the instillation of Ghana’s

Fourth Republic in 1992, although a few remnants of the previous debates persist, the

discussion of structural adjustment’s impact on Ghana began to wind down and scholars

in large part turned their attention elsewhere.9 Those scholars who remained adapted

their research agendas to explain the country’s election outcomes and elucidate particular

features of Rawlings’ guided democratic transition.10

Believing President Kufiior’s inauguration is significant enough an event to

warrant the next round of great scholarly attention for Ghana, the work at hand is an

attempt to influence the foreseeable research agenda. In their book titled D esigning

Social Inquiry, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba suggest that good social

science research projects must be “important in the real world” and contribute to an

8 For example see Jeffrey Herbst,The Politics o f Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Kwesi Jonah, “The Social Impact of Ghana’s Adjustment Programme,” inThe IMF, the World Bank and African Debt: the Social and Political Impact, ed. Bade Onimode (London, UK: Zed Publishers, 1989); Mathew Martin, “Neither Phoenix nor Icarus: Negotiating Economic Reform in Ghana and Zambia, 1983-1992,” in Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline, eds. Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Donald Rothchild, ed., Ghana: the Political Economy o f Recovery (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991).

9 Scholars who wanted to write about the successes of structural adjustment turned their attention to Uganda. The topic that seems to have replaced economic reform as the primary interest of Africanists is democracy. While Ghana has received some attention for its controlled transition, the National Conferences in francophone Africa and the replacement of the Apartheid regime by the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa are more dynamic case studies of democratic transition and have garnered a great deal of attention.

10 For examples see E. Gyimah-Boadi, “Ghana’s Encouraging Elections: The ChallengesAhead,” Journal o f Democracy 8, no.2 (April 1997): 78-91; Jeffrey Herbst, “The Dilemmas of Explaining Political Upheaval: Ghana in Comparative Perspective,” in Economic Change and Political Liberalization in Sub- Saharan Africa, ed. Jennifer A. Widner (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Richard Jeffries and Clare Thomas, “The Ghanaian Elections of 1992,”African Affairs 92, no.368 (1993): 331-366; Nugent; Mike Oquaye, “The Ghanaian Elections of 1992—A Dissenting View,” African Affairs 94(1995): 259-275; and Kevin Shillington, Ghana and the Rawlings Factor (New York, NY: S t Martin’s Press, 1992).

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‘identifiable scholarly literature.”11 It is these dual goals that drive the current inquiry on

democratic consolidation in Ghana.

For the real world, a project that studies democratic consolidation in Ghana is

important for the millions of Ghanaians who value their democracy and wish to see it

flourish. The following case study points to things Ghanaians have done to protect their

democracy thus far and things that must be done to maintain it in the future. It is also

important because there are several African countries struggling with democratization

and a few dealing with fledgling democracies. Where are the citizens of these countries

to focus their energies if their ultimate goal is to not only to attain democracy, but also

retain it for the long haul?

Africa is not a homogenous continent and research on Ghana is not wholly

applicable to its neighbors. This being said, one can make the reasonable generalization

that states in Africa are characterized by their “deep ethnic divisions, a very shallow

sense of nationhood, thinly established political institutions with little depth of

experience, lack of indigenous managerial and technical talent, [and] extreme economic

dependence.”12 These structural constraints have, to a certain extent, hindered Ghana’s

progress down the path of democratic consolidation. How has Ghana adjusted to deal

with the hindrances and what has hitherto proven itself an intractable impediment? The

11 Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference In Qualitative Research (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 1994), IS.

a Larry Diamond, “Introduction: Roots of Failure, Seeds of Hope,” inDemocracy in Developing Countries: Africa, eds. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 198S), S.

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descriptions and analysis provided in the following chapters offer answers to these

questions and hint at a possible model for democratic consolidation in an African state.

As of yet, there has been no comprehensive case study of democratic

consolidation conducted in an African country. Most of the democratic literature

focusing on Africa has concerned itself with the process of transition.13 As a wave of

precluded, blocked, flawed, and democratic transitions swept across the continent in the

early 1990s this focus was extremely appropriate.14 Since that time, however, the number

of transitions has declined and the proverbial wheat has been separated from the chaff.15

Some countries, like Ghana, Mali, and South Africa, have continued beyond

democratization to improve the state’s record for human rights, political participation,

and fair competition. Other countries, like Bdnin and Zambia, have proven their initial

democratic progress shallow and currently have governments closely resembling their

undemocratic predecessors.

With the majority of Africans still struggling under undemocratic regimes,

democratic transition should remain on Africanists’ agendas. It should not be assumed,

however, especially with Africa’s tumultuous political history, that once the democratic

wave reaches a nation’s shore the ebb will not take it back out to sea. Ten years ago talk

of democratic consolidation in any African country outside of Mauritius would have been

13 For the most comprehensive work on democratic transition in Africa see Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For the most comprehensive work on democratic transition in Ghana seeGhana’s Transition to Constitutional Rule: Proceedings o f a Seminar Organised by the Department o f Political Science, University o f Ghana, (Accra,Legon, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1991).

14 Bratton and van de Walle, 120.

13 Michael Bratton, “Second Elections in Africa,”Journal o fDemocracy 9, no.3 (July 1998): 51-66.

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laughable but with several of Sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-eight states meeting the

procedural minimum conditions for democracy, it seems appropriate to begin discussing

“the challenge of making new democracies secure, of extending their life expectancy

beyond the short term, of making them immune against the threat of authoritarian

regression, of building dams against eventual ‘reverse waves.”’16

With the literature on democratic consolidation in countries outside of the

continent growing by leaps and bounds, it is imperative that Africa not get pushed aside

in the debate. Scholars are beginning to pick up this agenda but as of yet the research on

consolidation has either been published as a disjointed edited volume or focused on the

dynamic between democracy and only one or two arenas of the polity.17 This thesis

gleans from my limited field work and a review of the disparate array of research on the

Ghanaian polity in particular, and African polity in general, a comprehensive analysis of

the process Ghana is undergoing to consolidate its democracy.

Methodology

While a large cross-national quantitative comparison of democratic consolidation

in Africa could potentially generate results far more parsimonious than those found in

this thesis, the paucity of African democracies and the continent’s unique resource

endowments and historical legacies would cause such a study to be difficult if not

16 Andreas Schedler, “What is Democratic Consolidation?,” Journal o f Democracy 9, no.2 (April 1998): 91-92.

17 Examples include Claude Ake, Democracy & Development in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997); Larry Diamond and Marc F. Planner, eds. Democratization in Africa (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and Economic Reform and Democracy (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Cflestin Manga, The Anthropology o f Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998;.

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impossible, and quite likely undesirable. Analyzing consolidation outcomes in the

handful of African democracies a liberal usage of the term “democratic” yields would

increase the statistical significance of one’s findings only negligibly while at the same

time potentially decreasing the depth of analysis in each individual case significantly.

Comparing a country like Ghana to democracies, both young and old, outside of Africa,

one runs a considerable risk of applying a theory that holds true in one region to a region

where it is not applicable because of drastically different interests, institutions, and

ideas.18

Instead of a cross-national comparative study, this thesis will investigate

democratic consolidation a single African case whose significance is described in the

above section. To evaluate the level of democratic consolidation achieved in Ghana, this

thesis will cull from the relevant literature the ideal type of polity for the promotion of

democratic consolidation. This ideal type of polity does not exist in the real world as

there are no actual democracies completely immune from overthrow and decay. The

ideal type is not, however, beyond the realm of theoretical reasoning. Using qualitative

data, the real state of the Ghanaian polity will be compared to this ideal type to reveal

Ghana’s relative level of democratic consolidation. This method of comparison allows for

analysis of an open-ended process of consolidation in a single state. If it is found that a

country’s polity is moving closer to the ideal type for democratic consolidation, as is the

case in Ghana, one can then look within said polity for the changes that sparked this

18 Peter Hall, “The Role of Interests, Institutions, and Ideas in the Comparative Political Economy of the Industrialized Nations,” in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, eds. Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 174-207.

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movement and their potential causes. In this thesis, analysis conducted on these changes

will rely heavily on observation, past research, and theoretical argumentation.

This methodology is not without its drawbacks. Single country case studies have

often been viewed as legitimate grounds for stimulating hypothesis but not for validating

and testing them.19 To suggest that this thesis flies in the face of this perception would be

greatly overestimating one’s ability to confidently apply the lessons learned from the

Ghanaian case of democratic consolidation to other countries. At base, this thesis

describes how a single country in Africa embarked upon the journey of democratic

consolidation. There are broader hypotheses that can, and are, extrapolated from this

case but these are left largely unvalidated. Acknowledging these limitations, however,

does not mean that suppositions presented here are pulled from a thin air never to be

rigorously tested. In Ghana, there have been observable changes in the polity which have

pushed the country towards increased democratic consolidation. Many of these changes

are cited in this thesis and although one can quibble with the choice of definitions or the

sequencing of observations and outcomes, there is a great deal of evidence to support the

fact that these changes exist and are strengthening democracy in Ghana. The recognition

of similar changes in another African democracy, while not a sine qua non sign of

democratic consolidation, would suggest similar democratic outcomes.

19 Deitrich Rueschemeyer, Evetyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 36.

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Thesis Organization

Chapter One explains the significance of a work on democratic consolidation in

Ghana. President Kufuor’s inauguration on 7 January 2001 was a milestone for the

country. While this thesis does not endorse the notion of democratic consolidation as an

end state, Ghana's Fourth Republic passing the first half of Samuel Huntington’s “two-

turnover test” is a significant sign of the process described in Chapter Two at work.20

Chapter Two surveys the literature on democratic consolidation. After a careful

review of the competing analytical models, this thesis settles on Juan Linz and Alfred

Stepan’s framework for evaluation.21 Their process-oriented approach is comprehensive

and looks at five arenas of the polity (civil society, political society, rule of law, state

bureaucracy, and economic society) for the acceptance of democracy attitudinally,

behaviorally, and constitutionally. The fact that Linz and Stepan have used this approach

to evaluate IS countries in Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist

Europe allows for immediate comparisons with the Ghanaian case study.

Chapter Three describes Ghana’s democratic transition. D.A. Rustow has noted

that “the factors which keep a democracy stable may not be the ones that brought it into

existence.”22 While this statement rings true for Ghana, the extent to which the tasks of

20 Samuel P. Huntington, The Hard Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 266-267. The “two-turnover test,” explains Huntington, means that “a democracy may be viewed as consolidated if the party or group that takes power in the initial election at the tone of transition loses a subsequent election and turns over power to those election winners then peacefully turn over power to the winners of a later election.”

21 Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South American, and Post-Communist (Baltimore, Europe MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

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consolidation are accomplished during the period of transition and the path of least

resistance set by the previous regime type and/or route to transition can greatly affect a

country’s potential for consolidation. Therefore, the analysis conducted in this chapter

will focus on the aspects of transition that affect consolidation and not so much the

factors that led to democracy in the first place.

Chapter Four takes the model described in Chapter Two and applies it to Ghana.

The chapter begins with brief analysis of the Ghanaian state. How does a relatively weak

state detract from a country’s ability to consolidate?23 Then the chapter shifts into an

investigation of the levels of democratic acceptance in the aforementioned five arenas of

the polity. One by one, civil society, political society, rule of law, state bureaucracy, and

economic society are examined in present day Ghana for their contribution to democratic

consolidation. Attention will also be paid to how each arena of the polity came to posses

its particular attributes and what changes could increase the particular arenas acceptance

of democracy.

Chapter Five serves as the thesis’s conclusion. It combines the process of

democratization described in Chapter Three with the analysis of consolidation from

Chapter Four to pull out the positive and negative lessons the Ghanaian case study has

provided for the rest of Africa. Also, the chapter will suggest a research agenda for the

future.

22 DA. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy; Toward a Dynamic Model,”Comparative Polities 2, no.3 (April 1970): 346.

23 For a discussion on the state’s ability to affect democratization see Alfred Stepan, “State Power and the Strength of Civil Society in the Southern Cone of Latin America,” Bringingin the State BackIn, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 317-330.

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As the foam of the “Third Wave” began to tickle African shores in the early 1990s, a

raging debate developed among scholars concerned with the state of democracy on the

continent.1 On one side of the debate stood those agreeing with Michael Schatzberg who

downplayed talk of democratization in Africa calling it “both arbitrary and terribly

premature.”2 On the other, were those in accordance with Crawford Young who wrote

that “it is time to...begin evaluating the breadth and depth of democratic consolidation in

various [African] countries.”3 At the heart of this debate was not an intractable

ideological difference but a disagreement over semantics. What do the terms

“democracy” and “democratic consolidation,” mean? How one answers this question

will greatly affect one’s analysis of democratic consolidation in general, and democratic

consolidation in Ghana in particular.

1 Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization In The Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

2 Michael G. Schatzberg, “Power, Legitimacy and ‘Democratisation’ in Africa,”Africa 63 (1993): 457. While these remarks were made almost a decade ago, to this day there are those who believe that talk of democracy in Africa is fruitless.

3 Crawford Young, “Africa: An Interim Balance Sheet,”Journal o f Democracy 7, no.3 (July 1996): 54.

13

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Definitions too strict relegate the concepts to the realm of the strictly academic

while definitions too broad devalue the concepts by making them endlessly applicable.

This chapter will delve into the literature on both democracy and democratic

consolidation to cull meaningful definitions for use in a country case study. Then the

questions, “How will one know if Ghana is a democracy?’ and “If Ghana is a democracy,

what is one to look for in an analysis of democratic consolidation?’ will be answered.

Defining Democracy

In 1956 the philosopher W.B. Gallie noted that democracy was “the appraisive

political conceptpar excellence,”4 David Collier and Steven Levitsky’s survey of the

democratic literature bears out Gallie’s remarks. They found that scholars, in their

attempt to increase analytic differentiation while maintaining conceptual validity, had

provided more than 550 variants of the definition of democracy.5 To make sense of the

cluttered landscape of democracy definitions, Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle

have developed a definitional matrix with one axis bound by procedure and substance

and the other by minimal and comprehensive. The procedure and substance axis

separates definitions based on how their authors would answer the question “[I]s the

nature of democracy best distinguished according to the form of its procedures or the

substance of its results?” The minimal and comprehensive axis separates definitions

based on how their authors would answer the question “[D]oes the definition of

4 W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings o f the Aristotelian Society 56 (1956), 184. Italics are in the original.

5 David Collier and Steven Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research,” World Politics 49,3 (1997): 430-451.

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democracy embody a m inim al set of essential requirements...[o]r does it provide a

comprehensive characterization that exhausts the phenomenon’s full complexity?”6

Given the relative complexity of the forthcoming definition of democratic consolidation

and a growing plurality forming around the particular quadrant, this thesis embraces a

procedural minimum definition o f democracy.

More than a half century ago, Joseph Schumpeter defined democracy

procedural^ as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which

individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the

people’s vote.”7 This definition is a response to three historical currents that have come

to dominate contemporary western political thought: classical democracy8,

republicanism, and liberalism. Taken separately, Guillermo O’Donnell explains, these

currents lead to undesirable outcomes: “Democracy without liberalism and

republicanism would become majority tyranny; liberalism without democracy and

republicanism would become plutocracy; and republicanism without liberalism and

democracy would degenerate into the paternalistic rule of a self-righteous elite.”9 Taken

6 Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12.

7 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950), 269.

* The term “classical democracy” is used here to make a differentiation with “contemporary democracy.” Classical democracy refers to die notion of rule by the people. Contemporary democracy, which will throughout this paper be referred to simply as democracy, embraces classical democracy but combines it with a notion of republican governance and liberal rights. Perhaps this confusing situation was the impetus for Robert Dahl to use the term “polyarchy” to refer to “contemporary democracy.”

9 Guillermo O’Donnell, “Horizontal Accountability in New Democracies,”Journal o f Democracy 9, no3 (July 1998): 15.

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together, however, the sometimes-uneasy mixture of classical democracy, republicanism,

and liberalism begets the institutional arrangement described by Schumpeter.

The three essential conditions Robert Dahl posits must be met for a country to be

considered a “polyarchy” break down Schumpeter’s definition and encompass the three

currents that comprise modem democracies in an extremely parsimonious and

measurable way. Although Dahl used the term “polyarchy” instead of democracy for the

sake of differentiating a concept in practice from a concept in its platonic form, the

conditions of competition, political participation, and civil and political liberties have

become widely accepted as the individually necessary and mutually sufficient conditions

for a democracy.10 One uses these conditions as one uses a toggle switch. For each

country a deduction can be made as to whether the level of competition, the level of

political participation, and the level of civil and political liberties are adequate for a

democracy. If a country is adequate in all three conditions, it is to be considered a

democracy. If a country is not considered adequate in at least one condition it is not to be

considered a democracy. It is important to note that the aforementioned conditions for

democracy measure a particular moment in time and point to whether a country is, or is

not, a democracy at that given time. Also, the conditions indicate the state of being a

democracy and not the level of democracy or the sustainability of that democracy.

Following is a detailed discussion of each of the necessary democratic preconditions.

Competition among individuals or organized groups for the seats of government

power occurring at regular intervals without the use, or threat, of force is the first

10 Robert Dahl, Polyarchy; Participation and Opposition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 3-4.

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condition of democracy.11 Tapping into the current of republicanism, competition that

meets the above requirements ensures that a usable mechanism is in place for the removal

of leadership that is not serving society’s best interests as judged by those allowed to

adjudicate the competition. This component of democracy does not require universal

suffrage or even elections although in practice relatively few competitive regimes exist

without a poll of some sort. What competition requires is “an opposition with some

nontrivial chance of winning office.”12 One can imagine a country with millions of

citizens that are ruled by one woman chosen from, and by, a cohort of four philosophers

who decide on a monthly basis who shall rule by playing a game of bridge. Such a

country would pass the competition standard for a democracy although it would not be

considered a democracy for foiling to achieve adequacy in the other conditions of

democracy. In the real world, “de fecto one-party democracy” and military junta are the

most common forms of governments that lack the competitive component of

democracy.13

“Both historically and contemporaneously,” Dahl explains, “regimes...vary in the

proportion of the population entitled to participate.”14 To understand the value of the

11 Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishing, 1990), 6.

a Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 9.

13 The term “de facto one-party democracy” is taken from Adrian Leftwich, “Governance, Democracy, and Development in the Third World,” Third World Quarterly 14 (1993): 613. The “democracy” in “de facto one-party democracy” is a misnomer and a pollution of the original concept of democracy. “De facto one- party democracies” are participatory and liberal regimes that lack competition because of a legal or institutional construct, but not democracies.

14 Dahl, 4.

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democratic component of political participation, all one has to do is interview individuals

from a state that withheld the right from them. It is doubtful that there are many black

South Africans who would, at this day, choose to go back to an Apartheid system despite

the fret that the governments of South Africa both pre- and post-1994 have been selected

through multiparty elections. Barrington Moore, Jr. noted in his treatise on theSocial

Origins o f Dictatorship and Democracy that the struggle “to obtain a share for the

underlying population in the making of rules” predates the notion of the state and

provides one of the keystones for democracy.15 While universal adult participation in the

political process for all citizens is clearly a necessity for any democratic state, it is not

sufficient. Were the majority black South Africans to have unanimously supported the

torture of all Afrikaner speaking whites or establish a constitution forbidding individuals

who were not ANC members from holding political office instead of following the path

they have chosen, their government would be participatory but far from democratic.

The final component of the triumvirate that constitutes democracy bears a striking

resemblance to the liberalism current. Finding their roots in John Locke’s “Natural

Law,” the framers of the US Constitution’s “Inalienable Rights,” and the United Nation’s

“Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” civil and political liberties draw lines that

even governments that are elected in competitive and participatory elections cannot cross

if they hope to maintain the democratic designation. Illiberal democracies, also known as

electoral democracies, are deceptive in that they camouflage themselves as “democratic”

when election time rolls around. Terry Karl tags the inaccurate labeling of illiberal and

15 Barrington Moore, Jr.,Social Origins o f Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making o f the Modem World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), 414.

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electoral democracies as democratic, the “fallacy of electoralism.”16 Because civil and

political rights are much more difficult to observe than competition and participation,

they are simultaneously harder for benevolent governments to enforce and easier for

malevolent governments to violate undetected. For this reason, participatory competitive

governments that abuse the rights and liberties of their citizens, or fail to do an adequate

job protecting them, are not uncommon.

Chapter Three of this thesis examines Ghana’s democratic transition by looking at

the levels of competition, participation, and civil and political liberties in the country over

a period of time. Unlike regime transitions where a military or one-party regime is

replaced overnight by a distinct civilian regime that embraces all three necessary

democratic components, Ghana’s transition was slow, halting, and messy.17 The fact that

the military PNDC government chaired by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings was

replaced by the civilian NDC government led by President Jerry John Rawlings meant

that not all of the components of democracy were realized by the citizens of Ghana at the

same time. In feet, as Chapter Three will explain, there were several years separating the

first elections of Ghana's Fourth Republic and the achievement by government of a

democratically acceptable respect for civil rights and political liberties. By breaking

democracy up into its three components as Dahl has done, the nuances of Ghana’s

protracted transition are not lost and one is not left with the unacceptable option of either

16 Terry Lynn Karl, “Imposing Consent: Electoral ism and Democratization in El Salvador,” inElections and Democratization in Latin America, eds. Paul W. Drake and Eduardo Silva (La Jolla, CA: University of Califomia-San Diego, Center for International Studies, 1986), 9-36.

17 Gfiran Hyden, “Top-Down Democratization in Tanzania,”Journal o f Democracy 10, no.4 (October 1999): 154.

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declaring Ghana a democracy before it has fully achieved the right or ignoring progress

in the process of transition.

Defining Democratic Consolidation

Like the term democracy, the phrase “democratic consolidation” has been subject

to extreme forms of theoretical molestation. For one reason or another, scholars have

found it beneficial to engage in what Jennifer Whiting refers to as “definitional

gerrymandering” to make the concept fit a certain situation, encompass a beloved value,

or explain a predetermined outcome.18 While acknowledging the fine line between

desiring precise definitions and being intellectually arrogant, it is unavoidable that upon

entering a debate one is forced to take a stand. After reviewing the scholarly arguments

revolving around the question, “What is democratic consolidation?” and given the

Dahlian components of democracy embraced earlier in this chapter, three categories of

democratic consolidation definitions rise to the fore. These categories described in the

following paragraphs will be labeled democratic transition, democratic enhancement, and

democratic consolidation. While the latter category will be judged to contain the accurate

definition of consolidation, the former two categories must be recognized as influential

albeit inappropriate for the work at hand.

18 Jennifer Whiting, personal communication to David Collier and Steven Levitsky cited in Collier and Levitsky, 445.

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Consolidation as Democratic Transition

Consolidation definitions M ing into the category labeled “democratic transition”

undercount the components of democracy. In doing so, these definitions incorrectly label

countries democratic that lack at least one of the components of democracy: competition,

political participation, and/or civil and political liberties. Collier and Levitsky have

culled some of the adjective encumbered culprits of this offense19: limited, male,

oligarchical, controlled, de facto one-party, restrictive, electoral, hard, and illiberal

democracy.20 After labeling countries “democratic” despite their obvious inadequacy in

one or more of democracy’s fundamental components, some scholars have argued that

democratic consolidation entails the attainment of the missing components. Country A

which holds participatory and competitive parliamentary elections every four years but

has a horrible record of abusing its citizens’ civil liberties, a proponent of this definition

of consolidation would argue, could consolidate its democracy by respecting civil

19 Ibid., 440. The types of democracy listed are taken from this work.

20 Limited democracy from Ronald P. Archer, “Party Strength and Weakness in Columbia’s Besieged Democracy,” in Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America, eds. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 166. Male democracy from Georg Sorensen,Democracy and Democratization: Process and Prospects in a Changing (Boulder, World CO: Westview Press, 1993), 20. Oligarchical democracy from Jonathan Hartlyn and Arturo Valenzuela, “Democracy in Latin America since 1930,” in The Cambridge History o f Latin America, volume 6, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 99. Controlled democracy from Bruce Michael Bagley, “Colombia: National Front and Economic Development,” in Politics, Policies, and Economic Development in Latin America, ed. Robert Wesson (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1984), 125. De facto one-party democracy from Lefhvich, 613. Restrictive democracy from Carlos H. Waisman, “Argentina: Autarkic Industrialization and Illegitimacy,” in Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America, eds. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1989), 69. Electoral democracy from Axel Hadenius, “The Duration of Democracy: Institutional vs. Socio-economic Factors,” Defining in ami measuring Democracy, ed. David Beetham (London, United Kingdom: Sage Publications, 1994X 69. Hard democracy from Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter,Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 9. Illiberal democracy from Donald Emmerson, “Region and Recalcitrance: Questioning Democracy in Southeast Asia” (Paper presented at the World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Berlin, 1994), 14.

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liberties. The flaw in this logic is that Country A has no democracy at all, let alone one

in the process of consolidation, until it respects civil liberties.

Avoiding the inaccurate use of the phrase “democratic consolidation,” Guillermo

O’Donnell and Phillippe Schmitter have described a process identical to the mislabeled

consolidation in the previous paragraph. “Transitions,” they write, “are delimited on the

one side, by the launching of the process of dissolution of an authoritarian regime and, on

the other, by the installation of some form of democracy, the return to some form of

authoritarian rule, or the emergence of a revolutionary alternative.”21 Consolidation as

democratic transition, the name of the category of consolidation presently being

considered, is not realty consolidation at all Rather, consolidation as democratic

transition is the successful latter half of the process O’Donnell and Schmitter correctly

label “transition.”

