Countdown to December 7: Will democracy win?

As everyone knows, presidential and parliamentary elections take place on December 7, 2024. 

Opinion polls are being published regularly by outfits such as Outcomes International and Global InfoAnalytics, predicting which presidential candidate and party will win.

Polls relating to the presidential election receive the most attention. This is because Ghana’s parliament is not so powerful in Ghana’s presidential system.

In other words, the president is top dog and the parliament is rather secondary. The result of the presidential election is, however, unclear with just over 50 days to go.

There is everything still to play for, and all presidential candidates, both from major parties and smaller ones, are pulling out all the stops in the run-up to December 7.

New phenomenon

In Ghana, systematic opinion polling is a relatively new phenomenon. Many Ghanaians are sceptical about their capacity to predict accurate electoral results.

If an opinion poll predicts that the NPP presidential candidate will win, then the NDC claims that the poll is rigged, paid for by the NPP, and that, in fact, the NDC candidate is way ahead.

The same goes for polls showing the NDC presidential candidate ahead: the NPP will rubbish that finding for the same reasons. What do voters think?

I suspect that many – perhaps most – pay no attention to the opinion polls, for several reasons: first, they are mistrusted, as already mentioned; second, they do not get much publicity; and, third, you would have to be a fluent reader of English to read the results of the opinion polls, and not all Ghanaians are, of course.

What is clear, however, is that most voters in Ghana, like voters in any liberal democracy, will vote according to how they think the incumbent government has performed in relation to bread-and-butter issues: the economy, jobs, price inflation, cost of living and security, including the insecurity produced by illegal gold mining (galamsey).

Quality of elections

Speaking as the Chairperson at a round-table meeting held in Accra on October 11, former Executive Director of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Prof. Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, said the country’s democratic future hinged on the credibility and quality of the December 7 presidential and parliamentary polls.

Prof. Gyimah-Boadi cited Afrobarometer surveys across Africa over the past two decades and highlighted the need for Ghana to safeguard its democracy in the imminent elections by demonstrating the key democratic principles and practices of fairness and transparency.

Successive Afrobarometer surveys reveal that when Africans have the opportunity to vote in relatively free and fair elections, they will prioritise the ballot box. However, citizens only express faith in democracy when they experience high-quality, free and fair elections.

Prof. Gyimah-Boadi noted that ‘Ghanaians’ support for democracy remains high at 75 per cent but there's a worrying trend’. That is, ‘rejection of military rule has dropped sharply by 20 per cent over the past decade and Ghana is among countries where citizens are increasingly open to military intervention if leaders abuse power’.

He pointed to societal concerns about the upcoming December 2024 polls, given Ghana’s location in a region plagued by extremist violence and anti-democratic groups.

It is imperative, the professor stated, that we ‘ensure the polls don't destroy Ghana's relative peace and maintain its status as a beacon of hope for democracy in the region’.

Good governance

Writing in the Daily Graphic on October 16, 2024, Dr John Osae-Kwapong, Project Director, Democracy Project, stated that the most recent Afrobarometer survey, conducted between 2021 and 2023 and covering 39 African countries, stated that addressing public problems was the key to good governance and a critical function of any government.

Dr Osae-Kwapong explained that Afrobarometer opinion surveys indicate that African citizens, including those living in Ghana, have several public problems they expect that their respective governments will address with purpose, vigour and sincerity.

In the most recent fully completed round of the Afrobarometer survey (Round 9, 2021-2023), the following emerged as the top five – a) management of the economy; b) unemployment; c) water supply; d) crime and security; and e) infrastructure/roads.

Afrobarometer surveys ask citizens to rate how well their government handles major public problems. Dr Osae-Kwapong’s conclusion is that, according to responses from Afrobarometer Round 9 (2021-2023), there is a continent-wide governance crisis. 

Crime and security

It will be noted that one of the five major concerns that Dr Osae-Kwapong notes is ‘crime and security’, the issue that Prof. Gyimah-Boadi referred to above. But what of the others: management of the economy, unemployment, water supply and infrastructure/roads?

None of these issues will be resolved simply as a result of having sufficient fairness and transparency in the imminent elections.

Ghanaians are becoming increasingly sceptical about the efficacy of four-yearly presidential and parliamentary elections.

While they are often adequate in terms of fairness and transparency, the problem is that in power, governments often seem unable to deal with bread-and-butter issues. 

Democracy wins on December 7, 2024, if the elections seem to be both fair and transparent to most Ghanaians. But that is the first step. Whoever is in power after December 7 needs to think long and hard about how to improve governance between elections. The stakes are high. Africa is looking to Ghana to show the way forward.

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