Faith in democracy: The elephant in the room?

The Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) presented its recommendations to President John Dramani Mahama on December 22, just as the festive season was commencing. 

The lengthy  127 page – document was promptly made available for public scrutiny and its contents have, understandably, been the subject of much private and public debate over the last few weeks.

The CRC’s work, which took nearly a year to complete, and which represents a sustained and laudatory effort on the part of the CRC’s eight members, focuses on strengthening democracy, accountability, and governance, and proposes significant changes.

These include banning members of parliament from being ministers, electing metropolitan, municipal and district chief executives, limiting executive power, reforming the judiciary and electoral system, enhancing separation of powers, improving mechanisms to curb corruption and, more generally, modernising the 1992 Constitution for current needs.

Key proposals include capping the number of ministers, making presidential salaries taxable, allowing independent candidates, ensuring asset declarations for officials, reducing the age of presidential candidates from 40 to 30 years and extending the term of the president from four to five years.

Highlights

The 10 topic clusters highlighted in the CRC report – Lands and Natural Resources, Decentralisation and Local Government and Chieftaincy, Public Services and State Enterprises, Advisory Councils, Independent Constitutional Bodies/Offices, The Directive Principles of State Policy and Social and Economic Rights, Political Parties, The Political Branches (Executive & Legislature), The Judiciary, Miscellaneous (Discretionary Power, Dual Citizenship, Amendment Procedure) – are displayed at the CRC website for public scrutiny (https://constitutionreviewgh.org/citizens-voices/).

What of the elephant in the room? In almost a year of public deliberations, there was no desire by stakeholders to formalise the position of faith in Ghana’s democracy.

In other words, although Ghana is a highly religious country, with around 95 per cent of Ghanaians professing membership of one of the three main religions: Christianity, Islam and African Traditional Religions, the CRC did not encounter public concerns about what role should faith play in the constitution or in Ghana’s democracy more generally. 

Faith and democracy

To what extent does faith impact Ghana’s democracy and political framework? Faith has no formal constitutional role in Ghana’s governance, no formal place in the country’s democracy.  

Although faith is not one of the topic clusters, it would be wrong to assume that the CRC ignored religious leaders.

Christian and Muslim representatives met with the CRC at the Alisa Hotel in Accra during the week beginning 15 September 2025.

According to a participant in the meeting, around 75 per cent of the time was spent focusing on the issue of whether Ghana is a ‘secular’ or a ‘religious’ country.

Religious leaders uniformly claimed that Ghana is a ‘religious’ country, denying that it is a ‘secular’ polity.

What this might suggest is a fundamental misunderstanding of what ‘secular’ means in the context of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution.

For religious leaders, ‘secular’ appears to be a synonym for ‘atheist’.

This is erroneous.

Ghana is, according to the 2021 census 71.3 per cent Christian, but this does not mean that Christianity is privileged over other religions.

This is what ‘secular’ means: all religions are officially equal.

An atheistic constitution, on the other hand, would likely be a strictly secular document that establishes a government and legal system based purely on human reason, rights, and evidence, rather than divine authority or religious texts.

It would look very similar to the constitutions of highly secular nations, such as the Nordic countries (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland). 

Faith and public life

Going forward, faith remains a very prominent feature of public life in Ghana. Christianity, in particular, seeps into every aspect of life, including political decision-making.

The first line of the constitution’s preamble states that the Constitution is promulgated in the name of ‘Almighty God’.

In addition, the 1992 constitution states that religious liberty is guaranteed:

‘All citizens are free to believe and manifest any religious faith’ or none. In addition, the Constitution ‘prohibits the elevation of any religious organisation into a State religion (see article 56 of the 1992 Constitution)’.

In the second part of this article, I examine further the role of faith in Ghana’s democracy and highlight how different faith actors impact the country’s governance.

The writer is an Emeritus Professor, London Metropolitan University, UK.