If a viable opposition party were to build up enough support to seriously

challenge SWAPO at the polls in Namibia while everything else remained constant in the

country, observers of the event would be witnessing a transition from authoritarian rule

(the colonial government of apartheid South Africa) to democracy. The fact that this

transition will have been long and protracted as a result of the difficult struggle for

independence’s political legacy does not take away from this reality.22 Not all

21 O’Donnell and Schmitter, 6.

22 John S. Saul and Colin Leys,Namibia's Liberation Struggle: The Two-Edged Sword (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1995).

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democratic transitions are as bhint as Benin’s was in 1991.23 Ghana is a case-in-point

that will be described in greater detail in the following chapter.

Consolidation as Democratic Enhancement

The argument put forth here is that democracy is a good in-and-of-itself. This

argument in no way, shape, or form suggests that all desirable norms and behaviors are

contained within a democracy or that all non-democracies are structurally unable to

possess any coveted qualities. Put simply, democracies sometimes do bad things and

non-democracies sometimes do good things. While this point has been largely accepted

after years of scholarly debate, consolidation has taken up democracy’s slack and become

to political scientists what an appropriation bill is to politicians, a convenient place for

pork. Noting this tendency, Andreas Schedler commented that the list of conditions for

democratic consolidation “has expanded beyond all recognition.” Schedler continues his

criticism by listing some of the many consolidation free riders:

popular legitimation, the diffusion of democratic values, the neutralization of antisystem actors, civilian supremacy over the military, the elimination of authoritarian enclaves, party building, the organization of functional interests, the stabilization of electoral rules, the routinization of politics, the decentralization of state power, the introduction ofmechanisms o f direct democracy, judicial reform, the alleviation of poverty, and economic stabilization.

Consolidation as democratic enhancement is the notion that any quality that makes a

democratic government “better” is a component of democratic consolidation.

23 Kathryn Nwajiaku, “The National Conferences in Benin and Togo Revisited,” The Journal o f Modern African Studies 32, noJ (1994): 429-447.

24 Andreas Schedler, “What is Democratic Consolidation?,”Journal o f Democracy 9, no2 (April 1998): 91-92.

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There is a strong positive correlation between those who emphasize the

substantive aspects of democracy and those who feel compelled to cajole cherished

values into the definition of democratic consolidation. Given the decidedly procedural

explanation of democracy in the introduction, it should come as no shock that

“conceptual stretching” will be ardently avoided here.25 A recent Afro barometer reported

by Michael Bratton and Robert Mattes showed that among the Africans they interviewed,

almost seven out of ten defined democracy in procedural terms while fewer than one in

five referred to substantive outcomes.26 Taking heed, topics like national unity, social

and economic development, and equality of outcomes will be set aside for another

discussion. While they are qualities whose absence may greatly reduce the quality of life

in a given democracy, it is quite possible that they are unlinked to democracy or

consolidation and are at best signs o f consolidation and not defining attributes.

Democratic Consolidation

Having naysayed democratic transition and democratic enhancement as

definitions for democratic consolidation, one must provide an alternative definition or

risk being labeled objectionable. With democratic transition explaining the process of

moving countries toward democracy and democratic enhancement explaining the process

of moving a democracy towards benevolence, there are three potential democratic

23 David Collier and James E. Mahon, Jr., “Conceptual ‘Stretching’ Revisited: Adapting Categories in Comparative Analysis,” American Political Science Review 87 (December 1993): 845-855.

26 Michael Bratton and Robert Mattes, “How People View Democracy: Africans’ Surprising Universalism,” Journal o f Democracy 12, no.l (January 2001): 110. The Afrobarometer is a large-scale crossnational survey conducted between July 1999 and February 2000 in Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe. There were a total of 10,398 survey respondents.

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processes still to be discussed. Two of these processes are antithetical to democratic

transition and democratic enhancement. At the cost of adding more terms to the already

overburdened literature on democracy, these processes may be labeled “democratic

regression” and “democratic depreciation” respectively. While it is doubtful that these

concepts will attract much scholarly attention outside of their prevention, the third as of

yet to be addressed democratic process is the much pondered consolidation. Andreas

Schedler calls this process the “’negative’ notion of democratic consolidation” and

defines it as “the challenge of making new democracies secure, of extending their life

expectancy beyond the short term, of making them immune against the threat of

authoritarian regression, of building dams against eventual ‘reverse waves.’”27

The discussion of democratic transition, enhancement, regression, depreciation,

and consolidation is more than just an exploration of the wonderful world of semantics.

Certainly for the hundreds of millions of Africans who toil under the many undemocratic

regimes, scholars must continue to examine transitions. With 31 of the world’s poorest

50 countries being African and with AIDS rates in excess of 10 percent throughout large

patches of the continent, dogged study of both democratic and undemocratic quality of

life enhancements are necessary.28 This being said, Africa today has a handful of

27 Schedler, 91-95.

28 Poverty was measured in terms of GDP per capita purchasing power parity. While there are plenty of good arguments as to why GDP is not a good measurement of wealth, given the limited use of die noted feet, it was deemed a permissible shorthand. GDP numbers were taken from the most current years available from Freedom House, “Table of Social and Economic Indicators,”Freedom House Online [home page on-line]: available from http://freedomhouse.org/survey/2000/tables/socecon.htinl; Internet; accessed 25 March 2001; and Central Intelligence Agency, “GDP-Per Capita,” CIA Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/fields/gdp_-_per_capita.html; Internet; accessed 25 March 2001. Far detailed information about AIDS/HIV rates in particular African countries, see Population Reference Bureau, “2000 World Population Data Sheet,”PRB Online [home page on-line];

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Figure 2.1 Definitions o f Democratic Consolidation

C onsolidation a s D e m o c r a t ic T r a n s it io n

Dahl’s Components of Democracy • Competition • Political Participation • Civil and Political Liberties

Democratic transition is the process of moving countries that are not democracies toward the procedural minimum components of democracy. When countries attain acceptable levels of competition, political participation, and civil and political liberties they cease to be undemocratic regimes and are transformed into democracies.

CONSOLIDATION AS DEMOCRATIC ENHANCEMENT

• National Unity • Social Development • Economic Development • Equality of Outcomes • and/or another perceived “good"

Democratic enhancement is the process of adding desirable qualities to a democratic regime. The list of these qualities can be endless and what one deans “desirable” depends largely on who one is. Enhancing qualities are not definitional aspects of democracy and can be added to undemocratic regimes without pushing them closer to democratization.

D e m o c r a t ic C onsolidation

Forces WoritingAgainst Democracy

Democratic consolidation is the process of making democracies less vulnerable to overthrow or decay. Instead of moving towards something, consolidation is a process of fortification against forces working against democracy. While the elements of this fortification are the subject of much contemporary debate, the graphic above illustrates a possible compilation suggested by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan.

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countries that can legitimately claim democracy and only Mauritius has more than ten

years of democratic governance under its belt.29 For those who hope the continent’s next

forty years will be more hospitable to democracy than the last forty years, this lack of

democratic longevity is disturbing. Research into fortifications against democratic decay

and overthrow is the key to realizing how Guiseppe di Palma’s challenge of making

democracy “the only game in town” can be achieved.30

Observing Democratic Consolidation

The ogbanje is a troubled soul in West African lore that cannot make up its mind

as to which it prefers, the land of the living or the land of the dead. This indecisiveness

leads the ogbanje to enter a grievous cycle of birth and death that torments its parents

with one miscarriage, still birth, or infant death after another. The diviner of the Afa

Oracle describes the ogbcmje to Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as “one

of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers’ wombs to be bom

again.”31 A native doctor in Buchi Emecheta’s The Slave Girl warns the protagonist’s

mother of herogbanje daughter: “she has an agreement with her friends in the land of

available from http://www.prb.org/pubs/wpds2000/wpds2000_Data_Available-GovtViewBirthrate.htnil; accessed 30 March 2001.

29 Botswana is often cited as an African democracy. While the country has had an electoral regime for the last 35 years, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has won by such large percentages at the polls that one can make a credible argument that the country is missing the competition component of democracy.

30 Guiseppe di Palma first used the phrase “the only game in town” to explain democratic consolidation in To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990).

31 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York, NY: Anchor Books of Doubleday, 1956), 77.

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the dead, to keep coming and mocking you.”32 While the diviner and the doctor both

emphasize the pain the ogbanje causes his or her parents, they underplay the value

attached to such a child and the great lengths family members will go to in hopes of

enticing the ogbanje to stay with the living. For those families who can afford the great

costs involved, ogbanje youth are covered with intricate tattoos and scarifications and

their appendages are adorned with an impressive array of bracelets, charms, cowries, and

bells. The reason the ogbanje is so reviled is not because it is unwanted. Rather, the

ogbanje is reviled because it is all too often accompanied with the pain of losing a

cherished possession.

Why begin a section on the observation of democratic consolidation by discussing

an ancient African spirit that has lost much of its significance in recent years with the

onset of urbanization and improvements in health care? The reason is that theogbanje

serves as the perfect metaphor for democratic consolidation. Democracy, like the

ogbanje, is a valued commodity. Recent surveys conducted in Africa, Eastern and

Central Europe, and Latin America showed that 75 percent, 65 percent, and 63 percent of

the respective samples identified themselves as supporters of democracy.33 For Africa,

democracy has a history of anotherogbanje~Vke quality in that it has tantalized many a

citizen and left misery in its passing. Democratic consolidation is the process of keeping

democracy alive and parallels parents’ efforts to keep their ogbanje child amongst the

32 Buchi Emecheta, The Slave G irl (New York, NY: George Brazillier, 1977), 18.

33 Afrobarometer (2000), cited in Bratton and Mattes, 112. New Democracies Barometer IV (1995), cited in Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer, Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 151. Latinobardmetro (1995), cited in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South American, and Post-Communist (Baltimore, Europe MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 222.

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living. With regards to the observation of democratic consolidation, like the attempts to

keep an ogbanje alive, the only accurate measure of success cannot be used until the

object of preservation has expired. As a “second best” measurement, trained traditional

doctors can count the beads that adorn an ogbanje's wrists or appraise the quality of the

tattoos on the child’s face to make a prediction as to whether theogbanje will grow to a

ripe old age or be tempted back to the land of the spirits in short order. In essence, the

remainder of this chapter is an attempt to expose democracy’s bracelets, charms, cowries,

and bells. In doing so, a “second best” measurement of consolidation will be uncovered.

Given the tremendous task of isolating the processes and structures that prevent

democratic collapse and decay, this thesis will rely in large part on the heavy lifting of

others. Most notably, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s fifteen country comparative study

of democratization in Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe will

be prodded for its contribution to scholars’ ability to observe consolidation.34 Linz and

Stepan begin their research with the notion that consolidation entails democracy being the

“only game in town.” Signs of this monopolization of legitimacy, they argue, are the

mass acceptance of democracy behaviorally, attitudinally, and constitutionally.

— Behaviorally, a democratic regime in a territory is consolidated when no significant national, social, economic, political, or institutional actors spend significant resources attempting to achieve their objectives by creating a nondemocratic regime or turning to violence or foreign intervention to secede from the state. — Attitudinally, a democratic regime is consolidated when a strong majority of public opinion holds the belief that democratic procedures and institutions are the most appropriate way to govern collective life in a society such as theirs and when the support for antisystem alternatives is quite small or more or less isolated from the pro-democratic forces.

34 Linz and Stepan’s research was published in article form, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies,”Journal o f Democracy 7, no.2 (April 1996) and book, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation.

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— Constitutionally, a democratic regime is consolidated when governmental and nongovernmental forces alike, throughout the territory of the state, become subjected to, and habituated to, the resolution of conflict within the specific laws, procedures, and institutions sanctioned by the new democratic process.35

After confirming a functioning democratic state, Linz and Stepan point to five distinct

arenas of the polity where behavioral, attitudinal, and constitutional acceptance of

democracy can be observed: civil society, political society, rule of law, state

bureaucracy, and economic society.36 Following is a theoretical analysis of the state and

the aforementioned arenas of the polity with special attention paid to their potential for

attesting to consolidation, their ideal type, and their adaptability to an African context.

Stateness

Max Weber defined the state as “a compulsory association with a territorial

basis.” He went further to assert that the state possesses the binding authority to make

legislation and legitimately use force.37 It is difficult, if not impossible, given Weber’s

definition, to talk about any aspect of politics without mentioning the state because every

macro-level variable is embodied in it, and every societal and transnational variable

directly affects it and is directly affected by it.38 Democratic consolidation is no

exception. Therefore, before launching into an analysis of democracy and its acceptance,

33 Linz and Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 6.

36 Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies,” 17.

37 Max Weber, “The Fundamental Concepts of Sociology,” inThe Theory o f Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons (New York, NY: Free Press, 1964), 156.

38 For a thorough discussion on the states position in political science, see Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3-37.

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or lack thereof in the five aforementioned arenas of the polity, it is necessary to examine

the functions of the state, its role in consolidation, and its presence in Africa.

Linz and Stepan include the condition of “stateness” in their model of

consolidation as a necessary precursor to research into democratization in the polity.39 In

essence, “stateness” is an inexact measurement of the difference between a state in

practice and a platonic state able to function perfectly as Weber describes; the slighter the

difference, the greater the “stateness.” Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda

Skocpol have broken this measurement into two distinct components: state autonomy

and state capacity.40 To paraphrase, state autonomy is a state’s ability to set its own

course with regards to legislation, policy, and the use of force in its sovereign territory.

States with high levels of autonomy have free range to set their trajectories while states

with lower levels of autonomy are constrained by special interests. State capacity is a

state’s ability to act on a course of action. States with extremely high levels of capacity

can get what they want done despite sometimes massive structural impediments while

states with low levels of capacity have difficulty pursuing a course of action on even the

most basic responsibilities of the state like defense, the maintenance of infrastructure, and

taxation. A country’s “stateness” refers to its relative levels of state autonomy and

capacity. Those states possessing high levels of each have a high level of “stateness”

while those possessing low levels have a low level of “stateness.” Whether one has high

or low levels of “stateness” has no direct correlation as to whether one is a democracy or

39 Linz and Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation, xiv.

40 Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back (NewIn York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 350-357.

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non-democracy. South Korea's amazing structural adjustment of the sixties and seventies

required high levels of “stateness” but had little to do with democracy or even

liberalization.41 Nevertheless, democratic consolidation is an accomplishment and like

any other state-level accomplishment, the probability of attainment increases along with

levels of “stateness.”

“Stateness” has historically been a commodity in short supply on the African

continent. Borrowing his model of state power from Charles Tilly’sCoercion, Capital,

and European States, Jeffrey Herbst offers an innovative explanation for the low levels of

“stateness” in Africa.42 He argues that state leadership confronts three distinct issues in

the process of increasing “stateness”: “the cost of expanding the domestic power

infrastructure; the nature of national boundaries; and the design of the state systems.”43

Generally low population densities and juridically protected borders have created a

situation in Africa where the cost of increasing “stateness” is still much higher than the

benefits an increase in “stateness” may potentially bring.44 Herbst illustrates this point by

considering road densities on the continent.43 Although this approach does not take

“stateness” head-on, roads are not only tangible results of state power but integral tools

41 For more on the Korean example, see Stephan Haggard,Pathways from the Periphery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 51-75.

42 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1990).

43 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and (Princeton, Control NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13.

44 Robert Jackson offers a thorough analysis of the effects of juridical protection of borders in his book Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third (New World York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990). He terms the difference between empirical sovereignty and juridical sovereignty “negative sovereignty.”

45 Herbst, 84-87.

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for the further extension of this power. Road density in a given country is a good short­

hand measurement of “stateness” and not surprisingly, Africa lags well behind the rest of

the world. In 1995, the International Road Federation surveyed 123 countries for road

densities and found that only Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe (all former

settler colonies), and Mauritius (an African standout in nearly every category) had more

than 1,000 kilometers of paved road per million people. Four countries, Chad, Ethiopia,

Niger, and Uganda had less than 100 kilometers per million people.46

Given Africa’s relatively low levels of “stateness,” is a thesis on democratic

consolidation in an African country a futile effort? The answer to this question is no.

There is no evidence that the process of increasing the levels of “stateness” cannot take

place simultaneously with the process of increasing the levels of democratic acceptance

in the polity. Also, democratization seems to show no real preference for states with high

levels of “stateness.” Therefore, even if the odds are against consolidation in states with

low levels of “stateness,” scholars must not condemn them to the academic hinterlands.

For a comparativist, these states provide an excellent opportunity to put Durkheim’s

organic analogy to use 47 The position of this thesis is that Ghana, and other African

countries for that matter, is not a strange or exotic case study for democratic

consolidation. Rather, Ghana is a state with low levels of “stateness” and its polity

reflects this feet.

46 International Road Federation, World Road Statistics (Geneva, Switzerland: International Road Federation Press, 1996).

47 Emile Durkheim, The Division o f Labour in Society (New York, NY: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964).

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Civil Society

The collapse of Benin’s authoritarian government under the weight of a National

Conference in February 1990 sparked a renewed interest in civil society in Africa.4® It

seemed like overnight what had once been merely associational life was transformed into

civil society and given new deference in the scholarship.49 Linz and Stepan define civil

society broadly as “that arena of the polity where self-organizing and relatively

autonomous groups, movements, and individuals attempt to articulate values, to create

associations and solidarities, and to advance their interests.”30 The components of civil

society are as varied as individual interests and include religious groups, women’s

groups, neighborhood associations, intellectual organizations, trade unions, business

groups, and professional organizations. Civil society, however, need not be the exclusive

range of large high-profile organizations with catchy abbreviations. Any self-interested

organized group within society that seeks to influence the state in some way, shape, or

form will do.

With regards to democratic consolidation, civil society is not necessarily an

attribute. The caliphate in northern Nigeria, Kalenjin mafia in Kenya, and Paul Biya’s

patronage networks in Cameroon all seek to influence their respective governments but

do so through undemocratic channels. They capture government or are captured by

government, the distinction is largely academic given the impossibility of separating the

48 J.S. Eades and Chris Allen, Benin (Santa Barbara, CA: CLIO Press, 1996), xl.

49 Michael Bratton, “Beyond the State: Civil Society and Associationai Life in Africa,”World Politics 41, noJ (1989) was ahead of the curb in his discussion ofcivil society on the continent.

30 Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies,” 17.

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aforementioned groups’ actions from those of their governments, and lose even the

appearance of autonomy. The variant in civil society that contributes to consolidation at

least accepts the tenets of democracy as good and at best incorporates Gabriel Almond

and Sidney Verba’s participatory civic culture and Robert Putnam’s horizontal linkages.51

These groups try to influence policy from outside of government and not from within.

They also, embrace competition, participation, and civil and political liberties although

these are not necessarily them primary concerns.

The composition of African civil society has been described as “incipient and still

ambiguous...and the shape of its social structures vary substantially from place to place

and country to country.”52 There are the usual suspects, labor unions, churches and

mosques, women’s and student organizations, professional and trade associations,

business groups, ethnic and community associations, clan affiliations, secret societies,

cultural groups, and various economic networks throughout the continent but these

groups vary significantly in numbers, power, and organizational capacity from country to

country.53 By focusing exclusively on these groups in states with relatively low levels of

“stateness,” however, one misses a significant portion of civil society.

31 Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); and Robert Putnam with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modem Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

52 Naomi Chazan, Peter Lewis, Robert A. Mortimer, Donald Rothchild, and Stephen John Stedman,Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa, 3rf Edition (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 100.

53 The list of civic organizations is taken from Peter Lewis, “Political Transition and the Dilemma of Civil Society in Africa,” in Africa: Dilemmas o f Development and Change (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 139.

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Whether one prefers the term “disengaged”54 or “uncaptured,”55 implicitly

organized interaction between disadvantaged members of society and the state in Africa

is well documented. Cdlesdn Monga describes the traditional relationship between the

African masses and their leadership: “They subverted the rules not by confronting them

directly, but by circumventing them very carefully, or even by using them to achieve

objectives contrary to the system they had no choice but to accept.”56 The weapons of

the powerless peasantry and lumpenpro letariat have been “foot dragging, dissimulation,

desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so

on.”57 Most of the new African democracies are only recently respecting civil liberties.

It will take time for their citizens to discard their old way of interacting with the state and

begin to feel safe enough to turn to a less passive aggressive form of state-society

interaction. In the meantime, organized circumvention must be considered an expression

of civil society’s discontent and mass engagement should be recognized as acceptance of

the current regime’s norms and behaviors.

54 The term disengaged peasantry refers to an action on the part of society and is from Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, “Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea,” in Africa: Dilemmas o f Development and Change, ed. Peter Lewis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 110-136.

55 The term uncaptured peasantry refers to inaction on the part of the state and was coined by GOran Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980).

56 Cdlestm Monga, The Anthropology o f (Boulder, Anger CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.), 7.

57 James C. Scott, Weapons o f the Weak: Everyday Forms ofPeasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), xvi.

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Political Society

Linz and Stepan define political society as “that arena in which the polity

specifically arranges itself to contest the legitimate right to exercise control over public

power and the state apparatus.”58 Like civil society, political society is an arena

propelled by interest The primary difference between the two arenas is that political

society can, and should, become part of government without violating one of its defining

principles and civil society cannot.

Within political society, the key institution is the party although this need not

theoretically be the case. Robert Dix defined parties as “major vehicles for the

recruitment of political leadership, the structuring of electoral choice and peaceable

political competition, and the framing of policy alternatives.”59 A mythical world can be

imagined in which individuals can communicate with their fellow citizens efficiently and

effectively enough to make the vehicle of the party unnecessary in political society. In

reality, however, systems of governance containing less than two parties have been

uncompetitive, unresponsive, uncreative, and, in a word, undemocratic.

For a glimpse at how this arena of the polity can contribute to consolidation, one

must look at the relationship between civil society, the arena of society interacting with

the state but disallowed from joining the state apparatus, and political society, the arena

of society affecting the state from within the state apparatus. Democracies are aided in

their consolidation when their politicalsociety is both distinctive and complimentary to

38 Linz and Stepan, Problem o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 8.

39 Robert R Dix, “Democratization and the Institutionalization of Latin American Political Parties,” Comparative Political Studies 24(January 1992): 488-511.

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their civil society.60 A distinctive political society is affected, but not captured by, the

plurality of interests that comprise civil society. Actors within a democracy

consolidating political society take the advice of their constituents under consideration

but are beholden primarily to their democratic principles. The relationship works in the

opposite direction as well Political society should affect civil society without co-opting

it. If this interaction is complimentary, political society educates citizens on the

constitution and the crafting of laws thus empowering civil society to participate in future

policy debates.

With independent Africa’s historical proclivity for military, one-party, and de

facto one-party regimes, political society is a relatively weak arena of the polity. A lack

of democratic competition in the aforementioned regime types pushes well-connected

individuals to hedge their bets in pursuit of hegemonic control of the state. Jean-Franfois

Bayart calls the result of this mindset the “reciprocal assimilation of elites.”61 In essence,

what has happened in Africa in the absence of competitive party systems working within

the boundaries of a democratic state is that state power has been concentrated in a single

node. Those wishing to obtain some of the benefits of state power must first ingratiate

themselves to the select few lucky, forceful, and/or charismatic enough to be close to the

nexus of power. This system has received much scholarly attention and is commonly

referred to as suhanism or neo-patrhnonial rule.

60 Linz and Stepan, Problem o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 8.

61 Jean-Fran^ois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics o f the Belly (New York, NY: Longman Publishing, 1993) 166.

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Unfortunately for those Irving under suhanistic regimes, political society ceases to

be a relatively large arena of contention and turns into a relatively narrow arena of back-

scratching. While the leadership in military, one-party, and de facto one-party regimes

have to reach out to the people with the power to remove them from office in hopes of

satiating their potential opposition, statesmen in multi-party democracies have to gamer

the support of broad coalitions within society. Ideally, these multi-party democracies

would accomplish this task by attracting supporters to their policy message. Given the

relatively short periods of continuous democracy in Africa, however, this ideal has been

in large part unmet. In the democratic interval between suhanism and consolidation,

recognizing that the African electorate has not generally been acculturated to debates that

go on in democracies, members of political society have often used charisma, ethnicity,

and state resources instead of ideology to gamer votes.

Rule o f Law

The notion of the “rule of law” is synonymous with Max Weber’s legal

legitimacy. In this type of legitimacy, the holders of legitimate authority are subject to,

and enforcers of impersonal norms decided on in advance for their purposiveness and

rationality.62 Governments that derive their power significantly from legal legitimacy

have bureaucratized structures of governance and judiciaries that are beholden to the

constitution and not to politicians’ whims. Weber’s other two categories of legitimacy,

traditional and charismatic, stand in stark contrast to the rule of law. Traditional

a Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modem Social Theory: An Analysis o f the Writings o f Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 157.

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legitimacy holds as the arbiter of justice the individual or group that can claim inheritance

of power from a past ruler. Charismatic legitimacy is derived from a leader’s desirable

personality traits and ability to mobilize support and wOl fluctuate greatly in quality from

leader to leader.63 Both forms of legitimacy are ad hoc and rules and justice wOl be

administered differently from individual to individual and from time to time. Although

these three forms of legitimacy are not mutually exclusive and rarely if ever occur in their

platonic forms, regimes that possess the “rule of law” lean relatively heavily on legal

legitimacy for their power.

