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A Comparative Case Study Into the Democratic Transitions of Ghana and Nigeria

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A Comparative Case Study Into the Democratic Transitions of Ghana and Nigeria A comparative case study into the democratic transitions of Ghana and Nigeria With a focus on the role of civil society in the process of transitioning Bachelor Thesis – Varieties of Democracy and Democratization Joana Lamptey 10536086 [email protected] Bsc. Political Science, University of Amsterdam Thesis supervisor: Ph.D. S. Tanaka Second reader: Dr. S. Lim Submission date: June 25, 2018 Word count: 7680 words ABSTRACT This thesis focusses on the democratic transition of the two Sub-Saharan African countries, Ghana and Nigeria. The main point of this thesis is two compare how civil society organisations (CSOs) were able to play a role in both democratic transitions. The two countries fall in what Huntington calls the Third wave of democracy. In this period from 1974 going many sub-Saharan African countries start making the transition from authoritarian rule to democratic rule. This is a transition in which Ghana has succeed, for Western standards and Nigeria has not. For a country to democratise I pose that, as literature suggests, a country’s rule should be willing to make to move to democratisation from above, but this must be done in combination with pressure from below to by CSOs. I argue that due to the longstanding heavily militarised and repressive scene in Nigerian CSOs were much less in the position to actually exert pressure and influence the government into making an effective change. Little to no will from above doesn’t help create a political atmosphere to transition. On top of this Nigeria’s ethnic divide has long stood in the way of reaching any effective unification in many factors in the country, including the stability of CSOs. In the case of Ghana military rule there was also repression, but less aggressive and caused for less bloodshed. This enabled the CSOs to take their chance at pressuring form below which was met with a will from above to move to democratisation. With this I also argue that political opposition that were not allowed to officially organise themselves, individually joined existing CSOs to still pressure the government to civil rule. 2 INDEX 2. THEORETICAL OVERVIEW AND METHODOLOGY ......................... 7 2.1 HUNTINGTON’S WAVES OF DEMOCRATISATION 7 2.1.1 WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? ....................................................................................................... 9 2.2 WHAT IS CIVIL SOCIETY? 10 2.2.1 THE ROLE OF CSOS IN DEMOCRATISATION ................................................................ 11 2.3 RESEARCH METHODS 13 3. THE CASE STUDIES .................................................................................. 15 3.1 GHANA 16 3.1.1 THE POLITICAL HISTORY ................................................................................................... 16 3.1.2. THE ROLE OF CSOS IN GHANA’S DEMOCRATISATION PROCESS ........................ 19 3.2 NIGERIA 22 3.2.1 THE POLITICAL HISTORY ................................................................................................... 22 3.2.2 THE ROLE OF CSOS IN NIGERIA’S DEMOCRATISATION PROCESS ....................... 24 4. ANALYSIS .................................................................................................... 25 5. DISCUSSION ................................................................................................ 27 6. CONCLUSION.............................................................................................. 30 7. REFERENCES .............................................................................................. 32 8. APPENDIX .................................................................................................... 36 8.1 SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW GUIDE 36 8.2 TRANSCRIPTION INTERVIEW (1) 37 8.3 TABLES 40 3 1. Introduction From the 1990s onwards, many sub-Saharan countries started their official journeys to democracy. It was what Huntington (1993) described as the third wave of democracy. In terms of external factors only, this so-called wave was able to set in because of the ending of the Cold War. The Western world saw a chance to not let communism get an upper hand in world politics and therefore ‘espoused desirability of democracy in promoting development, and the benefits that developing countries stood to gain from political pluralism’ (Yayoh, 2006-2007)’. To strengthen this development, financial pressure was exercised (exerted) on the African countries by their Western donors (Gyimah-Boadi, 1996). In current times we see that, having experienced widespread political problems such as civil wars because of misrule (Danso-Boafo, 2014), the process of democratisation for some African countries either failed to successfully happen, never happened or never happened at all by the doings of such autocratic (military) rulers. Some cases do however form an exception to the rule. In those cases, the process was able to set in successfully and today those countries are deemed democratic, if not full-fledged in light of Western concept of democracy. One of those countries is Ghana. Starting its official path to democracy in the early 1990s, presently scores an 83 out of 100 on the Freedom House ranking (Freedom House, 2018a). Based on this it can be said that Ghana has developed a democracy that is deemed, by this institute and with it many others, free, including civil and political freedoms for its citizens. A country where the process of democratisation so far has not been as successful is Nigeria, despite having certain similarities with Ghana. The country started making its official way to democracy in the late 1990s after long period of military rule. Today, Nigeria scores only a 50 out of 100 on the Freedom House ranking and is therefore considered ‘partly free’, 4 lacking many of the political and civil freedoms to be called a full-fledged democratic country (Freedom House, 2018b). There is no doubt that these countries both developed differently after their periods of colonisation and therefore ended up with different outcomes. It is of interest to delve into what caused these different outcomes, when their paths have been similar. In this Bachelor of Arts thesis, I aim to discover the causes. In order to do this, I will revisit and research the specific period of the transition to democracy in the history of the two countries. Both Ghana and Nigeria were faced with long periods of military rule before being able to make the step into multi-party democracy. Among other factors, I believe it is of great interest to research the way civil society was able to play a role in both transitions. In fact, the civil society factor is relatively under-examined in the democratization literature of African countries; which is interesting as the citizens of a country are the ones who must live in a system and the ones that can demand change in that same system if they deem it unsuitable. According to existing literature, Ghana’s civil society played a big role in getting the Head of State at the time, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, to succumb to the wishes of the people and call for elections in 1992 (La Verle, 1994). In Nigeria too, there was a strong civil society that had a lot of presence (Olayode, 2007), but was however not able to exert as much power as Ghana’s civil society. The research will indicate that even though the two countries had strong and active civil societies, the military rule in Ghana was less oppressive than in Nigeria and more willing to switch to democratic rule. I will also propose that another reason why civil society made more impact in Ghana’s transition is because political opposition, which was banned at the time, was able to act as civil society and equally exerted pressure on the sitting military government. What will also show is that Nigeria had a lot of internal factors such as profound ethnic and 5 regional cleavages that made it more difficult to create the much-needed internal civil coherence to strive towards democratic. When looking at the social relevance of this theme, it is noticeable that many African states are still not (fully) democratised. The people of such undemocratic states may however be striving towards a (multi-party) democracy and the findings of this research might aid into understanding the circumstances under which the citizens can come together and thrive in their efforts to get a democratic system in their respective countries; which can be a gain, as more democratisation may also result in domestic peace internally and internationally (Hegre et all 2001; Olayode 2007). Considering the scientific relevance of this research, I believe this can be found in the lack of comparative research done in this region in the specific role of civil society in the democratisation process. This mostly may come forth from the idea that civil society only thrives in already established democracies. Therefore the leading research question of this thesis shall be: Why was civil society able to play a much bigger role in the acceleration of democratisation in Ghana than in Nigeria? This thesis is built up to first look at the theoretical and methodological side of the research, continuing with the political histories of both countries and how civil societies took part in the transition, followed up with an analysis, discussion and finally the conclusion. 6 2. Theoretical overview and Methodology In this part there shall be a brief explanation of the most important concepts in this research: democracy (as well as democratisation) and civil society. The main objective is to conceptualize civil society
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