Codified democratic laws by themselves are not enough to protect democracy

from decay and overthrow. For the “rule of law” to insulate a democratic regime, the

words and phrases in the constitution and laws necessarily embody the spirit of

democracy by encouraging competition, political participation, and civil and political

liberties. Given the difference in political outcomes between France, Britain, and the US

and the plethora of African countries that have mimicked their legal codes, democratic

commandments, although necessary, are not sufficient to consolidate democracy. Kenya

has a potentially promising constitution but an illiberal judiciary has allowed enough

loopholes to be exploited undemocratically that the ‘‘Bill of Rights” is now often referred

to as the “Bill of Exceptions.”64 In addition to democratic laws, the judiciary must

interpret the written law with the spirit of democracy ever-present in their readings.63

Without a liberal reading of the laws, the judiciary can single handedly erode democracy

53 Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Bedmmster Press, 1968), 215-231.

64 Kathurima M’inoti, “Why the Kenyan BQl of Rights Has Failed,” Expression Today (November 1998).

63 H. Kwasi Prempeh, “A New Jurisprudence for Africa,” Journal o f Democracy 10, noJ (July 1999): 140.

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although they are almost always joined by an undemocratic legislature or presidency in

this task.

In African countries, as in countries around the world, an absence of the “rule of

law” has historically manifested itself in two related forms. One form, commonly

referred to as corruption, occurs when leadership take advantage of their positions of

power to disregard the rule of law. Jean-Fran^ois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice

Hibou noted this tactic in their chapter with the telling title, “From Kleptocracy to the

Felonious State?”66 They suggest that the crimes committed by the late Zairian President

Mobutu Sese Seko in the process of salting away billions of dollars in Swiss bank

accounts have been surpassed by the decentralization of illegality. The authors note that

in many countries nearly every two-bit local official is circumventing the law for

personal gain. These circumventions are no longer limited to the predictable demands for

petty bribes but may include:

trades in human beings, drugs, nuclear material and works of art; piracy and banditry; certain threats to the environment such as the trades in ivory and endangered species of wild animals and the unregulated dumping of toxic waste; various economic orfinancial practices or malpractices which constitute forms of fraud or embezzlement (the pilfering of foreign aid, the illegal export of capital or natural resources, the large-scale counterfeiting of patented products, systematic tax evasion, the laundering of money from illegal transactions), or practices which are illegal in virtually every national legislation, such as the counterfeiting of banknotes; and the illegitimate use of the state’s coercive resources or of resources of violent coercion which are private and, hence, illegitimate.67

66 Jean-Fran^ois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou, The Criminalization o f the State in Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1-31.

67 Ibid, 15.

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The other form the absence of the “rule of law” takes is in reality only the Janis

face of corruption. Human rights abuses are the result of those in power denying legal

protections to those with less power. While Nigeria is fir from the worst offender, or

best defender, of human rights in Africa, the tragic deaths of Alfred Rewane, Kudirat

Abiola (wife of Moshood Abiola who won the presidential election of 1993, was

immediately imprisoned, and died mysteriously just days after his release in 1999), Suliat

Adedeji, and the Ogoni nine (including Ken Saro-Wiwa) at the hands of the Nigerian

government are high-profile and telling examples of the subjective denial of the “rule of

law.”68

Mentioning corruption and human rights violations on the African continent in

reference to a lack of the “rule of law” is by no means an indication that these two

plagues on democracy are equally distributed among the forty-eight sub-Saharan

countries or that they are more prevalent in Africa than elsewhere. Human nature and the

demands of governance make it unlikely that corruption and human rights violations will

ever cease to exist. This being said, consolidation will be aided by relatively low levels

o f each.

State Bureaucracy

Max Weber listed as the three sources of modem state power: coercion,

legitimacy, and bureaucratic organization.69 While the job may be thankless and

68 Eghosa E. Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria Since Independence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 302-303.

69 Giddens, 154-163.

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mundane, the role of the bureaucrat in democratic consolidation is significant because of

its effects on the other arenas of the polity. Given a hypothetical state with a civil

society, political society, rule of law, and economic society ripe for consolidation, a

dysfunctional and non-performing state bureaucracy can make the difference between a

seemingly bright future for democracy ami a painful regression into autarky. Even if a

country’s citizenry selects the best and brightest to fill the select few elected positions in

government and the elected representatives ignore corrupting temptations and enact

democratic laws par excellence and appoint top notch liberal talent to sit on the federal

benches, without office clerks, border guards, police officers, and project managers who

know the duties of their job, possess the necessary qualifications, and are compelled to

perform their determined tasks, little the government seeks to accomplish will be

realized. Regimes that get nothing done will be less stable than those with the capacity to

pursue policy objectives.

The ideal type of state bureaucracy to protect democratic regimes from decay and

overthrow is the same ideal type of state bureaucracy that will increase capacity in any

form of regime. It would include formal rules of procedure, a clearly defined hierarchy,

and a strict definition of functions. The bureaucracy should recruit and promote

employees based on technical competence and merit and the employees should consider

their salary full remuneration for their labor.70 A bureaucracy that fits the above

description lowers the cost of state and society transactions by increasing procedural

efficiency and increasing transparency with rigid rules. Lowered transaction cost and

70 Ibid, 158.

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increased transparency are goods in-and-of themselves that not only allow the current

regime to function better but provide reasons why an alternative regime might alter the

status quo and negatively affect people’s lives.

David Leonard makes a general observation about African bureaucracies that

could not be further from the ideal type. He explains that “[individual managers

are...subject to strong pressures from their kinsmen for support, encouraging them to find

sources of corrupt income and to use their hiring prerogatives for extra-organizational

purposes.”71 Anyone who has flown to an African airport, traveled across land on the

continent, or visited an African outdoor market knows well the extracurricular activities

of many African bureaucrats. The sight of immigration officials applying new and ever

fluctuating “taxes,” police agents searching vehicles without due cause, and business

license officers with a cart full of goods in one hand and a thick stick in the other are not

uncommon. A Ghanaian said of his government in the early 1970s: “We Ghanaians are

so accustomed to bribing our officials, and they to stealing our rate-moneys, that it would

be considered odd if we didn’t bribe and they didn’t steal.”72 Unfortunately, today a

similar statement can be made about the vast majority of the state bureaucracies in

Africa.

71 David K. Leonard, “The Political Realities of African Management,” World Development 15, no.7 (1987): 908.

72 Victor T. LeVine, Political Corruption: The Ghana (Stanford, Case CA: Hoover Institution, 1975), 12.

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Economic Society

Like a state bureaucracy conducive to consolidation, a functional economic

society is less a definitional requisite of consolidation and more a pragmatic necessity.

Linz and Stepan define functional “economic society” as the norms, regulations, policies,

and institutions accompanying a mixed economy.73 Given the fact that all of the world’s

modem macroeconomies are some form of “mixed” economy, this assertion appears

fairly obvious. Nonetheless, Linz and Stepan’s emphasis on the accoutrements of an

economy that is neither fully free-market nor fully command is important. Is there

political momentum for protecting the market from the impossible demands of society?

Do those in power recognize the state’s responsibility to steer the market when it appears

certain to cause harm to innocents? These are the questions that must be answered “yes”

for economic society to contribute to the protection of democracy.

Although it is not safe to assume that a well managed and equitable economy aids

the process of democratic consolidation because of the problem of determining sequence,

the opposite hypothesis, that prolonged harsh economic downturns destabilize regimes

has a great deal of anecdotal evidence to support it. The growing economic discontent in

the late 1980s in the former Warsaw Pact countries was partially responsible for the

lowering of the iron curtain and the recurring bureaucratic authoritarianism/populism

cycle in some Latin American countries has as one of its key ingredients concern for the

economy.74

73 Linz and Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 13.

74 Joan M. Nelson, “Linkages Between Politics and Economics,” inEconomic Reform and Democracy, eds. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 45-58.

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With the bad taste of colonialism still in their mouths, the newly independent

governments of Africa quickly went about the task of restructuring the capitalist colonial

economy. Their role models were predominately to the east.75 Their goal, because of its

relatively high addition of value and potential for greater self-sufficiency, was

industrialization. Their method, which was already in vogue in Latin America and

justified in the writings of Radi Prebisch under the auspices of ECLA, was import-

substitution.76 The aspects of a command economy (price controls, marketing boards,

overvalued exchange rates, and import licenses) that accompanied such a policy had

unanticipated negative consequences. High levels of government intervention created

economic rents that were for too tempting for government officials not to exploit and

soon enough peasant formers did not have the right incentives to produce taxable goods

and the industrial parastatals were unable and unwilling to stay in the black.77 After years

of hollowing out the state, even leaders as determined and good mtentioned as Julius

Nyerere were forced to allow the markets to function freer or risk losing complete control

of their countries.78

75 Immediately following independence, the states of Africa were forced to pick sides in a bipolar world. Most followed Kwame Nkrumah's example and shunned the West They preached the economic message of statism. There were a few, however, who sided with the West and chose a more market-oriented approach to their economies. Leading this camp was Cote d’Ivoire’s Fdlix Houphoutt-Boigny. For a detailed analysis of the disagreement between Nkrumah and HouphouCt-Boigny, see Jon Woronoff,West African Wager: Hovphouet Versus Nkrumah (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972).

76 Prebisch outlines his influential theory in Radi Prebisch, The Economic Development o f Latin America and its Principle Problems (New York, NY: The United Nations Press, 19S0) and Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Economic Survey o f Latin America, 1949 (New York, NY: The United Nations Press, 1951).

77 The aforementioned process is a brief description detailed in Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis o f Agricultural Policies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981).

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As for free markets, many of Africa’s international creditors are working under

the basic assumption that “Africa needs less government.”79 Despite the implicit neo­

liberal assumption that when it comes to the economy “market good, state bad,” without

an interventionist state, markets will fail to produce pareto optimal outcomes and they

will fail to distribute utility equitably enough to quell discontents. Africa may need better

government interactions with the economy but a full-scale withdraw would be

inappropriate and harmful Anti-collusion laws, the protection of property rights, the

ability to constrain or burgeon the money supply, and a consistent handling of

infrastructure fees are just a few of the actions governments take to prevent wild boom-

bust cycles and promote efficiency in the economy.

In addition, if the vast majority of voters want government to redistribute

resources by subsidizing health care, education, transportation, and/or other social

welfare benefits, as to some extent they always do, democratically elected leadership

must weigh the cost of turning their backs on their constituencies versus caving in on at

least some of their demands. The same goes for negative benefits as well, such as the

Qlegalization of child pornography or the sale of narcotics.80 There will always be

enough political momentum to convince government to intervene in some way, shape, or

form and this is not only good for democratic consolidation, but a predictable outcome of

democracy.

n Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa.

79 World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, DC: The World Bank Press, 1989), 186.

80 Linz and Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 13.

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Conclusions

Chapter Four of this thesis will take the aforementioned democratic fortifications

and offer an in-depth analysis of contemporary Ghana. Given the open-ended process of

consolidation described above, the analysis will not offer a tidy answer to the question “Is

Ghana a consolidated democracy?’ Rather, the analysis will offer a descriptive of the

present-day state and five arenas of the polity (civil society, political society, rule of law,

state bureaucracy, and economic society). Where, in comparison to the ideal types, are

the five arenas of the Ghanaian polity with regards to democratic acceptance

behaviorally, attitudinally, and constitutionally? Is Ghana moving toward the ideal

democratic types or away? How did they get to where they are now? Are there

impediments blocking an arena of the Ghanaian polity from further accepting

democracy? Are there situations in Ghana that will boost democratic acceptance in an

arena of the polity? Answers to these decidedly messy questions wQl shed light on the

likelihood of democracy surviving in Africa’s Black Star.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER THREE DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION IN GHANA

Competition in the December 2000 elections was fierce with John Kufuor winning the

presidency with 57.4 percent of the vote in a runoff and the New Patriotic Party (NPP)

gaining majority status in parliament by capturing 100 of the 200 available seats.1

Political participation in Ghana was also evident in the most recent elections. More than

60 percent of the adult population went to the polls in both rounds of balloting, no

significant group of adults were prevented from casting their ballots, no significant

parties were prevented from contesting the seats of government power, and both domestic

and international observers vociferously gave the election a “free and fair” tag.2 As far as

civil and political liberties, following Kufiior’s presidential inauguration Freedom House

upgraded Ghana’s Political Rights’ score moving the country’s Political Rights and Civil

Liberties indexed score into the ‘Tree” category for the first time since the days of the

Third Republic.3 While anecdotal, the fact that President Kufuor held a press conference

1 Agori Telematica, “Elections Around the World,” Agori Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.agora.it/eIections/eIection.htm; Internet; accessed 18 April 2001.

2 Voter turnout numbers are from International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, “Voter Turnout from 1945 to date: A Global Report on Political Participation,” IDEA Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.idea.mt/voter_turnout/indexJitml; Internet; accessed 12 April 2001.

3 Adrian Karatnycky, ed., Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey o f Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 2000-2001 (New York, NY: Greenwood Press, 2001). Freedom House uses the labels “Free,”

49

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where he fielded unscripted questions from a room full of independent journalists for

over an hour to celebrate his first 100 days in office goes a long way in justifying

Ghana’s improved ranking. A similar event had not occurred in more than 20 years.4

Given the components of democracy described in Chapter Two, and the information

presented above, Ghana’s right to claim a seat amongst the democratic nations of the

world is substantiated.

With the existence of democracy established, two pertinent research questions rise

to the fore: how was democracy forged in Ghana, and will Ghanaians be able to protect

their fledgling democracy from overthrow and decay? While each of these questions

draws predominately on a particular body of democratic literature, the former on

“transition” and the latter on “consolidation,” one must not lose sight of the fact that an

answer to either will shed light on an answer to the other. Democratic transition ends at

the exact moment an undemocratic regime is replaced by a democratic one.5 Democratic

consolidation begins at the point in time immediately following the end of transition.6

4 Amos Safo, “The President’s Historic Outing With Ghana’s Media,”Accra Mail (Accra), 19 April 2001; and “Les 100 jours de Kufuor taipouvoir” Panafrican News Agency (Dakar), 18 April 2001.

5 Sometimes the replacement of an undemocratic regime by a democratic regime is dramatic. The transition from the interim military government of Major Daouda Mallam Wanke to the democratically elected government of President Mamadou Tandja and his party, the Mouvement National de la Societd de Ddveloppement, occurred the instant the latter were sworn into office and took over the reigns of state power. Sometimes transitions are more understated however. In cases like Ghana, undemocratic governments and the democratic governments that replace them are peopled by a nearly identical set of individuals. In other cases, elected governments that possess the participation and competition components of democracy but lack democratically acceptable levels of civil liberties and political rights will improve their record into the democratic range thus completing a transition. Regardless of how dramatic or understated the transition, it occurs in an instant even though the precise moment of this instant may be unknown.

6 Sometimes this process of consolidation is short-lived and sometimes it is long-lasting. No matter how long a democracy survives, however, it is undergoing one of two processes; it is either consolidating or regressing. For a country to transition to democracy and immediately begin the process of regression

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While the two processes do not overlap in time, unique aspects of a state’s process of

transition go a long way in explaining the potential form and outcome of its process of

democratic consolidation. To what extent are the tasks o f consolidation completed at the

end of the transition period? What path of least resistance is set by the previous regime

type and/or route to transition? It is the search for answers to these questions that propels

the following analysis. First, Ghana’s pre-democratic regime will be examined. Then,

the route taken from undemocratic regime to democratic regime will be mapped. It will

be shown that Ghana underwent a transformation under Chairman, turned President,

Rawlings that took the country from suhanistic regime to democracy. This

transformation included five distinct phases and was managed, in large part, from above.

Ghana’s Pre-Democratic Regime

In the early 1980s, Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg released an influential book

titled Personal Rule in Black Africa. In it, they generalized about African politics

describing them as “most often a personal or factional struggle to control the national

government or to influence it: a struggle that is restrained by private and tacit

agreements, prudential concerns, and personal ties and dependencies rather than by

public rules and institutions.”7 Since the time of Personal Rule's publication a great

many things have changed on the continent

would mean that democracy would come and go in a period of time too short to observe. Therefore, the process of democratic consolidation has to occur over at least a short period of time in any regime that can be recognized as democratic.

7 Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982X 1.

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With the notable exception of Angola, armed movements of rebellion have

migrated from the southern tip northward and westward. The ANC in South Africa,

SWAPO in Namibia, and FRELIMO and RENAMO in Mozambique have laid down

their arms and entered government in their respective countries8 while the former Zaire

and Somalia have collapsed9 and the countries of the so-called Mano River Union have

threatened to destabilize West Africa with their on-again off-again civil strife.10

Following the M of the Berlin Wall, Francophone Africa witnessed an unprecedented

round of national conferences. Sparked by a successfiil democratic transition in Bdnin in

1991, civil society called for national conferences in Chad, Congo, Gabon, Madagascar,

Mali, Niger, and Zaire to push for nationwide contests for the seats of government power.

Most of these efforts failed but Africa, Francophone as well as Anglophone and

Lusophone, witnessed more democratizations in the 1990s than it had witnessed in all of

its previous post-independence history.u Much to the dismay of many a would-be

leader, coups that were once tolerated have gone out of vogue with the international

8 For a detailed analysis of the situations in all three countries in the early 1980s see Gwendolen M. Carter and Patrick O'Meara, eds., Southern Africa: The Continuing 2nd Crisis, Edition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982).

9 On the rebel movement in Zaire see Wm. Cyrus Reed, “Guerrillas in the Midst,” and in Somalia see Daniel Compagnon, “Somali Armed Units,” inAfrican Guerrillas, ed. Christopher Clapham (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998). 10 The Mano River Union countries are Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Some of the many political problems facing these countries in recent years are outlined in Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, “Mano River (dis)Union,” Expo Times (Sierra Leone), 27 September -1 0 October 2000.

11 For more on the National Conferences in Francophone Africa see Kathryn Nwajiaku, “The National Conferences in Benin and Togo Revisited,” The Journal o f Modem African Studies, 32, no.3 (1994): 429- 447; and John R. Heilbrunn, “Social Origins of National Conferences in Benin and Togo,”The Journal o f Modem African Studies, 31, no.2 (1992): 277-299. For more on the “Third Wave” of democracy hitting African shores in the 1990s see Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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community. As recently as 1992 the baby-faced, black beret quaffed, and Ray-Ban

protected coup leader, Valentine Strasser, swaggered into the annual Organization of

African Unity (OAU) Summit in Dakar and was persuaded by administrators to give a

press conference because of an inundation of interview requests.12 In 1999, Secretary

General Salim Ahmed Salim of the OAU announced Resolution 142, which bars heads of

state who come to power through undemocratic means from attending annual summits.

Interestingly, the measure is not retroactive so General Robert Guet of Cote d’Ivoire who

took power through a coup in December 1999 and handed over power to an elected

civilian government in October 2000 was not allowed to attend the 26th Annual OAU

Summit in Lomd chaired by General Gnassingbd Eyadema who came to power through a

coup in 1967 and has ruled Togo with an iron fist ever since.13

With all these changes taking place since Personal Rule in Black Africa was

released, one thing has remained the same. African countries generally remain

institutionally weak and tend to place a great deal of power in the hands of the man at the

top. The aforementioned changes in African polities are significant, but as a matter of

course they have done little to change the underlying rules o f the game.

Prior to democratization, Ghana was no exception. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan

have provided four ideal typologies of undemocratic regimes: authoritarianism,

totalitarianism, post-totalitarianism, and sultanism.14 It is this final typology, sultanism

12 Keith B. Richburg, Out o f America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (New York, NY: Harvest Books, 1997), 136-137.

13 Francois Soudan, “Azali et la 142,”L'Intelligent, 4 Ju ly -10 July 2000,19.

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described by Max Weber as “the extreme development of the ruler’s discretion,” which

embraces Jackson and Rosberg’s characterization of personal rule and describes the pre-

democratic government of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).15

Anecdotal evidence laid-out in the following section on Ghana’s democratic transition

strongly supports this point.

Flight-Lieutenant J.J, later President Rawlings, did not rule Ghana in a legal-

rationalistic way prior to democratization. As a matter of fact, Rawlings showed outright

contempt for many of the formal institutions of governance. He used his own personal

brand of charismatic-pragmatism and abided by his own principles and whims instead of

the state’s rules and laws. So, how are sultanistic regimes dissolved and what are the

legacies a sultanistic regime generally bequeaths its successor? Linz and Stepan suggest

that a sultanistic regime is most likely replaced through a natural death of the

personalized ruler or a quick overthrow by movements in civil society, assassination, or

armed revolt. They explain that regardless of how the regime is replaced its successor

will wrestle with a state unused to the constraints of strong institutions necessary for

democratic consolidation.16 The isolated case of Ghana does not discredit the logic of

Linz and Stepan’s argument but it does offer alternative answers to the aforementioned

question. It will be argued that the sultanistic regime in Ghana was able to adapt to

14 Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South American, and Post-Communist (Baltimore, Europe MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 40-54.

15 Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Bedminster Press, 1968), 232.

16 Linz and Stepan, 70-71.

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changing demands domestically and internationally and unwittingly loaned some of its

charismatic legitimacy to the democratic regime that would gradually replace it.

Ghana’s Democratic Transition

When Jerry Rawlings burst onto the Ghanaian political scene in the late spring of

1979 he was a slender man dressed in a humble Air Force flight suit who never missed an

opportunity to mount his soapbox and rail against oppression both foreign and domestic.

His populist message and revolutionary tone struck a deep chord with the masses and

earned him the nickname “Junior Jesus” amongst the common people.17 When Rawlings

was elected to his final constitutionally permissible term as president in December of

1996 he cast a much larger shadow, had a penchant for expensive suits both western and

African, and drove decidedly immodest Jaguar sports cars.18 He was still a popular

figure, especially in Volta region and rural areas, but his fiery rants against imperialism

and social injustice were less prevalent and appeared out of context while not completely

out of character. Given Ghana’s political history of sultanistic “big man” rule an analysis

of the country’s most recent transition toward democracy will have as its chief task an

explanation of Rawlings’ great transformation. This was a transformation that took

nearly two decades, a period twice as long as any previous Ghanaian leader’s tenure, and

occurred in five distinct phases.19

17 Mark August, “’Junior Jesus’: Showman Or Canny Leader,” New African, February 1982, 13.

'* Antony Goldman, “Charismatic leader bows out after 20 years,” Financial Times, 29 November 2000, Ghana 2.

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Figure 3.1 Rawlings Great Transformation

1979 1999

The young Rawlings is remembered for The older Rawlings wears designer suits, his slender appearance and drives fancy sports cars, and eats well. characteristic flight suit He never His speeches are still occasionally missed an opportunity to rail against spotted with populist messages but exploitation and oppression in Ghana seem out of context compared to his and abroad. Seen here in rural Ghana earlier years. Seen here addressing the speaking about the ills of kalabuleism, General Assembly of the United Nations, capitalism, and corruption. his current employer. Photo: Black Tech Company Ltd, Accra Photo: UN http://alafrica.corTVptK)toessayftawflng8/ http://www.un.ofg/avrphoto/198621.lpg

The initial phase in Rawlings* transformation is depicted by the young Flight-

Lieutenant described above. Although this period in Rawlings’ progression began at an

early age, the public was unaware of the junior officer’s disillusionment until 15 May

1979 when he attempted to lead a group of six coconspirators in the overthrow of the

Supreme Military Council (SMC) II government.20 With Ghanaians preparing for

19 Paul Nugent, Big Men, Small Boys and Politics in Ghana: Power, Ideology and the Burden o f History, 1982-1994 (London, UK: Pinter Publishing Limited, 199S), 269-279. Nugent suggests the breakdown of Rawlings’ tenure into the five periods mentioned here.

20 A friend of his at Achimota Secondary School near Legon reminisced of Rawlings: “He used to tell his girlfriend, Nana, now his wife, that he did not think she would enjoy being his wife because he was going to be involved in a struggle all his life to help the poor and the needy whom he saw as being unjustifiably exploited.” Kqjo Yankah,The Trial o f JJ. Rawlings: Echoes o f the" December 31 Revolution (Tema, Ghana: Ghana Publishing Corporation, 1986), 12.

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civilian elections to be held a month later, the failed coup was initially viewed with a

great deal of skepticism. A contributor to the Daily Graphic, a popular Ghanaian

quotidian, wondered aloud: “what had the adventurers hoped to achieve at this period

when the majority of Ghanaians have all turned their minds to June 18 and after?... were

they propelled by mere love of power? Do they have genuine grievances which they

hoped can be redressed only through staging a coup? Couldn’t they have directed such a

grievance, if any, through the appropriate channels?”21 As Rawlings’ trial for mutiny

progressed and his message filtered through the barracks and into society-at-large, public

opinion made an about face. A reporter for the sameDaily Graphic that had criticized

Rawlings’ first impression wrote of his trail just a few days later:

it sounded rather foolish for one to ask him of his aims when people were dying of starvation in the teeth of a few, well-fed, who even had the chance of growing fetter, when the economy of this country was dominated by foreigners, especially Arabs and Lebanese, whom successive governments had failed to question about then nefarious activities. The first accused, [Flt.-Lt. Rawlings], started talking about widespread corruption in high places, and stated that this nasty state of affairs could be remedied only by going the Ethiopian way.22

Rawlings’ populist rhetoric found an audience amongst Ghanaians who were also fed-up

with the status quo of corruption andmismanagement.

A successful coup on 4 June 1979 sprung Rawlings from his cell and initiated the

reign of the Armed Forces Revolution Council (AFRC) military government chaired by

none other than Jerry Rawlings. That government lasted 110 days and handed the keys to

the Castle over to the democratically elected Limann/People’s National Party (PNP)

21 Yankah,3.

22 Yankah, 16. The “Ethiopian way” refers to the extermination of governmental opposition in the mid- 1970s by Mengistu Haile Mariam and his henchman. Because of the massive amounts of bloodshed, Ethiopians coined the phrase “Red Terror” to describe the period

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government on 24 September 1979. Then, on 31 December 1981 in a political d£j& vu

paralleled by few, Rawlings, acting on behalf of the PNDC, entered the public radio

station in Accra and preached to all those who would listen: “Fellow citizens of

Ghana...this is not a coup: I ask for nothing less than a revolution. Something that

would transform the social and economic order of this country...Today, we’ve initiated a

Holy War...There is no justice in this society and so long as there is no justice, I would

dare say LET THERE BE NO PEACE.”23 It is this “revolution” that distinguishes the

first phase of Rawlings’ transformation. A search for a scholarly consensus on the

components of a revolution is futile so whether the events that surrounded Rawlings’

early years were sufficient to comprise a “revolution” or not is a topic better left to

another discussion. The reasons for, and the substance of the policies of the AFRC and

early PNDC governments, however, are integral in understanding this period in

Rawlings’ life.

Put simply, Rawlings’ self-assumed raison d’etre was the castigation of those in

power who were thriving on the poverty of the people. He was far from alone, or

unjustified, in his belief that previous governments had filled their respective pockets

with loot while the standard of living for the man and woman on the street gradually

declined.24 The AFRC and PNDC sought to address these perceived injustices through a

23 A Adu Boahen, The Ghanaian Sphinx: Reflections on the Contemporary History o f Ghana, 1972-1987, 2nd edition (Accra, Ghana: Sankofa Educational Publishers, 1992), 38. Emphasis in the original.

24 An opinion piece in theDaily Graphic in the final days of the SMC II summed up popular discontent: “It is all very well for people in authority to make speeches about self-reliance, tightening ofbelts and other such exhortations, nobody has yet told us how a household is supposed to exist without something as basic as soap...Nobody has yet come up with a coherent explanation about why in the year of Our Lord 1979, we should rely on com cobs rather than toilet rolls...How come that the government still maintains a fully staffed department of [the] Price Control Unit and yet nobody takes the slightest notice of how much we

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series of radical populist policies. In the 110 days of the AFRC, eight top military

officers, including three former heads of state, were shot to death at the Teshie firing

range,25 023,954,536 was confiscated from the accounts of top military brass at the

Burma Camp Branch of Ghana Commercial Bank,26 and the principle market in Accra,

Makola No.l, was razed as a warning for “unscrupulous traders to refrain from hoarding

and profiteering.”27 Newspaper headlines daily boasted of the regime's crackdown on

those who were not considered to be sharing the country’s wealth. In August,

emblazoned across the front page of the Daily Graphic was the quote: “SHOOT

SMUGGLERS ON SIGHT.”28 Some days later an article appeared in the same paper

proclaiming, “13 Smugglers Arrested.” Upon reading the article, one is thankful that the

border guards did not take Chairman Rawlings’ previous advice, as the “Smugglers”

consisted of 3 women, 7 men, and 3 school age children attempting to drive a Nissan Bus

and two Peugeot 504s into Togo loaded with a paltry 210 packets of safety matches.29

The first days of the PNDC were almost indistinguishable from those of the AFRC.

Rawlings hogged the headlines with moral epiphanies and sent cadres to punish petty

pay for goods?... and if once in a while somebody felt like eating one tin of corned beef it should not cost him half his monthly pay.” Barbara E. Okeke, 4 June, A Revolution Betrayed (Enugu, Nigeria: Ikenga Publishers, 1982), 27.

25 Yankah, 3.

26 Boahen, 23.

27 Augustine Aidoo and Kidd Darko, “Makola No. 1 Goes Down,”Daily Graphic, 24 August 1979,1.

28 Albert Sam Navrongo, “Shoot Smugglers On Sight,”Daily Graphic, 31 August 1979,1. Emphasis in the original.

29 “13 Smugglers Arrested,” Daily Graphic, 1 September 1979,8.

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hoarders and marketers. The only significant difference between the AFRC and early

PNDC years was that the PNDC claimed an unlimited mandate.

Lashing out against would-be capitalists and instituting price controls and anti­

hoarding measures succeeded in punishing a few individuals who had abused the public

trust. These tactics did not, however, do much to improve the lives of the average

Ghanaian. In feet, the economic outcomes during the reigns of the AFRC and early

PNDC governments closely resembled those of the previous regimes which they had

severely castigated. A. Adu Boahen, distinguished professor at the University of Ghana,

recalled his impressions of the period:

scarcity and escalating costs of foodstuffs especially in the urban centers, widespread unemployment, sheer hunger depicted by the famous ‘chains’ [protruding collar bones] which most people came to acquire, and with these all sorts of social evils such as stealing, armed robbery, confiscation of people’s cars in broad daylight, and the resort to various devices, fair and foul, just to keep the body and soul together.30

Two catastrophes in 1983, a severe drought accompanied by bush fires and the

expulsion of more than one million Ghanaians from Nigeria, compounded the poor

government policies to produce a situation ripe for civil unrest and a potential coup. On

top of the economic difficulties feeing the PNDC regime, three High Court Judges,

(Cecilia Koranteng-Addow, Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong, and Fred Poku Sarkodee), and a

retired Major and Group Personnel Manager of GIHOC, Sam Acquah, were kidnapped

from their homes on 30 June 1982 only to be found a few days later as charred remains.31

The murders outraged the public and despite a government probe into the matter and the

30 Boahen, 45.

31 New Patriotic Party (Ghana), The Stolen Verdict: Ghana, November 1992 Presidential Election (Accra, Ghana: The Party, 1993), 2.

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conviction of a low level member of the PNDC, the popular opinion on the subject in

Ghana remains that Rawlings and his close friend Captain Kojo Tsikata ordered the

killings. Rawlings, although he could not have anticipated the mass expulsions and

droughts, had his finger on the pulse of Ghanaian society in the waning months of 1982.

Sensing a growing discontent in the government’s “revolution out of control,” he began

to take steps to give the PNDC much needed direction. It is the search for this direction

that serves as the hallmark of the second period of Rawlings’ great transformation.

Given the dire straits of the Ghanaian economy, a consensus had formed within

the PNDC that the economy needed restructuring. There was no consensus, however, on

what form the restructuring should take. Although all the individuals within the PNDC

shared resentment for the corruption they witnessed in previous regimes, the

ideologically heterogeneous group split into two camps when it came to dealing with

Ghana’s economic woes. In one camp were those who wanted to look east for the capital

to restructure. The youthful leader of the neo-Marxist June 4th Movement, Chris Atim,

headed this camp and made much publicized trips to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia,

East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Cuba, and Libya in the spring of 1982 in search of

funding for a development program.32 In the other camp were those willing to fraternize

with the enemy, the IMF and World Bank, to get the Ghanaian economy back on its feet.

Dr. Kwesi Botchwey, economics professor at the University of Ghana and Minister of

Finance, led this camp of technocrats, and along with General Akuffo’s ex-Commissioner

32 Boahen, 48.

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of Finance Dr. Joe Abbey, dared enter PNDC meetings and suggest devaluating the

cedi.33

Rawlings sided with the technocrats over the radicals. After more than a quarter

century of alternating bouts of Nkrumah-styled “socialism” and welfare capitalism,

Ghana’s radical populist leader gave Botchwey the go ahead to plunge the country into a

series of dramatic IMF sponsored neo-liberal structural adjustment programs.34 Those in

the opposing camp were either removed from government or jailed for one of two

unsuccessful coup attempts.35 Rawlings rationalized the new reforms to theGhanaian

public by suggesting that the country “must not get into the way of thinking that

revolutionary activities are substitutes for productive work.”36

Why did Rawlings side with the relative conservatives when all his rhetoric up to

that point had suggested he was an anti-Western radical? For its structural adjustment

policies, Ghana was heaped with praise from international donors and in 1988, with its

population of approximately 17 million, was the International Development Association

(IDA)’s third largest aid recipient behind India and China, each with populations in

excess of 850 million.37 Rawlings had no way of foreseeing the massive amounts of

capital the Western donors would shower on the small country. He did, however, know

that the development assistance promised from the East paled in comparison to that

33 Yvonne M. Tsikata, Aid and Reform in Ghana (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1999), 64-65.

34 Donald Rothchild, Ghana: The Political Economy o f Recovery (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 4.

35 Boahen, 47.

36 West Africa (London), 12 September 1983,2103.

37 Hammond and McGowan, 78-79.

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offered by the West. Being a keen politician, Rawlings recognized that without quick

access to a lot of capital, public discontent was going to continue to grow making

overthrow more and more likely.

With potential opposition from previous regimes and radical elements of the early

PNDC marginalized, Rawlings and the streamlined PNDC entered a long period of

stability. From the release of the government budget in 1983 through approximately

1990, M[t]he regime simply ignored dissenting voices, while claiming to speak on behalf

of a conveniently inarticulate rural majority.”38 This third period of Rawlings’

transformation was marked by a growing confidence in both himself and the technocrats

and came to closely resemble the model of bureaucratic authoritarianism commonly

found in Latin America at the time.39

Minister Botchwey and his team of bureaucrats had nearly free reign to tinker

with both monetary and fiscal policy. In an extremely unpopular move, especially in the

cities, the government oversaw a series of devaluations leading to an eventual floatation

of the Ghanaian cedL At the time of the April 1983 budget, one dollar could buy 2.75

cedis. By October 1983 the dollar could buy 30 cedis, 50 cedis by December 1984, and

330 cedis by July 1990. Having inherited a public sector bloated from years of

patronage, the government, in another controversial move, let go 53,000 civil servants by

1989 and liquidated dozens of parastatals.40 The government told the public that its

38 Nugent, 270.

39 The model of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism is well formulated in Peter Evans,Dependent Development: The Alliance o f Multinational, State, and Local Capital in (Princeton, Brazil NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

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guiding objective was “the realignment of the price and incentive system in the economy

in favour of the productive, particularly the export, sectors” and economic indicators

suggest that the PNDC was successful in this task.41 In 1979 exports, mainly cocoa,

composed 11.2 percent of GDP while they made up 16.7 percent in 1989.42 As well as

increasing in volume, Ghanaian exports diversified to include large percentages of not

only cocoa, but timber, pineapples, industrial fruit products, and gold.43

Protecting the technocrats from public discontent was the military core of the

PNDC led by Chairman Rawlings. They took advantage of a series of draconian

measures that strongly discouraged speaking out against the government and allowed

security forces to legally punish anyone who did. The Preventive Custody Law of 1982

(PNDCL 4) closely resembled the CPP’s hated Preventive Detention Act of 1958 and

allowed the government to arrest and detain anyone “in the interest of national security.”

PNDCL 91 limited the application of habeas corpus, PNDCL 78 prescribed death by

firing squad for political offenders, and PNDCL 211 (a.k.a. the Newspaper Licensing

Law of 1989) made it legal for the government to close down newspapers and radio

stations critical of the leadership.44 It was these obnoxious laws and the “culture of

40 Rothchild, 9.

41 Republic of Ghana, Towards a New Dynamism (Accra, Ghana: Government Printer, 1989), 2.

42 The World Bank Group, “Ghana at a glance,” World Bank Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.worIdbank.org/data/countrydata/aag/gha_aag.pdf; Internet; accessed 1 May 2001. By 1999, exports made up 33.5 percent of GDP.

43 The World Bank Group, “Countries: Ghana,”World Bank Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.worldbank.org/afr/gh2Jitin; Internet; accessed 5 May 2001.

44 Kwame Boafb-Arthur, “Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) In Ghana: Interrogating PNDC's Implementation,” West Africa Review 1, no.l (1999), [e-journal] (accessed 9 May 2001).

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silence” they provoked in the general public, much more than the economic reforms,

which an opposition slowly coalesced around.45

A Ghanaian proverb explains: “Ye se krotwiamansa ani ntonnwi ye nson, nanso

ehe na worekogyina akan” (it is alleged that the leopard has only seven eye lashes in its

eyebrow, but who can get close enough to verify this?).46 At first only a few brave souls

criticized Rawlings or the regime for its record of human rights abuse and they were

quickly imprisoned, executed, or forced into exile. As time passed, however, opposition

to the PNDC grew in numbers and confidence. By the late 1980s, members of the Ghana

Bar Association (GBA), Christian Council, the Ashanti Youth Association, the National

Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), the Democratic League of Ghana, and the Kwame

Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards were regular and vocal critics of what they considered to

be abuses of government power.47 These groups were joined by intellectuals,

businessmen, and the man on the street in a burgeoning campaign to democratize Ghana.

A combination of the aforementioned domestic discontent and a difficult to

pinpoint but impossible to ignore democratic Zeitgeist sweeping the globe pushed

Rawlings to enter the fourth period of his great transformation.48 Professor Kwesi Jonah

of the University of Ghana traced the PNDC chairman’s rationalizations in general terms:

45 Kwame Boafo-Arthur, “Prelude to Constitutional Rule: An Assessment of the Process,” in Ghana's Transition to Constitutional Rule: Proceedings of a Seminar Organised by the Department of Political Science, University of Ghana, Legon (Accra, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1991), 47.

46 Boahen, 60.

47 Boafo-Arthur, “Prelude,” 43.

48 Zeitgeist is a German word meaning the “spirit of the times.” The fall of the Berlin Wall, the disassembly ofthe Soviet Union, and a mass round of democratizations in the Third World were signs of an international democraticZeitgeist in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Linz and Stepan, 74.

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To prevent its political opponents in general and the overthrown party in particular from coming to power in any form to take political vengeance, the military regime accedes to pressures for constitutional rule but devises every means to manipulate the process of transition to advantage. The main motive is either to install a friendly successor regime or at least one that would not be hostile and vindictive. However, if conditions were favourable, the regime would rather perpetuate its hold on state power by going through the necessary constitutional motions to legitimise its rule.49

Fearing a democratic revolution out of their control, the PNDC ordered the National

Commission on Democracy (NCD) headed by S.KJ3. Asante to take the public’s pulse on

the issue of democratization.50 On advice from the NCD, the PNDC enacted PNDCL 253

in 1991 to create a Consultative Assembly similar in purpose to the National Conferences

that were sweeping across Francophone Africa. The Consultative Assembly was to be

composed of representative groups within society and had as its task the advisement of

government on the creation of a democratic constitution for a potential Fourth Republic.

To ensure the Assembly did not push the democratic envelope faster and farther

than the government was willing to go, as happened in Bdnin, it was disproportionately

peopled with PNDC supporters. Forty-five percent of the Assembly’s seats were filled

with individuals from District Assemblies (two-thirds of whom were actual

representatives of the people at the local level and the other third of whom were PNDC

thugs), 46.5 percent of the seats were filled with individuals from government-recognized

groups within civil society (all offshoots of the PNDC like the 315* December Woman’s

Movement headed by Nana Agyeman Rawlings, wife of the chairman), and 8.5 percent

49 Kwesi Jonah, “The Monopolisation And Manipulation of The Constitution-Making Process in Ghana,” Ghana’s Transition to Constitutional Rule: Proceedings o f a Seminar Organised by the Department o f Political Science, University o f Ghana, Legon (Accra, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1991), 78.

50 Nugent, 216.

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were directly nominated by the government.51 If stacking the deck in their favor in the

Consultative Assembly was not sufficient to protect the PNDC’s ability to name its

successor, the other aspects of PNDCL 253 were. The government retained the right “to

relieve any person from any action or proceedings to which he would otherwise have

been liable if this section had not been enacted, in respect of anything said or done by

him against the Head of State and Chairman of Council or any member of the Council or

a PNDC Secretary,” and as last resort could disregard any or all of the suggestions of the

Assembly.52

The Consultative Assembly settled on a constitution in August 1991 and in a

nationwide radio address on the eve of Ghana’s 35th Independence Anniversary,

Chairman Rawlings gave to the public a chronology of the events that would proceed a

potential Fourth Republic: on 28 April 1992 the PNDC would send a constitution to the

public to be approved by a national referendum, political organizations would be allowed

to begin legally functioning for the first time since the 31st December Revolution on 18

May 1992, presidential elections were to be held on 3 November 1992, parliamentary

elections were to be held on 8 December 1992, and the Fourth Republic was to be

inaugurated on 7 January 1993.53 Opponents of the government were not overwhelmed

with all of the aspects of the constitution but were anxious to get on with the process of

st Jonah, 80.

52 Boafo-Arthur, “Prelude,” 49.

53 Jerry J. Rawlings, Guidelines for Ghana’s Return to Constitutional Rule: Nationwide Broadcast by the Head of State and Chairman o f the PNDC, FLT.-LT. Jerry John Rawlings, on the Eve1* o f the 35 Independence Anniversary, 5* March, (Accra, 1992 Ghana: Information Services Dept, 1992), 3-4.

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replacing the PNDC and found it acceptable enough to urge their supporters to vote

“Yes” on the national referendum.54

When the new constitution received an approval vote in excess of 90 percent,

Flight-Lieutenant Rawlings announced he was interested in trading in his Khaki flight

suit for a Presidential cravat. The PNDC became the National Democratic Committee

(NDC) and Rawlings went about getting himself elected President by using the

government media to spread his party’s campaign message and government coffers to

grease the palms of potential voters. The American-based International Foundation for

Electoral Systems (IFES) described the mood in Ghana leading up to elections: “the

transition to democratic civilian rule in Ghana is a process characterized by

control... [mjembers of the existing government as well as opposition parties compete for

support with an understanding that the field is not completely level.”55 Despite the

noticeably tilted playing field, presidential elections were held as scheduled.

At best the election was deeply flawed and at worst completely rigged.56 No

purge had been completed from people deceased since 1987; names of many people who

presented registration receipts were not on the register; a Iarger-than-statistically possible

number of voters were registered; names were entered more than once as a result of

software problems; names were entered on the register exactly as they were given

resulting in inconsistency in the order of entering surnames, first, middle and day names;

54 Nugent, 220.

33 New Patriotic Party (Ghana), 6.

36 Scholars are split as to whether the 1992 Ghanaian elections were “free and fair.” There are many reports of intimidation and ballot box tampering by all sides. In all likelihood, however, the Election Day shenanigans did not change the outcome. It was a biased pre-Election Day campaign and underestimated levels of popularity in the Volta Region and rural areas that Rawlings owed his victory to and not fraud.

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there were reports that several people registered and casting ballots were not Ghanaian

citizens, polls opened up late and closed early, ballots showed up missing, counting

procedures were ignored; gifts were given; etc., etc., etc.37 The outcome was a Rawlings

victory in the first round of balloting with 58 percent of the vote.58 A week after

Chairman Rawlings was elected President, the Inter-Party Coordinating Committee

composed of the NPP, People’s National Convention (PNC), National Independence

Party (NIP), and People’s Heritage Party (PHP)’s Presidential candidates issued a public

response to the election outcome:

Given a deeply flawed voters’ register that is easily amendable to manipulation and electoral fraud, given the continued existence of paramilitary and revolutionary organs which are used for intimidating voters and interfering in the electoral process in favour of the incumbent candidate, given an INEC that is neither empowered nor capable of ensuring a free, fair and clean elections, given the feet that the PNDC government has shown no intention of setting up a truly independent interim administration to supervise the transitional arrangements for the restoration of constitutional rule, we have no choice but to reluctantly refuse to participate in any further electoral process. We have therefore instructed our various secretariats to take the necessary administrative steps to withdraw our candidates from the forthcoming Parliamentary elections.59

Despite the threatened boycott of parliamentary elections by all major NDC opposition

parties, the transition continued. The NDC won 189 out of the 200 seats available m the

first parliament of the Fourth Republic and Flight-Lieutenant Rawlings handed power

over to President Rawlings on 7 January 1993.60

57 New Patriotic Party (Ghana), 7.

58 U.S. Department of State,Ghana Human Rights Practices, 1993 (Washington, DC, 1994).

59 New Patriotic Party (Ghana), appendix 16(f).

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The fifth and final period of Rawlings’ great transformation as Head of the

Ghanaian State began with his inauguration on 7 January 1993 and ended with his

retirement on 7 January 2001. While the transition from the PNDC military regime to the

civilian NDC government in the Fourth Republic was not sufficient to make Ghana a

democracy, the changes it invoked were far from superficial It would be irresponsible to

claim that once elected head of a civilian government Rawlings became the righteous

champion of democracy. On the campaign trail when Rawlings believed the

microphones were turned off, he was overheard to say “if the NPP won, there would be a

fight in this country” since he was not going “to hand over power to thieves and

rogues.”61 He also made it clear that his sensitivity to criticism remained intact through

the regime change and at times appeared to make a full tune job out of harassing the

press with libel charges in the courts.62

It would be equally irresponsible, however, to claim that Rawlings did not accept

constitutional checks on his previously unchecked behaviors. After boycotting

parliamentary elections, opposition parties took to the courts to challenge the NDC

government A high profile case brought before the Supreme Court in the early days of

the republic revolved around the public funding of a holiday. Rawlings and the NDC

wanted to continue celebrating the anniversary of the 31 December 1981 coup d’&at

They viewed it as the start of a revolution that fundamentally changed Ghanaian society

60 Nugent, 247-249. The fact that the NDC won the boycotted election by a landslide is without contention. This being said, only 32 seats were uncontested and several candidates with a close affiliation to the PNDC were defeated by NDC candidates representing the legitimate will of the people.

61 New Patriotic Party (Ghana), 11.

62 Freedom House, “Press Freedom Survey 2000,” Freedom House Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.freedomhouse.org/pfs2000/; Internet; accessed 12 May 2001.

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for the better. Opposition claimed that the government of the Fourth Republic should not

celebrate the anniversary of the Third Republic’s overthrow. The Supreme Court sided

with the opposition over the government.63 An irate President Rawlings responded to the

decision with a claim that the courts “were staging a coup against the other branches of

government.”64 While a tongue-lashing may appear unprofessional, when compared with

the treatment given the three High Court Judges just a decade earlier, the restraint shown

by Rawlings takes on a great deal of relative significance. The fact that the Supreme

Court’s ruling was left standing is a real sign that formal state institutions were once

again important.

“It is a sad commentary on the politics of the nation,” noted a skeptic in the early

years of the Fourth Republic, “that none of the regimes that succeeded the military

completed its term of office”65 Rawlings was able to not only complete one term of

office but was elected to a second in 1996. He defeated the NPP candidate John Kufuor

in 1996 by an almost identical margin to that which he beat A. Adu Boahen in 1992. The

major difference between the elections of 1992 and 1996, however, was not the

presidential contest but the parliamentary elections. In 1996 opposition parties did not

boycott parliamentary elections and although the NDC again scored an impressive

victory, the NPP garnered 61 seats, the newly formed Nkrumahist People's Convention

63 H. Kwasi Prempeh, “A New Jurisprudence for Africa,” Journal o f Democracy 10, no.3 (July 1999): 138.

64 E. Gyimah-Boadi, “Ghana’s Elections: The Challenges Ahead,” in Democratization in Africa, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) 178.

65 Boafo-Arthur, “Prelude,” 41.

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Table 3.1 The State o f Democracy in Ghana (1972 - 2001)

Y ear C o m p e t it io n • P o litica l Civ il Participation * Lib e r t ie s & Po litica l RIGHTS' 1972 1973 No No Not Free (12) Period of 1973 1974 No No Not Free (13) M ilitary Rule 1974 1975 No No Not Free (12) (SMCI,SMCn, 1975 1976 No No Not Free (12) and A FRQ 1976 1977 No No Not Free (12) 1977 1978 No No Not Free (11) 1978 1979 No No Partly

1982 1983 Not Free (11) 1983 1984 Not Free (11) 1984 1985 Not Free (13) Period of 1985 1986 Not Free (13) Military Role 1986 1987 Not Free (13) (PNDC) 1987 1988 Not Free (13) 1988 -1989 Not Free (12) 1989 -1990 Not Free (11) 1990 -1991 Not Free (11)

a “Yes” means that the Legislature had no party with more than % of the available seats and that the President received less than 75% of the vote. “No” means that the conditions for “Yes” were not met Information gathered is from Africa South o f the Sahara (London: Europa Publications) and www.ghanaelections.com. b “Yes” means that Ghana’s government was elected to its mandate by universal adult suffrage, in internationally and domestically judged “free and fair” elections, with no significant group prevented from casting a vote and no significant candidate prevented from contesting a position. “No” means that the conditions fix- “Yes” were unequivocally not met. “Yes7” means there is some significant disagreement as to whether the conditions were, or were not, m et The information gathered is from the US Department of State background notes andA frica South o f the Sahara (London: Europa Publications). c Civil Liberties and Political Rights scores were taken from Freedom House’s Comparative Survey o fFreedom. The indexed scores for Civil Liberty and Political Rights for Ghana were combined for each year listed above. Then, using Freedom House’s categories, the composite score was transformed into a ranking of Free, Partly Free, and Not Free, in the above table both the score and the category are included. The information gathered is from Adrian Karatnycky, ed.. Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 2000-2001 (New York. NY: Greenwood Press, 2001).

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Party (PCP) 5 seats, and the PNC 1 seat out of the 200 available seats in the legislature.66

For the first time since 1981, Ghanaians had participated in a competitive national vote.

The opposition’s ability to get its message to the people and act as an NDC watchdog

from within parliament also pushed government towards democratically acceptable levels

of civil and political liberties. Beginning with the elections in 1992 the Ghanaian

government’s respect for civil and political liberties began to gradually improve. In

taking their seats in parliament, the opposition spurred the government to continue along

this path.67

Conclusions

The visit to Ghana by President BQl Clinton in 1998 was a symbolic recognition

of the completion of Rawlings’ great transformation.68 He had successfully made the

transition from revolutionary coup-maker to internationally respected leader of one of the

few democracies in Africa. The previous discussion explains this incredible

metamorphosis in a five-step process. First, the charismatic Rawlings responded to the

fundamentally unjust system of corruption and patronage that had burdened the people of

Ghana since the time of Osagyefo. He did this by killing and harassing those he viewed

as exploitative. This forced a “revolutionary break with the past.”69 While there were

66 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), World Factbook, 2000 (Washington, DC, 2000); available online at http://www.odri.gov/ria/publications/factbook/geos/ghJitinl; Internet; accessed 12 May 2001.

67 Karatnycky.

68 Lara Pawson and Mike Afrani, “When the ‘Messiah’ Came,” New African, May 1998, 11. No matter how shallow the praise, the feet that Clinton said “America needs Ghana as a partner in the fight for a better future” boosted the esteem of the small West African nation.

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many individuals punished for crimes they did not commit during this period, few if any

of the individuals guilty of using their political clout for ill-begotten gains in previous

regimes were able to maintain a position of influence. Second, once the “criminals” from

the past had been “prosecuted,” a floundering economy forced Rawlings to look to the

future. On one side of the PNDC were the leftist radicals and on the other the slightly

more conservative technocrats, each trying to convince the Chairman that their

development strategy was best for Ghana. The pragmatic Rawlings was shrewd enough

to see that the development funds offered by the West-biased lending institutions were far

more stable and free flowing than those offered by the Eastern Bloc so he sided with the

technocrats. This decision homogenized the PNDC and began Ghana’s program of neo-

liberal structural adjustment. Third, having settled on a development agenda, Rawlings

allowed the technocrats room to plan reforms that he did not fully understand while he

and the PNDC’s security apparatus kept a watchful eye on potential competition. They

provided a long period of stability by enacting a series of obnoxious laws which allowed

government to quash opponents and their views as necessary. Fourth, realizing the tide

of democracy threatened to destabilize his sultanistic regime, Rawlings made moves to

commandeer the cause. He instigated democratizing reforms making sure that the control

of these reforms never left his side. For the pro-democratic forces within Ghana, these

reforms were not perfect but provided a greater opportunity for representative

government than the status quo. Fifth, after getting himself elected President, Rawlings

settled into the role of executive. He remained viciously opposed to dissenting

69 Barrington Moore, Jr.,Social Origins o f Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making o f the Modem World (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), 430-431. Moore predicts that this break with the past is one of the prerequisites for democratic development

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viewpoints but used restraint when dealing with his critics. The institutions which

Rawlings himself had created increased in power over time as the President respected

their checks and balances. It is this story of Rawlings’ great transformation that explains

Ghana’s transition from sultanism to democracy and sets the stage for the next chapter on

democratic consolidation in Ghana.

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Having met Robert Dahl’s procedural minimum criteria for a democracy, Ghana found

itself in an awkward position. The country stood at a crossroads with democratic

consolidation stretching out towards the horizon in one direction and an all too familiar

undemocratic regime standing menacingly close in the other. Wanting to embark upon

the path of consolidation was the Ghanaian man and woman on the street. In a

nationwide survey conducted seven years after the installation of Ghana’s Fourth

Republic, Ghanaians were asked to rate specific regime types on a scale of I to 10 with

higher scores being preferable to lower ones. On average, they rated democracy a 6.7

while the former system of military rule received a rating of only 3.6.1 Meanwhile, at the

helm of the fledgling democracy was a man who had overthrown a democratically

elected government nearly a decade and a half earlier and was on record for saying of the

feasibility of multi-party democracy in Ghana: “I have my reservations and doubts.”2

Rawlings seemed willing to accept the trappings of democracy as the path of least

resistance but made it clear through his words and his actions that he was not going out of

1 Michael Bratton and Robert Mattes, “How People View Democracy: Africans’ Surprising Universal ism,” Journal o f Democracy 12, no.l (January 2001): 113.

2 A. Essuman-Johnson, “The Politics of Ghana’s Search for a Democratic Constitutional Order,” in Ghana’s Transition to Constitutional Rule: Proceedings of a Seminar Organised by the Department of Political Science, University of Ghana, Legon (Accra, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1991), 58.

76

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his way to maintain them. Given the tension between the citizens of Ghana and their

democratically elected leader on the topic of consolidation, the fate of their democracy

was far from preordained.

This chapter will show that Ghana has indeed begun the long and arduous trek

along the path of consolidation. The transfer of power that occurred on 7 January 2001 is

a significant testament to this feet. Alone, however, this single event is insufficient

evidence with which to build a case. It demonstrates a product of consolidation but not

the process that is the chief concern of this thesis. To demonstrate the process of

consolidation occurring in Ghana, this chapter will turn to a discussion of stateness and

the five arenas of the polity mentioned in Chapter Two: civil society, political society,

rule of law, state bureaucracy, and economic society. To what extent do the

aforementioned arenas of the polity accept democracy behaviorally, attitudinally, and

constitutionally? What events contributed to, or detracted from, improved levels of

democratic acceptance in the polity? Which obstacles in the polity stand in the way of

further consolidation? Which attributes in the polity will aid Ghana’s progression down

its current path? The better answers one comes up with for these questions, the more

accurately one will be able to predict democracy’s survivability in Ghana.

Ghanaian Stateness

One hundred and thirteen years after the Fanti chiefs near Cape Coast

unknowingly signed a treaty that paved the way for the British to colonize a swath of

West African land to be flanked by the Gulf of Guinea to the south, French outposts to

the north and west, and German Togoland to the east; the state of Ghana came into

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existence at the stroke of midnight on 6 March 1957.3 Six million people became

Ghanaians and a red, yellow, and green striped flag with a lone black star in the middle

came to fly over 57 million acres of land4 On 5 March 1957 the Gold Coast was a

colony with no right to declare war, make binding treaties, or issue its own currency. The

next day Ghana was “internationally enfranchised” and recognized as possessing “the

same external rights and responsibilities as all other sovereign states.” This change in

juridical status was not unimportant to the men and women in black Africa who saw

Ghana’s independence as a source of hope and pride. It did not, however, remedy the

CPP government’s deficiencies “in the political wQl, institutional authority, and

organized power to protect human rights or provide socioeconomic welfare.”5

Certainty, the former British colony was in a better position to forge an empirical

state than its francophone West African neighbors or the squabbling Nigerians to the east,

but its exceptionality was only relative. Ghana had the most roads per square kilometer

in African save for the two small and densely populated countries of Rwanda and

Burundi6 Thanks to a colonial economy marked by a 30 percent share of the world’s

cocoa market, the country enjoyed the highest income per capita on the continent.7

3 Yuri Smertin, Kwame Nkrumah (New York: International Publishers, 1987) 58.

4 Time-series population data for Ghana found at Universiteit Utrecht Library, “Ghana: historical demographical data of the whole country,”Umversiteit Ultrecht Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.library.uu.nl/wesp/popuIstat/Africa/ghanac.htm; Internet; accessed 30 June 2001.

5 Robert Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third (New World York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 21.

6 Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and (Princeton, Control NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 162-163.

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Educationally, Ghana was the vanguard of Africa with a four-year university granting

degrees from the University of London just a few miles outside of Accra and an

impressive number of academics, professionals, and more than 200 trained lawyers who

had returned from overseas to become leaders of their new country.8 Ironically, it was

the ever-optimistic Kwame Nkrumah who put Ghana’s endowments in their proper

global perspective:

It was when they had gone and we were faced with the stark realities, as in Ghana on the morrow of our independence, that the destitution of the land after long years of colonial rule was brought sharply home to us. There were slums and squalor in our towns, superstitions and ancient rites in our villages. All over the country, great tracts of open land lay untilled and uninhabited, while nutritional diseases were rife among our people. Our roads were meager, our railways short. There was much ignorance and few skills. Over eighty percent of our people were illiterate, and our existing schools were fed on imperialist pap, completely unrelated to our background and our needs. Trade and commerce were controlled, directed and run almost entirety by Europeans.9

Ghana was a standout of empirical statehood only because its neighborhood was such a

low-rent district.

Nkrumah’s charisma served as a buffer against the CPP government’s lack of

capacity at first but his authoritarian streak combined with the country’s poor foundation

to create a real dilemma for Ghanaian stateness. Citizens disengaged from the state en

masse and successive governments were unable, or unwilling, to take steps to reengage

7 For more on the economic atmosphere surrounding Ghana’s independence, see Tony Killick, Development Economics in Action: A study o f Economic Policies (New in Ghana York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1978).

8 Robin Luckham, “The Constitutional Commission,” inPoliticians and Soldiers in Ghana, eds. Dennis Austin and Robin Luckham (London, UK: Cass Publishing, 1975), 63. The University of Ghana, which became independent of the University of London in 1961, has a website at http://www.ug.edu.gh/.

9 Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London, UK: Heinemann, 1964), xiii.

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them in significant numbers.10 There were no civil wars or secessionist movements to

threaten the state’s juridical existence but the grind of the Nkrumah, Ankrah, Afrifa,

Busia, Acheampong, Akuffo, Rawlings, and Limann governments transformed Ghana

from the jewel of Africa into just another weak state on a continent full of weak states. It

is the contention of this thesis that over the final two decades of the twentieth century,

what had been a gradual down trend in levels of stateness turned into a gradual up trend.

Although there remains a great deal to be done before the Ghanaian state comes to

resemble the ideal Weberian type, some of the changes in the polity to be discussed later

in this chapter have significantly affected stateness for the better. Rawlings’ PNDC and

NDC governments have had little impact on Ghana’s tangible infrastructure but have

nonetheless contributed, both wittingly and unwittingly, to a decrease in domestic

challenges to empirical statehood. The press’s newfound voice has brought national

debates to even the smallest and most isolated villages. Improvements in the rule of law

have made it physically safer for citizens to interact with their state. Economic

liberalization has made it once again profitable for peasants to sell their wares through

official channels instead of the black market. To avoid repetition, analysis of these

changes will be left to the arena of the polity in which they occurred.

Ghanaian Civil Society

The groups within Ghanaian civil society hearty enough to survive the brutal

years of PNDC repression became voracious advocates for their consistencies’ respective

10 Victor Azarya and Naomi Chazan, “Disengagement from the State in Africa: Reflections on the Experience of Ghana and Guinea,”Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1987): 106-131.

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interests in the Fourth Republic. In addition, the major civil society organizations

continued to advocate for democracy as they had done in the pre-democratic regime and

accepted the task of government watchdog. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of

this new self-imposed role can be found in the mission statement delivered by the

Christian Council of Ghana at the end of a three-day seminar in 1996 organized under the

general theme, “Moving Christ’s Church Together Into The21st Century.” The two

sentences o f resolve in the preamble read:

We resolved, in the name of Jesus Christ, to participate in the processes which would lead to a renewed church that would be a fellowship of believers and a sharing community which is conscious o f and sensitive to the life circumstances of our people. We resolved to work for a renewed church with commitment to the basic principles of democracy which will lead to the creation of the necessary conditions for the emergence of a civil society characterized by justice, peace, unity, tolerance, and mutual acceptance of one another, and respect for human life and dignity.11

A statement such as this by Ghana’s largest and most influential Christian organization, a

coalition of fourteen Protestant Churches and affiliated Catholic and Pentecostal

organizations, bodes well for democracy’s mass attitudinal acceptance. One sentence is

dedicated to the glorification and advancement of the Church’s mission and the other to

the glorification and advancement of democracy.

While the Christian Coalition of Ghana represents a broad and active base of

supporters, they were not alone in spreading the gospel of democratic acceptance. The

Trades Union Congress (TUC), the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), the

National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), the Civil Servants Association (CSA), and

11A Communique Issued by the Christian Council o fGhana at the End o f a Three-Day Seminarfor Church Leaders Held at the Volta Hotel, Akosombo, March 14-16,1996 (Akosombo, Ghana: Christian Council of Ghana, 1996), 1.

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the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) have also been important and vocal critics of the

undemocratic practices of Rawlings and members of his government. At no time was

this unitary resolve more evident than in the months following the Alliance For Change

(AFC)’s organized protests of 1995.

On May 11 more than 150,000 citizens joined the AFC to march on Christianborg

Castle to demonstrate their frustration with economic mismanagement, public sector

corruption, and in particular, the implementation of 12.5 percent Value Added Tax

(VAT). Security Agents and thugs loyal to the ruling NDC government met the peaceful

protesters in the streets of Accra and opened fire. Four Ghanaians (Ahunu Honga, Jerry

Opey, Kwabena Asante, and Richard Kwabena Awungar), were murdered in cold blood

and countless others were injured in the ensuing mass flight.12

The murders, which came to be known as the Kume Preko murders became the

focal point of civil society’s discontent.13 How could a self-titled “democratic”

government, especially one that had been elected in questionable and boycotted elections,

order the killing of citizens expressing their policy preferences in a peaceful and

constitutionally acceptable manner? This was the question that members of the

aforementioned groups within civil society found themselves unanimously asking

Rawlings and the NDC. Even a group like the CSA, whose leadership had been stacked

with supporters of the government, found it impossible to ignore its members’ cries for

12 The Ghanaian Chronicle, 17 May 1995,3.

13 Kume preko was the local name given to the protest march. Translated roughly into English from the original Twi,kume preko means “you might as well kill me now”

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justice and was compelled to condemn the incident and call for action to be taken against

the perpetrators.*4

Not since the murders of the High Court Justices in 1983 had the public in

general, and civil society in particular, coalesced their outrage so tightly around a single

event. Both tragedies have in common a public perception that justice has yet to be

served. In the murders of the judges, while a few sacrificial lambs were prosecuted, most

Ghanaians feel unassuaged nearly two decades after the fact.15 Five years on, the

perpetrators of theKume Preko murders are either unidentified or unprosecuted.16 The

principle difference between these two tragedies is not the way in which the government

handled them but the way m which the debate on the issues surrounding them reached the

man and woman on the street and in the bush.

W. Joseph Campbell has noted that “[t]he independent press in sub-Saharan

Africa has shown itself to be deceptively dynamic—fragile and vulnerable to repression,

but gritty and resilient at the same time.”17 In 1983 the press in Ghana was not only

largely owned by the government, but subject to explicit forms of maltreatment. When

Jerry Rawlings sauntered into the headquarters of the government owned Daily Graphic

in 1980, he warned the journalists and editors that they should think carefully about what

they printed because in the next revolution, “thousands of civilians would die, including

14 “Civil Servants Demo, No Tear Gas!,”Accra M ail (Accra), 1 June 2001.

15 A. Adu Boahen, The Ghanaian Sphinx: Reflections on the Contemporary History o f Ghana, 1972-1987, 2nd edition (Accra, Ghana: Sankofa Educational Publishers, 1992), 45.

16 “Who are the killers?,” Accra M ail (Accra), 15 May 2000.

17 W. Joseph Campbell, The Emergent Independent Press in Benin and Cote d’Ivoire: From Voice o f the State to Advocate o f Democracy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 28.

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journalists of theGraphic .” Slightly more than a year later when Rawlings overthrew the

Limann government he did not follow through with his unveiled threat, but did sack the

editors of the Daily Graphic and M irror, George Aidoo and Nana Addo-Twum

respectively, for publishing his warning.18 The independent media fared even worse as

notable newspapers such as the Catholic Standard and the Legon Observer were forced

to cease publication.19 News critical of Rawlings or his PNDC cohorts was kept out of

the papers and off of the airwaves and relegated to what Stephen Ellis labels “pavement

radio.”20 Rumors and allegations regarding the deaths of the judges were exchanged in

lorry parks and markets throughout the country but never so loudly as to draw the

attention of the PNDC’s security apparatus.

Standing in stark contrast to the treatment the press was allowed to give the

murders of the Justices in 1983 is the treatment accorded the Kume Preko murders of

1995. Gritty and resilient, the Ghanaian publishers and journalists took the liberalization

of the PNDC/NDC regimes in the early 1990s as a signal that it was once again safe to

report on sensitive issues and criticize the government. Joining the two government

dailies, which reported on Kume Preko with kid gloves, were dozens of independent

newspapers, several of which have subsequently gained a broad national readership,

18 “Rawlings Cracks The Whip,” New African, March 1982,52.

19 Kwame Boafo-Arthur, “Prelude to Constitutional Rule: An Assessment of the Process,” Ghana's in Transition to Constitutional Rule: Proceedings c f a Seminar Organised by the Department o f Political Science, University o fGhana, Legon (Accra, Ghana: Ghana Universities Press, 1991), 47.

20 Stephen Ellis, “Tuning in to Pavement Radio,” African Affairs, 88, noJ52 (1989): 321-330.

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reporting not only on the facts surrounding the events of 11 May 1995 but on salacious

details of government conspiracy almost always citing anonymous sources.21

In a nation like Ghana with relatively low levels of English literacy, the

burgeoning industry of private radio has played an even greater role than the print media

in setting civil society’s democratic agenda.22 In 1992, at the dawn of the Fourth

Republic, Accra had a single FM radio station, and it was owned by the government. By

1996, the capital city had more than a half dozen privately owned FM stations.23 These

stations joined the newspapers in condemning the government’s role in theKume Preko

murders and spread the message to the nooks and crannies of Ghana that the killing of

peaceful protestors by security forces is not a legitimate act for a democratic government.

To say the press was allowed to provide civil society and society-at-large with an

alternative analysis of events shaping the nation is not to say that the NDC appreciated

the press’s newfound voice. In Rawlings’ tenure as President of Ghana’s Fourth

Republic, he and his NDC colleagues used the relatively illiberal judiciary to harass the

media with more than 150 charges of criminal- and seditious-libel Some of the charges

21 International Journalists’ Network, “Ghana: Press Overview,” IJNet Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.ijnet.org/Profxle/Africa/Ghana/media.htmI; Internet; accessed 14 May 2001. Among the more widely read independent newspapers in Ghana are The Ghanaian Chronicle, The Ghanaian Digest, and die Independent. The two government owned dailies are The People's Daily Graphic and The Ghanaian Times.

22 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),Human Development Report 1999(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 178. In 1997 the UNDP cites “[t]he percentage of people aged IS and above who can, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life” as 66.4 percent. While the mast prominent non-European language in Ghana, Akan, has been a written language fix* several years its uses are limited and the number of people who can read it are few. On the radio however, programs are regularly broadcast in English, French, Akan, Mole-Dagbani, Ewe, and Ga- Adangbe.

23 E. Gyimah-Boadi, “Ghana’s Elections: The Challenges Ahead,” in Democratization in Africa, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 174.

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were thrown out but most resulted in journalists paying several hundred dollars in fines to

avoid jail time.24 In two high profile cases however, the Ghanaian Chronicle was

ordered to pay a fine of 42 million cedis (approximately $17,500 at the time) for accusing

Edward Salia, then Minister of Roads and Transport, of accepting bribes23 and Eben

Quarcoo of theFree Press was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay 1.5 million

cedis for alleging that Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, wife of then President Jerry

Rawlings, dealt illegal drugs on the side.26 The treatment of journalists in the courts,

while severe, paled in comparison to the extra-institutional approach Rawlings’ thugs

took to dealing with unfriendly reporters. Staff ofThe Ghanaian Chronicle in 1994, Free

Press in 1996, and The Crusading Guide in 2000 had their offices smeared with human

excrement by unknown perpetrators only days after publishing articles particularly

critical o f the government.27

After describing the obnoxious treatment accorded the media in Ghana’s Fourth

Republic, one might ponder whether the press’s situation at the time of theKume Preko

murders was really better than at the time of the murders of the High Court Justices.

Rawlings and the NDC gave themselves plenty of room for improvement in their

24 One should not assume that all of the lawsuits were unwarranted or that all of the penalties were unjust While most of the daily newspapers are professional in their feet checking some of the lesser known papers are no more than rumor mills. For an interesting take an the press in Africa and the way reporters define a feet see Stephen Ellis, ‘'Reporting Africa,”Current History (May 2000): 221-226.

25 Committee to Protect Journalists, “Africa: Country Report,”CPJ Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.cpj.org/attacks99/africa99/Ghana.htmI; Internet; accessed 14 May 2001.

26 Amnesty Internationa], “Ghana: Imprisonment ofJournalists,” Amnesty International Online [home page on-line]; available from http://web.amnesty.oi-g/ai.nsf/rprint/AFR280011999?OpenDocumcnt; Internet; accessed 18 April 2001.

27 Ann K. Cooper, New York, to Jerry Rawlings, Accra, 12 October 2000, available from http://www.cpj.org/protests/001trs/Ghanal2oct0Qpl.html-

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dealings with the media but they were either unwilling, or unable, to silence the critical

media as they had done in the early years of the PNDC. For civil society to function

effectively as a protector of democracy in a regime that is not necessarily a bastion of

democratic acceptance, it needs a mouthpiece capable of expressing discontent.28 During

the Fourth Republic, the press in Ghana has served as this mouthpiece and offered an

authoritative version of reality capable of competing with the government’s on a

nationwide scale. This alternative voice provided civil society with two important tools.

First, groups within civil society were able to formulate agendas using information

provided by the press. Second, by publicizing their views on the airwaves and in the

newspapers civil society organizations were able to take advantage of the bandwagon

effect to build a base of vocal supporters on a wide range of issues.

With the inauguration of the Kufuor/NPP government, the press’s job appears as

if it will get a great deal less trying. “The NPP believes,” reads the party’s most recent

manifesto, “that the vigour and independence of newspapers, radio and television is a

reflection of the confidence of a people and the health of democracy in a country.”29

Ghanaians have heard more than their fair share of empty political promises and should

be wary of the NPP’s good intentions muttered when they were in the minority. This

being said, President Kufuor’s historic press conference to celebrate his first hundred

28 Cdlestin Monga, The Anthropology o f Anger: Civil Society and Democracy in(Boulder, Africa CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), 124. Monga states that “the classical mechanisms for the protection of rights (separation of powers) and the media for the expression of dissent (freedom of the press) must retain their foil credibility” because uninstitutionalized freedom, i.e. disengagement from the state, is temporary and “fuels confusion.”

29 New Patriotic Party (Ghana),Manifesto o f the New Patriotic Party (Accra, Ghana: New Patriotic Party, 1996).

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days in office30 and his discontinuance of all libel proceedings are clear steps in the right

direction.31

There are however, still questions to be answered by civil society and the press.

Will civil society grow weary of the political goal of consolidation and chose instead to

focus on economic goals possibly better attained by an undemocratic regime when the

national economy inevitably sours? Can the press, who has been joined at the hip to the

NPP throughout the long and arduous journey towards democratization, learn to be

critical of a democratic NPP government without being critical of the institutions of

democracy? If and when, the press and civil society take a stance not in accordance with

the NPP’s policy agenda will the government rethink its hands off policy?32 It is far too

early to tell definitively, but if in four years time when Ghanaians are preparing for their

next set of elections one can answer the three aforementioned questions no, yes, no

respectively, it will bode well for the survivability of democracy in Ghana.

Gh a n a ia n P o l it i c a l S o c i e t y

To fully understand the current state of Ghanaian political society, one must look

to the rift that developed during the nation’s struggle for independence. In 1947 an elite

30 Amos Safb, “The President’s Historic Outing With Ghana’s Media,” Accra Mail (Accra), 19 April 2001.

31 West African Journalists Association,Press Statement: WAJA Happy At Plan to Repeal Criminal Libel in Ghana (Accra), 20 February 2001.

32 In the first several months of NPP rule, ex-President Rawlings’ obnoxious behavior has protected the government fix’ the ire of civil society and die press. The two groups have been too busy calling fix- Rawlings’ head on a platter to notice what the government is doing. Amos Safi), 'Thumbs Up fix’ Democracy,”Accra M ail (Accra), 13 June 2001.

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group of Ghanaian nationalists, dominated by traditional chiefs and a new professional

class, formed the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) to lobby the British for self-

rule. A split in the UGCC a year after its inception resulted in two ideological camps that

would frame Ghana’s formal domestic political debates through the present.

On the relative left, calling for immediate independence, stood a group of young

western educated intellectuals from families far removed from the traditional nodes of

power. This group’s ideological leader was the Osagyefo himself Kwame Nkrumah,

who developed a loosely articulated philosophy he labeled “African socialism.”

Members of Nkrumah’s Convention People’ Party (CPP) claimed as their base of support

the common and self-made man and argued that imperialism was the primary cause of

Ghana’s problems and greater self-reliance was the key to economic development.33

Tracing the CPP’s legacy through the present one will find the National Alliance of

Liberals (NAL) serving as the opposition in the Second Republic, the People’s National

Party (PNP) and President Hilla Limann governing in the Third Republic, and the

Convention People’s Party (CPP), Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), and

Peoples’ National Convention (PNC) all struggling to build a wide enough base of

support to have an impact in the Fourth Republic.34

33 Smertin, 73-104.

34 The three Nkrumahist parties all claim individually to be the true heirs to the original CPP tradition. Unfortunately for those partial to Nkrumah’s political philosophy, none of these parties has been able to make a significant impact in the Fourth Republic. In the 2000 elections the three parties won a combined total of 4 seats in parliament. In the presidential elections Nkrumah ism fared even worse. Dan Larty, the 74-year-old GCPP candidate who veered the least from Nkrumah’s anti-imperialist message, was heckled by the audience of a nationally broadcast debate for his inability to demonstrate a mastery of the English language.

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On the relative right, willing to negotiate a gradual independence with the British,

stood a group of well-educated and well-connected members of the Ashanti elite. This

group’s ideological leader was J.B. Danquah, a London educated lawyer who returned to

the Gold Coast to practice law, publish a newspaper, and serve as secretary general of the

Gold Coast Youth Conference all before founding the UGCC.35 Those who stayed with

Danquah in the UGCC instead of joining Nkrumah focused more on the principles of

pluralism and liberalism and less on economic development and neo-colonialism.

Tracing what would come to be known as the Danquah-Busia tradition’s legacy, one will

find the United Party (UP) serving as the chief opposition in the First Republic until the

CPP proclaimed a one-party state in 1964, the Progress Party (PP) and Prime Minister

Kofi Busia governing in the Second Republic, the Popular Front Party (PFP) and United

National Party (UNP) serving as a divided opposition in the Third Republic, and the NPP

and President Kufuor moving from vocal opposition to governing party in the Fourth

Republic.

While the “radical versus conservative'’ political dynamic was a palatable way for

the British and the rest of the West to view the pre-independence struggle in Ghana, it

camouflaged the political parties’ “catch-all” character. “Ideology,” points out Robert

Pinkney, “in the vague sense of folk memories of the early nationalist movement, appears

33 Danquah is a character in Ghanaian history who is all too often mentioned only as the man who gave Kwame Nkrumah a national platform. He was the elder statesman of the UGCC and an integral part of Ghana's nationalist movement Despite his years of service to the nation, the feet that he was willing to negotiate independence with the British prompted Nkrumah to label him a sell out After a landslide victory for the CPP in 1960, Nkrumah’s party enacted legislation that permitted them to throw Danquah in jail for protesting die government’s dictatorial character. Tragically, at the age of 69, he died of “natural causes” in a poorly ventilated prison cell with only a straw mat and chamber pot for company.Journey to Independence and After (J.B. Danquah’s Letters) 1947-1965, ed. H.K. Akyeampong (Accra, Ghana: WatervQle Publishing House, 1970).

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to have been important in welding the party together as a vote-winning and activist-

winning machine, but as a guide to policy it had little to offer.”36 In the “pursuit of

hegemony,” individuals and groups in Ghana have historically not limited their quest for

advantage to the realm of ideology, but instead have relied on constituency building traits

such as ethnicity, religion, region, and the ever-present greed.37 Certainly there have

been some stalwarts in Ghana’s past who believed so strongly in either the Danquah-

Busia or Nkrumah tradition that they were willing to let their fortunes rise and fall with

then parties, but there were many others willing to use whichever party was in power as a

vehicle for self-enrichment. So plentiful were politicians of this ilk in the First Republic

that there were comments made that the carpet in the Parliament House was in danger of

wearing out prematurely due to the practice of aisle-crossing.38 Although party switching

is not a telltale sign of bad character or malevolent political motives, the frequency with

which some prominent politicians recycled themselves within and throughout the four

republics is quite alarming.

Being Ghana’s first military head of state turned civilian president, Jerry

Rawlings disturbed the formal Danquah/Nkrumah political debate and claimed the crown

of hegemon for his newly formed NDC at the dawn of the Fourth Republic. In the

previous three republics, first election campaigns were abuzz with high-minded

ideological discussions, albeit shallow ones. In the first election of the Fourth Republic,

36 Robert Pinkney, “Ghana: An Alternating Military/Party System,” in Political Parties in the Third World, ed. Vicky Randall (London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1988), 48.

37 Jean-Franfois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics o f the Belly(New York, NY: Longman Publishing, 1993) 110-111.

38 “The Inusah Complex,”Public Agenda (Accra), 29 May 2001.

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the question on everyone’s mind was not one of philosophy but one of pragmatism:

Should Rawlings stay or should he go?

Even if one were to credit the NDC with the stated ideological goals of the

PNDC, namely “the transformation of the relationship between rulers and ruled, between

the haves and the have-nots, between state and society,” it would be naive to overlook

Rawlings’ significance to the party.39 The Progressive Alliance (a coalition of the NDC,

Egle Party, and National Convention Party) had as its unveiled raison d’etre the return of

Rawlings to the Castle.40 Members of the military and PNDC were not alone in their

desire to maintain the status quo. Rawlings’ with his charisma, unashamedly populist

message, and Ewe/Scottish heritage was, after 11 years as Chairman of the PNDC,

extremely popular in the rural areas outside of the Ashanti region where the majority of

Ghanaians live. The results of the 1992 election bear out this feet. Whether one believes

the presidential contest was rigged or not, the NPP with its highly educated and highly

Ashanti core constituency grossly underestimated the number of their compatriots who

appreciated what Rawlings had done for the country 41

39 Naomi Chazan, “Liberalization, Governance, and Political Space in Ghana,” inGovernance and Politics in Africa, eds. Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), 126.

40 Paul Nugent, Big Men, Small Beys and Politics in Ghana: Power, Ideology and the Burden o f History, 1982-1994 (London, UK: Pinter Publishing Limited, 1995), 228-231.

41 Did the election results of 1992 Presidential contest represent the real support for each candidate? The answer to this question depends on who one asks. Opponents of Rawlings suggest the answer is no. They published their case for fraud in New Patriotic Party (Ghana). The Carter Center team that monitored the election for the international community suggest the answer is yes. The published analysis of the election written by the head of the observation team can be found in Richard Jeffries and Clare Thomas, “The Ghanaian Elections of 1992,”African Affairs: The Journal o f the Royal African Society 92, (July 1993). For the purposes of this thesis the answer must remain maybe. There is significant evidence that fraud occurred in the election but whether or not this fraud was substantial enough to change the results cannot be deduced from the available evidence.

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The NPP, with its feet firmly grounded in the Danquah-Busia tradition, was held

up as Rawlings* potential replacement for those who felt the Flight-Lieutenant’s days as

Head of the Ghanaian State were far too numerous already. There are three mam reasons

why a Danquahist party became Rawlings’ chief opposition in the Fourth Republic. The

first reason is that President Limann and the PNP were Nkrumahists. To their credit, the

Limann government had not run roughshod over civil liberties as the Nkrumahists in the

First Republic had. The government did, however, in its 28 months in office distinguish

itself as at best economically inept and at worst downright corrupt. “It would seem that

politics in the Third Republic was mainly about how to make money out of the system,”

notes Legon Professor A. Essuman-Johnson, “those who financed the PNP to win the

1979 elections were out to recoup their investment.”42

The second reason why Danquahists inherited the role of chief opposition in the

Fourth Republic is that Rawlings is slightly closer to Kwame Nkrumah than J.B.

Danquah on the traditional Ghanaian ideological spectrum. During his PNDC years,

Rawlings’ populist rhetoric, grassroots organizational style, and focus on economic

development over the development of pluralist institutions caused many Ghanaians to

draw parallels between the chairman and the Osagyefo.43 This point should not be

overstated however, as Rawlings has at times been an outspoken critic of Nkrumah and

enrolled Ghana in an IMF sponsored structural adjustment program which flies in the

face of the Nkrumah’s anti-imperialist and pro-statist teachings.44

42 Essuman-Johnson, 56.

43 “Kojo Tsikata Speaks,”Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 14-20 December 1992.

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Table 4.1 The Ethnic Balancing Act (Percentage o fSeats Won by the Major Parties in Ghana‘s 2* and 3rd Parliaments o f the 4th Republic)

A s h a n t i V o l t a R e g i o n Gh a n a i n R e g io n (19 S e a t s ) E n t i r e t y (33 S e a t s ) (200 Se a t s )

NDC 1996 15.15% 100.00% 67.00% 2000 6.06% 89.50% 46.00% NPP 1996 84.85% 0.00% 30.00% 2000 93.94% 0.00% 50.00% O th e r 1996 0.00% 0.00% 3.00% 2000 0.00% 10.50% 4.00% Source MtpyAwww.ghananfactfon8.conV

The third and probably most important reason for NPP constituency building that

Danquahists became the NDC’s opposition is that Rawlings is an Ewe. Although not yet

the source of large scale violent conflict, when it comes to politics in Ghana, ethnicity

can make or break a candidate.45 In pre-colonial times, the powerful Ashanti kingdom

dominated much of the territory in present-day Ghana. After independence the Ashanti

have often expressed their discomfort at being subjected to a government controlled by

non-Ashantis. While the Danquahist parties, including the NPP, have attempted to take

on a national character, their upper echelons are stacked with Ashanti and their Ashanti

44 Nugent, 229.

45 The exception to the rule in Ghana is the “Guinea Fowl War.” On 31 January 1994 a quarrel began near Bimbilla in Northern Ghana over the market price for guinea fowl. This quarrel stirred up deep-seated disputes over land rights and sparked months of fighting between the Konkomba and Nanumba. The result of these clashes was approximately 2,000 deaths and nearly 200,000 persons displaced. The government stepped in to mediate and end to die conflict in April of 1994. Although the mediation was successful in the short term tensions are still high in the region and fighting intermittently breaks out For more on the conflict see “Ghana’s Guinea Fowl War,”Economist , 12 November 1994,60.

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base of core supporters was energized by the thought of ousting the Ewe-dominated

PNDC/NDC.46

The previous chapter explains in detail the outcome of the “Should Rawlings stay

or should he go?” referendum. In 1992 Rawlings defeated A. Adu Boahen, the NPP

candidate, in the first round of balloting. Opposition protested the validity of the election

results and boycotted the parliamentary contest leading to an NDC landslide. After four

years of serving as the opposition from outside of the Parliament House, the NPP

contested the NDC at the polls in 1996. In the second set of elections in Ghana’s Fourth

Republic, Rawlings defeated the NPP’s candidate, John Kufuor, in the first round with

57.2 percent of the vote and the NDC gained majority status in parliament winning two-

thirds of the available seats. With two terms as President under his belt, Rawlings was

constitutionally barred from running for the office in the December 2000 elections.

Unlike his Zambian counterpart, Rawlings appeared willing to accept his term limits.47

“I want to obey the constitution,” Rawlings announced at the opening of a regional

hospital in Cape Coast in 1998, “[m]y time is up.”48

Just as Rawlings’ entrance into the civilian political arena disturbed the

Danquah/Nkrumah dialectic, his exit from civilian politics disturbed the dialectic

revolving around whether Rawlings should stay or go. The NPP and their presidential

46 The Danquah-Busia Memorial Club founded in the Ashanti heartland of Kumasi in the late 1980s was the cocoon from which the NPP vanguard emerged. Nugent, 221.

47 In a troubling development for those concerned with democracy in Africa, President Chiluba of Zambia had the country’s constitution changed to allow him to run for a third term. The Economist Intelligence Unit, “Zambia: Chiluba’s third term?,” EIU Online [home page on-line]; available from httpVAvww.eiu.com/latest /541840.asp; Internet; accessed 12 June 2001.

48 Mike Afrani, “Who will succeed Rawlings?,” New African, October 1998,20.

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candidate, John Kufuor, were still comfortably saying Rawlings must go but the NDC

was put in the awkward situation of saying Rawlings’ legacy should stay even though the

man could not. Posters for the NDC presidential candidate invariably showcased a

picture of not only the candidate, Vice-President John Atta Mills, but what appeared to be

his Siamese twin, President Rawlings. At a debate held in September 2001 by the

Freedom Forum in Accra, every presidential candidate made an appearance except for

Mills who was told by Rawlings not to attend because of the debate’s foreign

sponsorship.49 And in the most shocking example of the outgoing president’s attempts to

put his mark on the NDC’s candidate, Rawlings signed with his bloody thumbprint a

copy of the NDC manifesto that was auctioned off to an anonymous bidder for

approximately US$25,000 to fond the Mills campaign.50

Given the results of the 2000 elections, Kufuor was elected president and the NPP

won a plurality of seats in parliament, one of two things had happened to the NDC.

Either the voters had tired of Rawlings or his party had been unable to commandeer his

appeal Regardless, the NDC is on its heels. The party still has a sizeable minority in

49 The sponsor of the presidential debate was the US-based nonprofit Freedom Forum. They were joined in their endeavor by the state-owned Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) and Ghana Association of Journalists (GAJ). The debate was the first of its kind in Ghanaian history and attended by Charles Wereko Brobby (United Ghana Movement), George Hagan (Convention People’s Party), John Kufuor (New Patriotic Party), Dan Lartey (Great Consolidated Popular Party), Edward Mahama (People’s National Convention), and Goosie Tanoh (National Reform Party).

50 This odd event occurred in early August 2000. While the legality of fundraising by auctioning off manifestos is questionable, the buzz in Ghana surrounded the gruesome act of signing a document with ones blood. The morning after the auction, several NDC candidates for parliament went on the radio talk shows in Accra to distance themselves from Rawlings. While the president never explained his action, there are two schools of thought on why he did what he did. Some say it is an Ewe tradition to share blood with those you honor and others say it was a foreshadowing of the violence Rawlings intended to bring the nation if the NPP won the upcoming elections.

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parliament, but only a loosely articulated economic development plan for an ideology31,

read maintain the status quo, and a skeleton crew consisting of the former president and

his friends for leadership.52 Danquahist parties have a strong record of supporting multi­

party democracy and the NPP has done nothing to suggest it wQl do anything but

promote democratic consolidation. If however, the voters grow dissatisfied with the

NPP there appears to be no viable democratic alternative. With no viable democratic

alternative the NPP will unavoidably degenerate into a patronage machine, being the sole

rout to state power, and the coup d’&at as a mechanism for succession will become more

and more likely. For political society to move democracy further down the road of

consolidation another party that embraces democracy attitudinally, behaviorally, and

constitutionally must offer the voters a legitimate second choice at the voting booth.

Who are the possible candidates for this second democratic party Ghana requires

to aid in the process of consolidation? There are two strong possibilities, both of which

are mutually exclusive and both of which are as likely as the other. One option would be

for the NDC to cut its undemocratic chaff and remain the NPP’s primary opponent.

While Rawlings and his followers are the loudest members of the NDC, a silent majority

51 When prodded for their ideology, NDC members invariably trot out a plan they label “Vision 2020.” The goal of this plan is to have Ghana firmly entrenched as a middle-income country by the year 2020. Short of a vague “strategy of broad-based growth” how the NDC hopes to attain these goals is unarticulated. National Democratic Congress,National Democratic Congress, 1996 Manifesto, (Accra, Ghana: National Democratic Congress, 1996).

52 None of the NDC’s more distinguished parliamentarians is a member of the party hierarchy. In fact, Rawlings selection of the political lightweight John Atta Mills as his vice-president in 1996 caused a great deal of consternatioa within the NDC’s ranks. “The faces and voices which have been widely associated with helping the NDC to lose the elections are ironically,” reads a recent editorial in theAccra Mail, “the same faces taking centre stage even with the party in opposition: the face and voice of Rawlings; the face and voice of Tony Aidoo; the face and voice of E.T. Mensah are just three examples.” “NDC Who is in Charge,” Accra M ail (Accra), 13 June 2001.

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of the NDC’s parliamentarians have been noticeable for the increasing awkwardness of

their public comments. Dr. Ibn Chambas, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Aiiairs and

current NDC Member of Parliament for BimbiDa Constituency, demonstrated this

awkwardness in an interview with the Accra-based radio station, Joy 99.7 FM, regarding

threats ex-President Rawlings had made to the NPP government to mark the 22nd

Anniversary of his beloved June 4th coup. “Even though he was presenting a genuine

concern I think the way and manner he did it did not help him,” Chambas continued his

criticism in the gentlest way he knew how, “The Ex-President has done so much for this

country and on the international scene. For him to come down to this level and make

such pronouncements that give all kinds of people the excuse to make all kinds of

interpretations is most unfortunate.”53 Can the NDC parliamentarians increase the

distance between themselves and Rawlings without loosing the support of J.J.’s followers

who form the party’s core constituency? If they cannot, the party will lose democratic

legitimacy and its followers will have to rely on Rawlings to take up the gun as he did in

1979 and 1981 to return some semblance o f the party to government.54

The other option would be for the Nkrumahists to consolidate their efforts and

form a single party. In the last elections, the three parties struggling to claim the title of

heir to the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah garnered a composite of only 5.7 percent of the

votes in the presidential contest and only 2 percent of the available seats in Ghana’s

53 Osbert Lartey, “Chambas condemns Rawlings ‘He stooped too low,’”The Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 8 June 2001.

54 A JL Alhassan, “COUP PHOBIA...Once Bitten...,” Accra M ail (Accra), 17 January 2001.

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winner take all parliamentary contests.35 Despite these disappointing results for the

Nkrumahists, they are the obvious beneficiaries of an NDC collapse. A united front

against the NPP would renew the old Nkrumah/Danquah political debates Ghanaians

have grown comfortable with and give the old NDC constituency a ready-made

ideological base from which to attack NPP policy.56 There has been much discussion

about unification of the Nkrumahists over the course of the Fourth Republic but as of yet

egos have prevented such a merger.

Ghanaian Rule of Law

All modem states base their right to sovereignty on raw power and an

amalgamation of three forms of legitimacy: traditional, charismatic, and legal37 As

mentioned in Chapter Two, states enjoying the rule of law have relatively high levels of

legitimacy and lean heaviest on its legal variant. Prior the PNDC’s coming to power in

1981, Ghana had two types of regimes with regards to the rule of law. The multi-party

civilian regimes claimed legal legitimacy but had little control of the state’s powers of

coercion. The military and one-party CPP regimes claimed a moral mandate but relied

almost exclusively on the delicate tools of state coercion to remain in power. Under

neither type of regime was the rule of law a defining attribute.

53 Ghana Elections, “Ghana Elections 2000: Daily updates on the political scene,”Ghana Elections Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.ghanaelections.com; Internet; accessed 17 January 2001.

36 Isaac Homeku, “CPP Unity On Course-Chairman,” The Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 23 May 2001. In an interview with the Chairman of the Convention People’s Party, Dr. Abubakar Al-Hassan indicated that the CPP and the other Nkrumahist parties were already holding talks for a possible merger to compete as a united force in the 2004 elections.

57 Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Bedminster Press, 1968), 226.

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When Rawlings burst onto the Ghanaian political scene first in 1979 and then

again in 1981, he was a very different type of political animal than his immediate

predecessors. Even his staunchest critics were forced to acknowledge the feet that he

possessed a charisma matched by few. “Ghana has been able to produce only three

charismatic personalities in this century,” noted A. Adu Boahen, “namely, Kwame

Nkrumah, Akwasi Amankwah Afrifa and thirdly J.J. Rawlings.”58 What the intellectuals

recognized as charisma, the average Ghanaian viewed as righteousness, hence the

nickname “Junior Jesus.”39 Stories about Rawlings’ humble appreciation for the common

man and his self-sacrificing nature thrive in Ghana. Nana Agyeman Rawlings, Jerry’s

wife, played into her husband’s legend when she relayed an anecdote to a Daily Graphic

reporter shortly after the AFRC’s successful coup of 1979. “Do you know that mentally

handicapped man who is always parading the street across here?,” she rhetorically asked

the reporter adding, “Jerry insists that we should feed him everyday. He always talks of

the way he appreciates the positive and beautiful way in which the man cleaned the

environment by picking all the bits and pieces of paper rubbish on the street. So we had

to find food for him anytime he came around.”60

The charismatic legitimacy attributed to Rawlings from the masses empowered

the chairman to add to his mystique by pursuing “common sense” (read un-researched)

58 Boahen, 41.

39 Mark August, ‘"Junior Jesus’: Showman Or Canny Leader,”New African, February 1982,13.

60 Kojo Yankah, The Trial o f JJ. Rawlings: Echoes o f ihe 31" December Revolution, (Tema, Ghana: Ghana Publishing Corp., 1986), 1.

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solutions to Ghana’s pressing social ills.61 During Rawlings’ early years, he had such

epiphanies as “Refrain From Over-Indulgence in Alcoholism” in which he urged

Ghanaian workers not to drink too much and to take care of feeding and clothing their

wives and children before turning their attention to girlfriends.62 In another pearl of

wisdom, Rawlings told parents to “Love Your Kids” adding that parents should “develop

parental love and affection for their children to save them from frustration in their early

lives.”63 He even declared August 4th National Pot-Holes Day ordering citizens to

celebrate by fixing the roads in front of their residences. Championing the causes of

sobriety, family values, and civic pride are not sine qua non signs of the absence of the

rule of law. The feet that edicts concerning the minutia of every day life were the closest

Rawlings got to issuing a law with clear limits and penalties is.64

Largely due to economic difficulties and some atrocious human rights violations

described in greater detail in Chapter Three, Rawlings’ charismatic legitimacy began to

wear thin less than a year after his self-proclaimed “31st December Revolution.” The “do

as I say” aspects of his rule grew less and less compelling for average Ghanaians. At first

the wily chairman turned to economic reforms as a source of legitimacy, but as the 1990s

61 Donald Rothchild, “Rawlings and the Engineering of Legitimacy in Ghana,” in Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration o f Legitimate Authority, ed. I. William Zartman (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995), 55.

62 “Refrain From Over-Indulgence In Alcoholism,” Daily Graphic, 24 August 1979.

63 Kidd Darko, “Love Your Kids,” Daily Graphic, 1 September 1979.

64 Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems o f Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South American, and Post-Communist (Baltimore, Europe MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 249.

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approached he sought the legitimizing cover offered fay democratic institutions. Two of

these institutions are a constitution and an independent judiciary.

Ghana’s fourth republican constitution went into effect on 7 January 1993.

Highlights of this document include popular sovereignty, guarantees for human rights and

freedoms, a system of checks and balances similar to those codified in the US

Constitution, freedom and independence of the media, protections for political parties,

and a two-term limitation on the tenure of president.65 Although a step in the right

direction, the encouraging words in the 1992 Constitution are far from guarantors of

democracy. One need not look outside of Ghana to find examples of democratic

constitutions par excellence that were felled shortly after ratification. Both the 1969 and

1979 Constitutions embraced principles of democracy very similar to those described

above. The governments that swore to protect these constitutions lasted only 28 months

apiece.

Of the individuals who are constitutionally obligated to interpret the 1992

Ghanaian Constitution, H. Kwasi Prempeh has remarked: “the Ghanaian judiciary

remains attached to a jurisprudence that is far more authoritarian than liberal.”66 The

decision by the Supreme Court in the early days of the Fourth Republic to disallow public

funding of the 31st December holiday was an important landmark for judicial

independence precisely because it was unprecedented. Much more telling of the court’s

general practice are the criminal- and seditious-libel proceedings lodged by the NDC

65 A copy of the 1992 Ghanaian Constitution has been placed on the Internet at http://212.67.202.38/--gri/GconsthtmI courtesy of Ghana Review International (GRi).

66 H. Kwasi Prempeh, “A New Jurisprudence for Africa,” Journal o fDemocracy 10, no.3 (July 1999): 139.

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government against the independent media. Chapter 12, Article 162, Section 1 of the

Ghanaian Constitution reads: “Freedom and independence of the media are hereby

guaranteed.” Chapter 12, Article 164 of the Ghanaian Constitution reads: “The

provisions of articles 162 and 163 of this Constitution are subject to laws that are

reasonably required in the interest of national security, public order, public morality and

for the purpose of protecting the reputations, rights and freedoms of other persons.”67

Even though neither of the two listed segments of the Ghanaian Constitution are given

explicit preeminence, the Ghanaian courts have consistently chosen to rule in favor of

“protecting the reputations, rights and freedoms of other persons” over the “freedom...of

the media.” As there is absolutely no evidence to suggest the adjudicators in the above-

mentioned cases were crooked or colluding with government, one is forced to attribute

their behavior to one of two possibilities: Either the charged publishers and journalists

acted completely irresponsible and intentionally published malicious fiction in the guise

of researched fact or the courts were unwilling to advance liberal-democratic values by

setting legal precedents.68 The government claims the former and the media claims the

latter but impartial observations indicate that both are problems.

Despite the ratification of a democratic constitution and installation of an

independent, albeit slightly illiberal, judiciary, Rawlings continued to act as if charisma

was the sole source of his legitimacy. He criticized mercilessly the institutions of

democratic governance, which he and his cohorts had a hand in creating, and viewed the

rule of law with contempt whenever it got in his way. The interactions between a head of

57 See footnote 65.

“ Prempeh, 139.

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state who claimed his legitimacy based on his personal charisma and democratic

institutions which claimed legal legitimacy were always awkward and at times downright

ugly. When Rawlings had a personal conflict with his first Vice-President, K.N. Arkaah,

he knocked the man to the ground at a cabinet meeting and proceeded to kick him in the

groin several times while he was down. To add to the beating, Rawlings then went

around the country accusing Arkaah of rape and womanizing.69 When the longtime

boyfriend of Rawlings’ eldest daughter Zanetor broke off their relationship, Rawlings had

the young man arrested, roughed up by security personnel, and shaved. Then, to make

certain the lad was punished thoroughly, Rawlings sent a cadre of police officers to raze

35 properties owned by his mother.70 Combined with the fit Rawlings threw when the

Supreme Court ruled against the public funding of his holiday and the bloody manifesto

he auctioned to support his candidate in the 2000 elections, the abovementioned

examples demonstrate the gracelessness with which Rawlings maneuvered as head of a

supposed legal/rational state.

Now that President Kufuor is Ghana’s head of state, the uneasy relationship

between a charismatic leader and legal-rational institutions has been relieved. Kufuor is a

lawyer by training who lacks the fiery personality of Rawlings. He is also a staunch

supporter of the rule of law. “No Ghanaian now goes to bed or indeed gets up in the

morning,” Kufuor applauded his government’s progress just a few months after taking

69 Robin White, “Arkaah’s BBC Interview with Robin White,” Ghanaian News Runner [home page on­ line]; available from http://www.newsnmner.com/archive/NWI20196.HTM; Internet; accessed 11 November 2000.

70 Mike Afrani, “The president and his ex-‘inlaw,’” New African, October 2000, 10. President Rawlings wife went on public radio the day after the young man’s arrest and justified his treatment to the public.

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office, “with the fear that he will be arrested or molested outside the realms of the law.”71

Whereas Rawlings was willing to disregard the rule of law to elicit what he considered to

be justice, Kufuor has shown stoic restraint.

In the first few months of Kufuor’s tenure, former President Rawlings, who has a

history of coup making, has been traveling about the country criticizing the current

government and hinting at its possible overthrow. In June 2001 security personal were

dispatched to Rawlings' home in search of illegal weapons. When they found only one

licensed handgun, the officers left his property without an arrest.72 In another incident,

Rawlings’ right hand man, former Youth and Sports Minister and current NDC Member

of Parliament E.T. Mensah, was arrested for instigating a riot in the Nima slum area of

Accra. Following the tragic deaths of 126 Ghanaians in a football stadium disaster,

Mensah led a groups of youths into downtown Accra to protest the government’s alleged

role in the disaster. Once there, the mob attacked a police station, destroyed public

property, and started a number to tire fires. Even though Mensah was quickly released on

baQ, the NDC went on a one-day parliamentary strike claiming martyrdom.73

Whereas with Rawlings the public criticized the overuse of the state’s security

apparatus, many in Ghana are questioning the current government’s relative lack of

action. They remember President Limann’s short-lived government and the way

Rawlings and his thugs sauntered about the country threatening to overthrow the regime.

Limann irritated his predecessors by retiring them from the armed forces but refused to

71 Joyce Mensah Nsefo, “Kufuor in Full Control,”Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 19 April 2001.

72 Kwaku Sakyi-Adoo, “Ghana police raid Rawlings property in arms search,” Reuters, 9 June 2001.

73 “Detained Ex-Sports Minister Out On Bail,” Panqfrican News Agency (Dakar), 14 May 2001.

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criminally prosecute them for their misdeeds as civilians. The result of this inaction was

a military overthrow o f a democratic regime.74 At the moment, instigators of coup d’&ats

are receiving pariah status in Africa and the Ghanaian Military High Command has

issued several statements pledging the armed force’s support for the current

administration.73 Notwithstanding these reassurances, Kufuor and the NPP must

remember the wisdom of the old adage “once bitten, twice shy.” There is a great deal of

public support for reopening the cases of the murders of the three judges and Kume Preko

protesters.76 Having opened up the government’s books, NPP auditors are finding

criminal mismanagement.77 On the 22nd Anniversary of his June 4th coup, Rawlings

threatened the military overthrow of the present government.78 Just as going after former

political opponents without justification would violate the democratic principles of civil

liberty and political rights, refusing to hold Rawlings legally accountable for his

egregious actions, especially those committed after his return to civilian life, could harm

the rule of law and significantly hinder democratic consolidation.

74 Boahen, 37.

73 “Ghana Military Restates Support fir Kufuor,” The Guardian (Lagos), 7 June 2001. The Military High Commission issued the following statement: “The Ghana Armed Forces hereby reaffirm their loyalty to the Commander-in-Chief (Kufuor)...and are prepared to defend the constitution of Ghana at all times.”

76 A. Harruna Attah, “People’s Funeral for Judges,” Accra M ail (Accra), 18 June 2001; “So Who Killed the Judges?,” Accra Mail (Accra), 2 July 2001; S. Kwaku Asare, “TRC, how far back do we go?,” Accra Mail (Accra), 3 July 2001.

77 “Hypocrisy,” The Independent (Accra), 1 February 2001.

78 A. R. Alhassan, “Not All Military Officers Are Bad, But All Military Governments Are Bad,” Accra M ail (Accra), 18 June 2001; Kwame Ogyampah, “Boom! Boom! Saka!!,”Accra Mail (Accra), 13 June 2001.

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Ghanaian State Bureaucracy

“To promote productive investment and efficiency,” Richard Sandbrook and Jay

Oelbaum have noted, “Ghana need[s] more responsive, expert, disciplined, and motivated

civil servants, public corporations, and regulatory agencies.”79 Of all the arenas of the

Ghanaian polity discussed here, state bureaucracy is the arena that has been the least

dynamic. While the aforementioned scholars were referring to the condition of the

Ghanaian state bureaucracy at the dawn of the Fourth Republic, the charge of

unresponsive, inept, undisciplined, and lazy civil servants could be justifiably leveled

against Ghana today or Ghana forty years ago. This inauspicious characterization of the

Ghanaian civil service in no way impugns the work ethic of the average Ghanaian.80

Anyone who has visited the country knows well how hard the men and women on the

streets of Nima and the dirt paths of Bonpolugu work just to put food in their belly.

Rather, the characterization points to a dysfunctional institution that does not provide the

proper incentives for professionalism or productivity. Naomi Chazan has summed the

ailments infecting Ghana’s state bureaucracy up in two words: overestablished and

underbureaucratized.81

79 Richard Sandbrook and Jay Oelbaum, “Reforming Dysfunctional Institutions Through Democratisation? Reflections on Ghana,”The Journal o f Modem African Studies 35, no.4 (1997): 638.

80 This thesis does not subscribe to the cultural analysis approach that has often been used to characterize the cultures of countries and regions doing relatively well developmentally as superior to the cultures of countries and regions doing relatively poorly. For countries that have been in existence less than half a century the fatalism of the culturalist approach is inappropriate.

81 Naomi Chazan, “Ghana: Problems of Governance and the Emergence of Civil Society,” inDemocracy in Developing Countries: Africa, eds. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1988), 129.

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The overestablishment of the Ghanaian civil service is a direct result of the

prebendal politics that have flourished since the creation of the Ghanaian state

apparatus.82 In essence, prebendalism is the appropriation of public resources for private

wealth accumulation. Sometimes this appropriation takes the form of outright

embezzlement but quite often it is much subtler. The political leaders in Ghana, in a

similar fashion to most of their African brethren, have consistently used the state

bureaucracy to reward their friends and supporters with ministerial and department head

postings. These ministers and department chairs turn around and reward their friends and

supporters with managerial positions who turn around and reward their friends and

supporters with clerical positions until the well of state resources runs dry. The

insidiousness of neo-patrimonialism, as the aforementioned state of affairs has come to

be known, is its intractability.

It seems as if each time a new Ghanaian government has come to power, the

project of reducing the size of the civil service is at the top of its list of things to do.

When it comes to acting on this impulse, beyond terminating a few of the previous

regime’s top brass, political reality sets in. With official unemployment rates in excess of

20 percent, and unofficial underemployment rates much higher, no government wants to

be held responsible for firing thousands of Ghanaians earning less than a dollar a day

even if they are not contributing to national development.83 Rawlings and the PNDC

government, in an amazing display of autonomy, tried to reorganize the Ghanaian state

82 For the origins of the term “prebendal” in its current usage see Richard Joseph, “Class, State, and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria,” Journal o f Commonwealth and Comparative 21,Politics noJ: 21-38.

83 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), World Factbook, 2000 (Washington, DC, 2000); available online at http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/gh.html; Internet; accessed 12 May 2001.

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bureaucracy in the late 1980s as part of the country’s structural adjustment program.

They were able to reduce the civil service roles by nearly 25,000 people between August

1987 and March 1992 only to have then* replacements in the NDC hire nearly 80,000

people to fill the vacated spots.84

The underbureaucratization of the Ghanaian civil service goes hand in hand with

its overestablishment. By filling the ranks of the civil service with acquaintances instead

of technocrats, Ghanaian governments have severed the link between career advancement

and the attainment of formal organizational goals.85 Who one knows and what one can

do for that person has been for more important than one’s ability to conduct departmental

business. The unmeritocratic hiring practice of the civil service in Ghana is not however,

a sufficient explanation for the country’s bureaucratic ineffectiveness. While it is

doubtful that a random sampling of twenty Ghanaians would have the training and skills

necessary to run the country on the ministerial level, there is no reason why that same

sampling could not stamp documents at a government office, check licenses at

roadblocks, or monitor sales permits in the markets in a professional manner.

In the presidential debate leading up to the 2000 elections, United Ghana

Movement candidate Charles Wereko-Brobby got to the root cause of Ghana’s

underbureaucratization. “For too long,” Wereko-Brobby commented, “the government

has pretended to pay us and we’ve pretended to work.” The best and brightest from the

limited pool of Ghanaians with professional and technical training do not even bother

M Sandbrook and Oelbaum, 639.

85 David K. Leonard, “The Political Realities of African Management,” World Development 15, no.7 (1987): 903.

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with civil service employment. The treatment and remunerations these individuals get

from multi-national organizations and privately owned foreign companies for exceed

anything they could get from the public sector.*6 Left for the civil service, are those

Ghanaians desperate, or unscrupulous, enough to hustle informally to make up for the

paucity of what the government pays them formally. In the few hours civil servants

dedicate to their formal duties each week, they are bureaucratic to a fault insisting that

every form is filled out perfectly and stamped, signed, and verified by nearly every

individual in the office, most of whom will be out to lunch or on business. “[T]hey

practise bureaucracy,” explains JeanrFran^ois Bayart tongue and cheekily, “with a zeal

for the good of a government which frequently depends upon a different sort of

legitimacy.”*7 With the vast majority of their time, however, the bureaucrats use their

public position to earn money off the books by demanding bribes, running a cottage

industry in their office, or stealing supplies for resale on the street.

President Kufuor has vowed to alter the status quo in the Ghanaian state

bureaucracy. In an interview conducted just day before he assumed his current office,

Kufuor outlined his prescription for the eradication of public sector corruption, a generic

term that encompasses both the overestablishment and underbureaucratization:

What I am going to do about corruption is that I have told Ghana that I would begin with myself I would do everything humanly possible with myself not to get corrupt, so that I would be able to ensure my ministers and high officials who work for me will be disciplined, that I can deal with them if they should become corrupt. And through that, I would expect the discipline and the anti­

86 For more on the wage disparity between the Ghanaian public and private sectors, see Harold Alderman, Sundharshan Canagarajah, and Stephen Younger, “A Comparison of Ghanaian Civil Servants’ Earnings Before and After Retrenchment,” Journal o f African Economies 4, no2 (1996): 259-288.

87 Bayart, 246.

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corruption crusade would seep down to the grassroots. I believe this is it. And then I would empower the investigative agencies of state to be primed everywhere to be sure that corruption remains under assault. And again further, would support the judiciary, which is a different arm of government would enable it with all the support government can master, to be able to dispense justice as expeditiously and as fearlessly as can be, so people offending are quickly brought to book and dealt with due process of the law. These are the things I want to do.88

The Ghanaian press is not known for its discretion and reporters have yet to dig up any

dirt on President Kufuor to suggest he is anything but a man of great principle. His

remarks, however, demonstrate a trust in humanity that borders on the naive.

In the first few months of the Kufuor administration, the government has

launched internal audits of a few of the high profile public bureaucracies known for their

access to tempting rents, most notably the Social Security and National Insurance Trust

(SSNIT).89 Preliminary findings of these audits suggest that there has been a great deal

of inefficiency and mismanagement. The likely result of these audits will be the

termination of a handful of administrators, most of whom were big donors to NDC

candidates. Will this crackdown on corruption beget a more capable and competent civil

service? In the short term, if the NPP replaces the bureaucratic deadwood with

professional managers and technocrats, a constituency that forms a large part of the

party’s core, the state bureaucracy will probably show some improvement in services

offered.

88 Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, “We’re A Regional Pace-Setter, Says Kufuor,”allAfrica.com Online [home page on-line]; available from http^/209.225.9.134/stories/printable/200101040082Jitml; Internet; accessed 2 May 2001.

89 Kofi Coomson, “SSNIT: Shadow Boxing Now Coming Out in the Open,”Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 28 May 2001.

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In the long term, however, it will take a fundamental change in the bureaucratic

incentive structures for the man and woman on the front lines. To deal with labor, the

NPP government raised the minimum wage by 31 percent to 05,500 a day (approximately

73 cents in 2001 US Dollars). Labor unions, especially the Trade Union Congress

(TUC), have not been traditional bedfellows of the Danquahist parties, but given their

contempt for the PNDC’s structural adjustment program they have agreed to make

conditional sacrifices for the current government. “We shall demand to see the material

benefits of our sacrifices,” explained Secretary General of the TUC Kwasi Adu-

Amankwah, “and we call on government to rise up to its tasks.”90 When one considers

the poor state of economic affairs inherited by the NPP, it is doubtful that the honeymoon

with labor will last long and the current appointed government ministers will find it

increasingly difficult to force then employees to work any harder for them than they did

for the previous government’s ministers. The state bureaucracy is the arena of the polity

where citizens have the most direct interaction with their government and if this

experience does not become less wearisome, opponents of democracy will have a

meaningful issue to criticize the government on.

Ghanaian Economic Society

Few issues in Ghanaian history have received as much bifurcated scholarly

attention as the PNDC’s management of the economy. As the IMF and World Bank

sought desperately for a success story to attribute to their neo-liberal structural

90 Kofi Arthur, “Labour Throws Challenge to Gov’t,”Public Agenda (Accra), 7 May 2001.

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adjustment philosophy in the mid-1980s, Ghana was given the tag “economic miracle”91

Critics of the Bretton Woods’ institutions were not very accommodating to the new labeL

Far from a miracle, Ross Hammond and Lisa McGowan argue that Ghana is a “sham

showcase” that “continues to be used to legitimize adjustment programs elsewhere on the

continent...[despite] overwhelming evidence of the program’s Mure.”92 While the

International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have backed off the miracle categorization in

recent years, Ghana’s Economic Recovery Program (ERP) remains a contentious topic

with scholars on both sides of the issue arguing vehemently for their respective points of

view.93 This thesis takes the stand that, during the PNDC’s economic reforms, Ghana’s

economy was neither a miracle nor a mirage.94 The record of structural adjustment in

Ghana has been mixed and both the positive and negative consequences of the

PNDC/NDC economic policies have impacted greatly economic society’s ability to effect

democratic consolidation.

91 World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1989).

92 Ross Hammond and Lisa McGowan, “Ghana: The World Bank’s Sham Showcase,” in50 years is enough : the case against the World Bank and the International Monetary ed. Kevin Fund, Danaher (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994), 78.

93 World Bank, Can Africa Claim The 2la Century (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000), 28-38. While the civilian NDC governments has remained faithful to the SAP in speech, it has demonstrated itself either unable, or unwilling, to curb the country’s skyrocketing inflation or reign in public deficit spending. Uganda appears to have replaced Ghana as the neo-liberal economists’ flavor of the month. Unfortunately those heaping praise on Uganda are either unfamiliar with Ghana’s “miracle” trajectory or have short memories. It remains to be seen whether the Museveni government can attract significant investment in value-added sectors of the economy after completion of the ongoing liberalization reforms. Rawlings and the PNDC could not

94 The miracle and mirage metaphor is borrowed from Ernest Aryettey, Jane Ham'gan, and Machiko Nissanke, “Economic Reforms in Ghana: The Miracle & The Mirage” (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000).

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To truly understand the impact of the PNDC/NDC structural reforms, one must

look back to the struggling economy Rawlings commandeered via his 31 December coup

d’dtat. An unfavorable international environment, poor domestic policy choices,

widespread bureaucratic corruption, and simple bad hick commingled and compounded

from the time of independence to create a dire situation for the economically

inexperienced soldiers of the PNDC. Years of political favors had bloated the civil

service with ghosts (people on the government payroll who did not actually exist) and

bandits (people on the government payroll whose time at work was spent pursuing

personal gain). The swollen public sector consumed a full quarter of Ghana’s GDP by

1981.95 The cedi, which successive governments had refused to devalue for fear of a

coup, was quoted at the unrealistic exchange rate of approximately two cedis to one

dollar. Finding it impossible to convert their money for anywhere close to official rates,

the man and woman on the street were addicted to imported goods and unable to

exchange their nearly worthless banknotes for a hard currency.96 Marketing Boards,

import controls, and dilapidated infrastructure had pushed many farmers off the land or

into the black market97 Formal production of Ghana’s chief export cocoa, had M en

from 557,000 long tons in the crop year 1964/65 to 185,000 long tons in the year 1980/81

causing the country’s share of the world cocoa market to M from 33 to 17 percent

95 Robert Summers and Allen Heston, “The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An expanded set of international comparisons, 1950-1988,”Quarterly Journal o f Economics 106 (1991): 327-68.

96 Jeffrey Herbst, The Politics a f Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 47.

97 Robert Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis o f Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 11-29.

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between the years 1970 and 1980.98 This decline in production was in spite of the fact

that agriculture, comprised mainly of cocoa, remained 60 percent of the country’s GDP."

Given the utter financial chaos and lack of incentives for productivity, it is not surprising

that in the years between 1971 and 1981, per capita income dropped almost 30 percent

from approximately 640 cedis to 460 cedis.100 The “Black Star” of Africa had traversed a

path from the dream of unlimited potential at independence to the nightmare of utter and

seemingly unretractable poverty in less than a quarter of a century.

While the differences, or lack thereof between the economic conditions inherited

by the Kufuor/NPP government in 2001 and the PNDC government in 1981 cannot be

contributed entirely to the PNDC and NDC’s management of the economy, the economic

tools the current government has at its disposal have been fundamentally transformed by

the policies of the ERP. What the NPP has not inherited is a developmental juggernaut of

an economy as the tag “miracle” suggests. Chapter Three goes into the ERP policies and

the rational behind them in some detail, but it bears mentioning here that after nearly

twenty years of bitter neo-liberal medicine, the Ghanaian economy remains debt ridden,

relatively low-tech, and extremely dependent on volatile international markets.

Between 1983 and 2000, Ghana received more than $1.6 billion in loans from the

IMF.101 Although debt is not inherently bad, the Ghanaian government’s use of

98 Donald RothchQd, Ghana: The Political Economy a f Recovery (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 5-6.

99 The World Bank Group, “Ghana at a glance,” World Bank Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.worldbank.org/data/countrydata/aag/gha_aag.pdf; Internet; accessed 7 January 2001. The figure 60 percent is for the calendar year 1979.

100 Jeffrey Herbst, 27. Cedis quoted are from 1975.

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borrowed funds to make up for their largely consumption driven revenue shortfalls

created a debt-load of 81 percent of gross domestic product in the year 2000, this

compared to 32 percent in 1979, with no significant income-generating investment to

show for it.102 When trade fell by 10 percent in 1999 and a further 16 percent in 2000,

largely due to a 20-year low price for cocoa and elevated oil prices, the lack of export

diversity combined with the overwhelming debt burden to send the government in a

desperate search for foreign exchange. A cedi worth a third as much in 2001 as it was

worth just two years prior, foreign reserves capable of covering less than a month and a

half of imports, and licensed forex bureaus willing to exchange dollars for cedis but

“unable” to make the transaction in reverse are the woeful reminders of this search.103

In addition to a chronic weakness in the economy brought about by the massive

debt load and insufficient investment that accompanied the ERP, poor distribution of the

spoils of economic efficiency has many Ghanaians grumbling. The PNDC/NDC

governments were unable to parlay their relative proximity topareto optimal into

significant and widespread improvements in the average Ghanaian’s standard of living.104

101 International Monetary Fund, “Summary of Disbursements and Repayments: Ghana,” IMF Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.imf.org/extemal/country/GHA/index.htin; Internet; accessed 18 October 2000.

102 The World Bank Group, “Ghana at a glance.”

103 The World Bank Group, “Countries: Ghana,”World Bank Online [home page on-line]; available from http://www.worldbank.org/afr/gh2.htm; Internet; accessed 18 October 2000.

104 Standard of living is a highly subjective matter. For more on the lack of standard of living improvements over the course of the ERP see Kwesi Jonah, “The Social Impact of Ghana’s Adjustment Program, 1983-86,” in The IMF, the World Bank and the African Debt, vol.2: The Social and Political Impact, ed. Bade Onimode (London, UK: Zed Publishing, 1989); and Kwamina Panford, “Ghana: A Decade of IMF/World Bank’s Policies of Adjustment (1985-1995),”Scandinavian Journal ofDevelopment Alternatives and Area Studies 16, no.2 (1997): 81-106. “Significant and widespread improvements” does not mean that things are not better today than they were in 1983. What the phrase means is that if in die year 2000 Ghana had experienced a severe drought and inflow of 1 million citizens ejected from Nigeria, as

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One of the principle reasons for this failing is that “the beneficiaries of the growth have

been largely rural and too few, and the distributive impact of the policies often

inequitable.”105 Thanks to fewer import restrictions, a market-determined exchange rate,

and increased exportation, one can now find expensive imported consumer goods

(snacks, liquor, magazines, and toiletries) on display in the foreign owned gas station

boutiques throughout Ghana. The problem is that almost no one has the cedis to buy

them.106

High underemployment, due in part to cutbacks in public hiring and an inability to

attract manufacturing investment, has created a situation where even skilled workers are

having difficulty finding gainful employment.107 A survey conducted in the early 1990s

found that, in Ghana, an average of 15 people are dependent on each principal urban

wage earner.108 The other 14 people are left to struggle for coins selling trinkets on the

side of the road, doing odd jobs for wealthy neighbors and expatriates, or wandering the

streets in search of their next get-rich-quick scheme. When one asksGhanaians on the

street, “how can you afford to live?’ a common answer is “magic.” A close inspection of

happened in 1983, the average citizen’s economic quality of life would be very similar to the average citizen’s quality of live pre-ERP.

105 Jon Kraus, “The Political Economy of Stabilization and Structural Adjustment in Ghana,” inGhana: The Political Economy o fRecovery, ed. Donald Rothchild (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1991), 151. Ironically, those who benefited most from the PNDC’s neo-liberal reforms were cocoa growers and gold miners. Both of these groups are dominated by Ashanti businessmen who have been the chief source of campaign funds for the NPP.

106 Rothchild, Ghana, 11.

107 Carol Lancaster has stated that “Recovery will turn into sustained growth only when a substantial amount of investment in new productive activities is forthcoming. The experience of Ghana thus far is not reassuring.” “Economic Restructuring in Sub-Saharan Africa,”Current History (May 1989): 216.

IW Hammond and McGowan, 81.

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this “magic” reveals an unhealthily low caloric intake, usually involving fish and kenkey,

and the generosity o f a comparatively wealthy relative either in Ghana or abroad.109

Even though the above description of the fruits of Ghana’s structural adjustment

tarnishes the country’s “miracle” image, for the sake of democratic consolidation, the

results of the ERP have not been all bad. Joseph Abbey, a key member of the PNDC’s

economic restructuring team, remarked of the country’s economic reforms: “We are

hoping that Ghanaians will have the political maturity to judge the programme not on

their direct material benefits but on the solid foundations we have laid down for future

economic take-off.”110 Looking past the political motives behind Abbey’s comments, the

NDC was in the midst of the 1992 election campaign, he perceptively recognized that the

success of the ERP is negligible in terms of “direct material benefits” but significant in

the “foundations” it laid. The economic rents that had strangled the pre-ERP Ghanaian

economy since the time ofNkrumah are now largely gone thanks to PNDC policies.

Whereas import licenses, government run monopsonies, and artificial exchange

rates were once lucrative sources of “off the books” income for politicians and their

cronies, today they are either extinct institutions or so endangered as to not bear

mentioning.111 Parastatal divestiture has not been as forthcoming not so much for a lack

109 This insight is thanks to the many residents of Sakumono Estates on the outskirts of Accra who took time out of their busy schedules during the summer o f2000 to talk about their lives. Special thanks go to Kwabena Twum-Barimah and Ebenezer Amanor who made a foreigner feel right at home.

110 Julian Ozanne, “Ghana’s Tough Economic Reforms Face the Ballot Box Test,”Financial Times, 14 August 1992.

111 James Ahiakpor, “Rawlings, Economic Policy Reform, and the Poor Consistency or Betrayal?,”The Journal o f Modem African Studies 29, no.4 (1991): 594-595.

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of will, but for lack of legitimately interested investors.112 By liquidating the parasitic

invested interests associated with the aforementioned economic rents, the PNDC

bequeathed its successors a great deal more autonomy with regards to economic policy

than it had upon entering office. For President Kufoor and the NPP to have to break the

invested interests, as would be necessary to make progress in meeting their

constituency's demands for development, would have been much more difficult than it

was for the PNDC who had the guns and unlimited mandate that come with being a

military government.113

Recognizing the successes and M ures of economic reform under Rawlings in a

similar fashion to that stated above, the current government of Ghana has chosen a rather

unoriginal sounding set of policies to correct the previous economic policy’s wrongs and

perpetuate the rights. In an interview conducted just a few days prior to the assumption

of his current office, President Kufoor stressed promotion of the private sector and

discipline in the public sector as keys to sustainable economic development. He went on

to say that, unlike his predecessor, he has always been steadfast in his faith in economic

liberalism and believes “engendering wealth” will be the centerpiece of any NPP

112 Rothchild, Ghana, 9. Of nearly 200 state-owned enterprises in the year 1990, the PNDC opened all but 18 for private bids. Given the risk of such an investment however, the majority of willing purchasers either offered bids much lower than estimated worth or were friends of the government and given sweetheart deals in an opaque fashion.

113 Because of the dynamics of collective action, all of the Ghanaian governments prior to the PNDC found it impossible to eliminate the debilitating economic rents formed by Nkrumah and the CPP’s socialist policies. For more on the difficulty of liberalizing an economy with regards to entrenched interests see Thomas Callaghy, “Political Passions and Economic Interests,” inHemmed In: Responses to Africa’s Economic Decline, eds. Thomas Callaghy and John Ravenhill (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993X 463-519.

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policy.114 Although it is still very early, the NPP’s philosophy appears to be more than

simple lip service.

Almost immediately upon taking office, the NPP government went after the

country’s crown jewel of public enterprises. Being a pilot himself former President

Rawlings not only declared Ghanaian Airways (Ghanair) a strategic national interest not

to be divested, but with much pomp and circumstance decorated the company with the

first and only “Ghanaian Business of the Century” Award.115 In May 2001, the Internal

Revenue Service (IRS) delved into Ghanair’s books to find that E.C. Quartey Jr., the

company’s CEO who retired in February amid a storm of allegations of wrongdoing, and

Tim Stevens, Deputy Chief Executive of Business Development who Ghana Immigration

Services (GIS) has since reported does not have a valid working permit, had been paying

themselves with petty cash vouchers. This creative payment scheme allowed the two

men to evade nearly 01.2 billion (more than $150,000 in current dollars) in federal

taxes.116

Two other high profile examples of the NPP’s promotion of the private sector and

disciplining o f the public sector can be found in the government’s handling of the African

114 Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, “Austerity, Discipline Necessary For Economic Recovery Says Kufoor,” aRAfiica.com Online [home page on-line]; available from http://209.225.9.134/stories/printable /200101030l42Jitmi; Internet; accessed 2 May 2001.

115 Although it seems a bit presumptuous to give a best of the century award in a country that has been in existence slightly more than 40 years and to a business that has been around for far fewer, Ghana Airways proudly displays the trophy at their headquarters and advertises the award with a five minute commercial run several times on each Transatlantic flight

116 Dominic Jale, “0l.2bn Tax Evasion At Ghanair, Ex-CEO, Deputy Involved, Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 28 May 2001. Mr. Quartey and Mr. Stevens have left Ghana for Europe where they are living comfortably. The company Rawlings fancied a source of national entrepreneurial pride in Ghana posted a loss of $100 million for the 1999/2000 operational year.

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Ground Handling Operations (AFGO) and Quality Grain Company Ltd. Government

lawyers are in the process of negating a contract between the AFGO and Ghana Civil

Aviation Authority (GCAA) which granted, in an uncompetitive bidding process, the

right to a monopoly with regards to all ground cargo-handling services at Kotoka

International Airport to a long time friend and supporter of the Rawlingses, Syrian

national Marwan Traboulsi. The previous government had contributed equipment and

training to AFGO employees and President Rawlings personally led a group of soldiers to

close down the warehouses of AFGO’s competitors.117 In a different legal proceeding,

The Ghanaian High Court joined the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations

(FBI) and Gwinnett County Georgia Courts to prosecute, both civilly and criminally,

Juliet Cotton, the 37-year-old American entrepreneur who founded Quality Grain Inc.

The NDC government gave Cotton access to 22,000 acres of land and $22 million to

develop a rice farm in rural Brong-Ahafo but she instead showered herself with fancy

cars, houses, and clothes. Rawlings refused to take steps to recoup the government funds,

the press in Ghana is reporting that he was hypnotized by Ms. Cotton’s voluptuousness,

despite the fact that less than 550 acres were ever developed.118

The NPP, by taking the aforementioned actions against Ghanair, AFGO, and

Quality Grain Inc., has built on the PNDC/NDC governments’ market liberalization

efforts by removing economic rents associated with opaque government transactions. If

sustained, this practice should motivate the private sector to fill the void left by

117 Paa Kwesi, “Rawlings’ Pal to Lose Air Cargo Monopoly,”Ghanaian C h ro n icle (Accra), 29 May 2001.

118 “Atlanta firm loses Ghana assets,”The Atlanta Joumal-Constitution, 18 May 2001 and Kofi Coomson, “FBI, IRS Hunt $20m Quality Grain ‘Loot,’” Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra), 27 March 2001.

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Table 4.2 The Economic Indicators o f Ghana ’s Economic Recovery Program (ERP)

GDP per capita: 1983 - 2000 Exports: 1983 - 2000

1500 -| S2J5O 0 - r r — f a o o o - tt

$600 SO 1963 1966 1967 I960 1961 1906 1906 1907 1900 1963 1966 1967 I960 1901 1903 1906 1907 1900

External Debt 1983-2000 Cedi/Dollar Exchange Rate: 1983-2000

6000 17.000 6 5000 !VT1 Tv: r 'r J J- - iOl-.' I *»> 14.000 ? 3000

/,)<• 7-v J P S f r s , i£ vV , 2000 § $2,000 1000 $ 1,000

1063 1966 1967 1960 1961 1963 1906 1967 1906 1963 1966 1967 1960 1061 1900 1906 1967 1900

Source: EIU

inefficient government subsidized rackets. “Given any year during the [Rawlings]

tenure,” Kufuor described the harm done to Ghanaian entrepreneurial spirit by his

predecessors back room deals, “if you looked at the auditor-general’s report, you would

see that waste and corruption alone absorbed something like a third of all the outlays

government made, whilst at the same time the private sector that could have broadened

the base of earnings, especially export earnings, hard currency earnings, was

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undermined.”119 While a step in the right direction, in the short run these actions do little

to deal with the general economic malaise characterized by persistent fiscal deficits and

large public-sector debt, low growth rates, and a rapidly depreciating currency that are

inflicting the country. To improve the fundamentals of the economy Kufuor and the NPP

have sought immediate relief from the IMF’s Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC)

initiative.

While going after Rawlings’ cronies was a politically easy maneuver that

punished a few wealthy NDC supporters and helps the NPP’s core constituency of

market-oriented businesspeople, joining HIPC could potentially alienate a broad swath of

the population. President Kufuor has tried to pin HIPC on his predecessor’s

mismanagement and underplay the hardships it will bring. “We were forced to take the

seemingly high demeaning initiative out of desperation to revive the economy,” Kufuor

explained to the Ghanaian public, “but through proper management we could come out of

it.”120 The details of Ghana’s HIPC program have yet to be worked out but one can make

a reasonable prediction that the initiative will require the government to continue with

neo-liberal reforms and cutback on consumer subsidies.

Ghanaian students recently went on strike to protest a 300 percent hike in tuition

and an already strapped public is beginning to grumble about a recent 64 percent increase

in fuel prices, 103 percent increase in electricity prices, and 96 percent increase in water

prices.121 If the NPP government lives up to its incorruptible image, the citizens of

119 Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, “Austerity.”

120 “Benefits of HIPC to Be Realised Soon - Kufuor,”Accra Mail (Accra), 15 May 2001.

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Ghana may be willing to accept HIPC as a necessary evil They have, however, been told

to tighten their belts for the good of the country by successive governments since

Nkrumah and remember suffering without reward. No matter how “right” the NPP gets

the economy, if the government remains unable to meet the basic needs of its citizenry

over an extended period of time, democracy might survive but not without increasing

opposition.122

Conclusions

Addressing democratic consolidation in the above fashion has its advantages and

disadvantages. With so little writing done on Ghana’s democratic consolidation in its

entirety, looking at consolidation in particular arenas of the polity allows for greater

comparability. For example, the above analysis of democratic consolidation in Ghanaian

civil society can be compared with other writings on civil society and its role in

democratic consolidation in Ghana or another part of the world. Also, without breaking

the complicated process of consolidation into manageable chunks, the detail in the above

narrative would have been impossible to muster. By adding comparability and

complexity, however, some cohesion has been lost. Although implicit linkages and

interactions between stateness and the arenas of the polity are woven into the descriptive,

the above format implies that each variable is independent of the next. This implication

should not be indulged. Stateness and all five arenas of the polity affect, and are affected

tty, one another.

121 “Ghana Raises Minimum Wage By 31 Percent,” Panafriccm News Agency (Dakar), 30 April 2001.

122 Joan M. Nelson, “Linkages Between Politics and Economics,” inEconomic Reform and Democracy, eds. Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 49.

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The result of such an analysis on Ghana suggests that the country has indeed

embarked upon the path of consolidation. While the state bureaucracy has remained

relatively stagnant, modifications in the Ghanaian state and polity that have occurred

since the termination of the Third Republic either contribute to the acceptance of

democracy, or at least do not detract. People who had long ago turned then: backs on the

Ghanaian state because of its weakness are beginning to reconsider their actions. The

press and civil society organizations have broken through the culture of silence to find

new and important voices. In political society, a party with legitimate democratic

credentials holds the reigns of the state. The 1992 Constitution has survived longer than

any of its predecessors and is gaining esteem in its old age. Market liberalization has

foiled to develop the country or improve income per capita but it has rid the government

of some parasitic invested interests. Ghana still has a long way to go before it catches up

to some of the more consolidated democracies on this planet but it is definitely headed in

the right direction.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER FIVE TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS

In one of the seminal works on democratization in Africa, Michael Bratton and Nicolas

van de Walle concluded on a cautiously optimistic note:

[D]emocratization in Africa is a long-term institution-building project that is fraught with obstacles and constantly threatened with reversal Nevertheless, in the early 1990s, political actors in more than a dozen African countries overcame objective handicaps in order to complete the minimal steps required for the installation of democratic regimes. Although most of these democratic experiments will foil, a handful of imperfect multiparty electoral systems could well survive.1

This thesis has examined one of Africa’s most promising experiments. At the turn of the

century, Ghana is entering the ninth year of its current republic. In this republic, there

have thus for been three presidential and parliamentary elections, each surpassing the last

with regards to competition and participation. On 7 January 2001 Ghanaians witnessed

their country’s first ever peaceful transfer of power. Since 1992, the country’s record of

protecting civil liberties has improved every year.

Is Ghana’s young democracy beyond reproach? The answer to this question is a

resounding no. The majority of Ghanaians have accepted democracy as a good in-and-

of-itself but the state has little presence in the hinterlands, the civil service is ineffectual

1 Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 268.

126

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the economy is in shambles, poverty is rampant, and the only surviving former head of

state has made it known that the current government better deliver on all of its campaign

promises or “one day there could be a boom.”2 In spite of this, is Ghana’s young

democracy more secure than a Ghanaian democracy has ever been? A simple “yes”

answer to this question is not strong enough. While democratic overthrow and decay are

not beyond the realm of possibility, the tenuousness of the previous republics is not

present in Ghana’s Fourth Republic. The arenas of the polity discussed in great detail in

Chapter Four, have accepted, even embraced, democracy to an extent unprecedented in

Ghanaian history.

Lessons from Ghana's Consolidation

The Ghanaian case study provides an example of a polity using an autocrat’s skill

at maintaining stability to benefit democratic consolidation. An amalgamation of

domestic and international pressures in the late 1980s made democracy an increasingly

alluring option forChairman Rawlings.3 He calculated the risks involved in staving off

political liberalization and chose instead to oversee the creation of the Fourth Republic

with all its accompanying democratic institutions. Rawlings then managed to get himself

elected as the republic's first President. Protected from overthrow by Rawlings’

strongman tactics, these institutions, and the arenas of the polity they are associated with,

2 Network Computer Systems Unlimited, “Battle lines drawn between Rawlings, Govt,” NCS Online [heme page on-line]; available from http://www.newsinghana.coin; Internet; accessed 5 June 2001. Italics added.

3 Chapter Three touches on these democratizing pressures in some detail. Far a focused discussion on the topic see Jeffrey Herbst, "The Dilemmas of Explaining Political Upheaval: Ghana in Comparative Perspective,” in Economic Change and Political Liberalization in Sub-Saharan ed. Africa, Jennifer A. Widner (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

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grew in democratic acceptance and strength in spite of the President’s occasional

outbursts.

Now, much to the dismay o f Rawlings, President John Kufuor, unlike Busia and

Limann before him, has taken the helm of a state relatively long in the democratic tooth.

For eight years Rawlings had unwittingly been engaged in what Seymour Martin Lipset

characterizes as the “charismatic legitimization of a polity.”4 This transition from

President Rawlings’ powerful and charismatic style of leadership to John Kufuor’s legal-

rationalism was not only necessary for Ghana’s democracy, but inevitable given

continuing free and fair elections. Rawlings was using democracy to legitimize his rule

but never realty embraced its tenets. At heart, he is an autocrat whose skill and

determination to dominate outweigh all other aspects of his personality.3 Even ignoring

the feet that his tenure was constitutionally limited, the attribute that Rawlings brought to

the presidency, namely raw power, was bound to decrease in utility as the institutions of

democracy developed legitimacy of their own.

Finding that a decidedly undemocratic leader significantly contributed to Ghana’s

democratic consolidation in no way diminishes the role that judges, journalists, civic

leaders, and the common man played in both Ghana’s democratization and the ensuing

consolidation. The three judges and four Kume Preko marchers who gave their lives

protesting the undemocratic practices of Rawlings’ governments are rightfully exalted as

4 Seymour Martin Lipset, “George Washington and the Founding of Democracy,”Journal o f Democracy 9, no.4 (1998): 31.

5 Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg, Personal Rule in Black Africa, (Berkety, CA: University of California Press, 1982) 78-79.

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the martyrs of Ghanaian democracy.6 The reporters and academics who have sacrificed

their careers, their economic security, and their physical well being to speak the truth are

the genuine Ghanaian patriots, not Rawlings. Without the selfless actions of these

individuals, Chairman Rawlings would have been perfectly comfortable to continue with

his bankrupt revolution and President Rawlings would have been happy to allow the

fledgling institutions of democracy to languish.

At the turn of the century, thirty-two of Sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-eight states

were captained tty men who initially came to power via means other than multi-party

elections.7 Some of these countries have already begun the process of democratization by

ratifying a democratic constitution and holding elections. In the other countries, a

hodgepodge of military men, rebel leaders, and one-party oligarchs remain content with

the status quo and have yet to be toppled. They survived the onslaught of

democratizations that swept across the continent at the end of the last century and it is

doubtful that they will wake up one morning and decide to hold multi-party elections in

which they are not a candidate.8 Given this state of affairs, if more countries are going to

6 Since the murder of the three judges in 1982, Ghanaians have unofficially observed Martyr’s Day on July 6th. 7 On 31 December 2001, the following heads of African states had a period of rule on their resume not attributable to victory in a multi-party election: Jos6 Eduardo dos Santos (Angola), Mathieu K&dkou (Benin), Blaise Compaord (Burkina Faso), Pierre Buyoya (Burundi), Paul Biya (Cameroon), Idriss Ddby (Chad), Assumani Azzali (Comoros), Laurent Desire Kabila (Congo-Kinshasa), D&iis Sassou-Nguesso (Congo-Brazzaville), Robert Guei (Cfite d’Ivoire), Teodoro Obiango Nguema Mbasogo (Equatorial Guinea), Isayas Afcwerki (EritreaX Mdes Zenawi (Ethiopia), Omar Bongo (Gabon), Jerry Rawlings (Ghana), Lansana Conte (GuineaX Joao Bernardo Vieira (Guinea-BissauX Daniel arap Moi (Kenya), King Letsie III (LesothoX Charles Taylor (LiberiaX Didier Ratsiraka (Madagascar), Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya (MauritaniaX Joaquim Alberto Chissano (Mozambique), Oiusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Paul Kagame (Rwanda), France Albert Ren6 (Seychelles),Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir (Sudan), King Mswati III (SwazOandX Gnassmgbd Eyadtma (Togo), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), and Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe). Somalia had no national government

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consolidate democracies in Africa, they are going to have to do so with a strongman in

charge. Ghana shows that it can be done.

Pushing the Research Agenda Forward

The work at hand would benefit enormously from similarly formatted democratic

consolidation case studies from some of Africa’s other democratic experiments. Bdnin,

after bringing great hope with its National Conference in 1991, has lapsed into an

uncompetitive electoral regime captained by none other than Mathieu K6r£kou, the ex­

general who had served as head of state for nearly 20 years prior to democratization.9

Whilst Ghana was undergoing the process of consolidation detailed in this thesis, the

country of Bdnin underwent a process antithetical to consolidation whereby the state and

polity moved further and further away from democratic norms and behaviors. What are

the structural differences between the Bdninois and Ghanaian polities that could

realistically lead to such dissimilar democratic outcomes? Were there actions taken in

Ghana that could have been taken in Benin to illicit a more similar outcome?

South Africa and Senegal, are two countries that share with Ghana recent

elections highlighted by unprecedented participation and competition. In the year 2000,

* Even if the candidate scheduling the elections were to lose and accept defeat, history points to a difficult road to hoe with regards to consolidation. In the 1990s, the citizens of Benin, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Madagascar, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, South Africa, and Zambia successfully ousted the leadership of the previous regime in the first democratic elections of their new republics. Since those initial elections, former heads of state have been returned to power by hook or crook in four states (Benin, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, and Madagascar), the new head of state has decided he is more indispensable than the constitution in one state (Zambia), the old head of state has taken up the position of Prime Minister (Sao Tome and Principe), and troops aligned with the former head of state and current head of state have been involved in civil warfare in another (Central African Republic).

9 John R. Heilbrunn, “Corruption, Democracy, and Reform in Benin,”The Self-Restraining State, eds. Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishing, 1999).

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for the first time in Senegal's four-decade-old republic, an individual not running under

the flag of the Parti Socialiste (PS) won the country’s presidency.10 In 1999, South

Africans saw state power leave the hands of their democracy’s founding father at the

same time that the number of parties represented in parliament increased by more than a

third.11 What are the similarities and differences between Ghana’s democratic trajectory

and the trajectories of Senegal and South Africa? Are the similarities transferable? Do

the differences point toward divergent outcomes in the future? These are the questions

whose answers will be facilitated by more case studies of democratic consolidation in

Africa.

Despite the overall optimistic tone of this thesis, the previous chapter calls

attention to two seemingly insurmountable obstacles feeing the Ghanaian people on their

journey of democratic consolidation: an inefficient state bureaucracy and a chronically

weak economy. In these deficiencies, Ghana is not alone. There are many countries on

the African continent whose chronic ailments are far more numerous, but these two

difficulties are nearly universal. Can democracy survive without major renovations in

these two troubled areas? Probably so, but it will undoubtedly be limping along instead

o f moving full stride ahead.

In explaining development in both the east and the west, a myriad of scholars

have heaped praise on benevolent variants of state bureaucracy.12 As the type of

10 Francis Kpatincte, “Wade: Je n’ai pas change, mais...,” Jeune Afrique, 23 May 2000,20-28.

See Chris Landsberg, “Promoting Democracy: The Mandeia-Mbeki Doctrine,” Journal o f Democracy 11, no.2 (July 2000): 107-121.

12 Max Weber was the father of bureaucratic veneration. He outlined the characterizations of pure bureaucratic organization inEconomy and Society, vol. 3 (New York, NY: Bedminster Press, 1968). Peter

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bureaucracy that promotes development is very sim ilar to the type of bureaucracy that

aids democratic consolidation, this literature is helpful in illuminating how far Ghana’s

state bureaucracy is from the ideal Africanist scholars have weighed in on why the state

bureaucracy in Ghana, and its African brethren, is so deplorable. Neo-patrimonialism,

corruption, and lack of resources have all been given as credible causes of bureaucratic

inefficiency on the continent.13 Africanist scholars have yet to contribute to a significant

body of research on how to move from the African variant of bureaucratic ineptitude

toward the ideal type of bureaucratic organization.14 Given the magnitude of the

problems African states have with their bureaucracies, this lack of research is frustrating.

Will the “crackdowns” on corruption that accompany every new Ghanaian government

have a long-term effect on bureaucratization this time around? How will the recent

increase in minimum wage affect productivity? What role does scrupulous leadership

play in professionalizing the men and woman on the front lines? For now answers to

these questions involve a great deal of conjecture but little real evidence.

Of all the arenas of the polity discussed in this thesis, the relationship between

economic society and democratic consolidation has been the most heavily scrutinized.

Out of this scrutiny has come a general consensus that the richer a country, the more

likely that country is to have a democracy advanced in the process of consolidation.

Evans picked up on the state bureacracy’s role in development in Asia in Embedded Autonomy: States <& Industrial Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

13 Some examples ofthis can be found in Roger Tangri, The Politics of Patronage in Africa (Lawrenceville, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000); Jean-Franfois Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics o f the Belly(New York, NY: Longman Publishing, 1993); Robert Klitgaard, Tropical Gangsters: One Man’s Experience With Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1990).

14 David Leonard, African Successes: Four Public Managers o f Kenyan Rural Development (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991) is a step in the right direction.

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Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi went so far as to quantify this consensus. They

found that democracy is indiscriminate with regards to the countries it befalls but

countries with higher per capita incomes are more likely to keep their democracies than

poorer countries and countries with per capita incomes in excess of $6000 have been

immune to democratic overthrow up to now.15

Hitherto no Sub-Saharan African state has reached the magic mark of $6000.

What are the reasons for Africa’s low levels of income? Countless scholars have

pondered this question and their answers run the spectrum. Among the more convincing

targets of blame are domestic leadership, the global economy, colonialism, international

lending institutions, and even geography.16 Given the poor state of African economies,

one can make a credible argument for any or all of the aforementioned causes of African

poverty. There really is enough blame to go around.

What can African states do to increase their income levels? To answer this

question, one must go in search of African successes that have overcome the obstacles

common to the continent and deduce from their path a model for African economic

development. While this type of analysis holds great promise, the two obvious African

economic success stories, namely Botswana and Mauritius, have key ingredients that are

15 Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi, “Modernization: Theories and Facts,” World Politics 49 (1997).

16 On domestic leadership see George B. N. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed (Hew York, NY: S t Martin’s Press, 1992). On the global economy see Claude Ake,A Political Economy o f Africa (New York, NY: Longman, 1981). On colonialism see Walter Rodney,Haw Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1981). On the international lending institutions see Thomas M. Callaghy and John RavenhilL, eds^ Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993). On geography see David Bloom and Jeffrey Sachs, “Geography, Demography, and Economic Growth in Africa,”Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2 (1998): 207-295.

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nontransferable to the rest of the continent.17 For countries like Ghana, a great deal of

theoretical fill in the blank is necessary. Until a credible path to economic development

is discovered for countries feeing sim ilar impediments as Ghana, one can only make

questionable inferences as to whether or not loan restructuring, government policy shifts,

and economic indicators point toward, or away from, democratic consolidation via

economic development.

Conclusion

As promising an event as John Kufuor’s inauguration was, Ghanaians must never

forget the University of Ghana’s illuminating motto: Vigiles ales evocat auroram (It is

the wakeful bird that proclaims the dawn).18 This message provides a good metaphor for

Ghana on two very important levels. On one level, it warns Ghanaians not to rest on their

democratic laurels. They must remain vigilant against threats to their fledgling

17 Botswana is an ethnically homogenous state with vast mineral wealth that benefited immensely from its proximity to South Africa and its watered down stance on Apartheid. For more on the Batswana economic miracle see Penelope Hartland-Thunberg, Botswana: An African Growth Economy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978); Christopher Colclough and Stephen McCarthy, The Political Economy of Botswana: A Study o f Growth and Distribution (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980); Stephen John Stedman, ed., Botswana: The Political Economy o f Democratic Development (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993); Charles Harvey and Stephen R. Lewis, Policy Choice and Development Performance in Botswana (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994); and Abdi Ismail Samatar, An African Miracle: State and Class Leadership and Colonial Legacy in Botswana Development (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999). Mauritius is an island nation with no indigenous population. Nearly 70 percent of its citizens trace their ancestry to the Indian subcontinent but there are also a number of black Africans, French, and Chinese. For more on the Mauritian economic miracle see Stanislaw Wellisz and Philippe Lam Shin Saw, “Mauritius,” in Five Small Open Economies, ed. Ronald Findlay and Stanislaw Wellisz (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993); Berhanu Woldekidan, Export-led growth in Mauritius (Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press, 1994); Deborah Br&utigam, “Institutions, Economic Reform, and Democratic Consolidation in Mauritius,”Comparative Politics (October 1997): 45-62; and Rajen Dabee and David Greenaway, eds., The Mauritian Economy: A Reader (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave,2001).

1S A. Adu Boahen, The Ghanaian Sphinx: Reflections on the Contemporary History o f Ghana, 1972-1987 (Accra, Ghana: Sankofa Educational Publishers, 1992), 56.

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democracy and not lose sight of the feet that it is relatively secure in comparison to

previous Ghanaian democracies and current African democracies, neither of which set a

very high bar. To make their democracy impregnable, Ghanaians of this and future

generations will have to continue to accept democracy as “the only game in town” while

simultaneously struggling through economic hardships and fighting with their

government to improve services. On another level, the motto reminds Ghanaians of their

potential as a source of inspiration for their brothers and sisters on the rest of the

continent. On 7 March 1957 Ghana showed the way towards independence. With more

than five hundred million Africans suffering the indignities of a government that does not

value their voice or respect their rights, what symbol could be more evocative than a

shiny Black Star proclaiming a new democratic dawn?

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