On December 7, 2024, the day Ghanaians went to the polls, a video of a voter went viral. A stocky aged man in an oversize white tunic stands in entrance of a voting sales space with the solar glistening on his bald head as he hectors his poll. “Eight years are enough,” he tells it, gesticulating angrily. When ballot watchers attempt to quiet him, he doubles down, raging in half-sentences. Onlookers within the shady patio of the encircling compound giggle on the scene. Finally he deposits the poll—however not earlier than leaping and holding each arms to the sky in what seems like an invocation.
Clearly his magic labored. Inside hours the reigning New Patriotic Get together (NPP) had been overwhelmed so comprehensively that its candidate, Mahamudu Bawumia, conceded quicker than most likely any earlier presidential contender had in Ghana’s historical past. The challenger, John Mahama, was hardly unfamiliar. The nation’s president from 2012 to 2017, he had misplaced to the term-limited incumbent, the NPP’s Nana Akufo-Addo, twice earlier than, in 2016 and 2020. This time, nonetheless, he was seen as a savior, a conquering hero. Hundreds of joyful folks poured into the streets throughout the nation. Per week after the outcomes have been licensed, protesters in Sekondi, in Ghana’s Western Area, vandalized a bronze statue of Akufo-Addo, whom Ghanaians had began evaluating to Nebuchadnezzar and the pharaoh of Exodus.
Eight years in the past all of this is able to have been unthinkable. By the point Mahama had been ousted many thought of him a spineless chief incapable of reining in his administration’s corrupt members, who took each probability they acquired to inflate contracts. (The transportation ministry, for example, spent $1 million to color a couple of hundred buses with the faces of the nation’s leaders.) The years of Mahama’s presidency have been characterised by a declining financial system, frequent energy outages that introduced on a regular basis life to a halt, and a spate of worldwide scandals: throughout the 2014 World Cup money needed to be flown to Ghana’s nationwide soccer crew, the Black Stars, whose gamers have been threatening to boycott the occasion over unpaid bonuses. Finally Mahama and his brother have been investigated by the UK’s Critical Fraud Workplace and the US Division of Justice, which suspected them of taking bribes to facilitate the sale of army plane. (They have been finally cleared.) Ghanaians couldn’t wait to be freed from him.
And but so bitter was the expertise below Akufo-Addo that anything felt like a aid. Ghana has now spent fifteen years lurching from one corrupt administration to a different; governance has slowly devolved right into a type of spoils-sharing. However Akufo-Addo’s abuses of energy—his administration’s dramatic, shortsighted efforts to weaken democratic levers and checks—hit many citizens particularly laborious. When he first ran for Ghana’s highest workplace, he introduced himself as a progressive candidate who might reverse the nation’s democratic decline, solely to fall wanting even the primary Mahama administration’s dismal report. In final 12 months’s elections there was hardly a viable different to Mahama: no different contender had sufficient identify recognition, and Ghana’s closely monetized marketing campaign system discourages candidates from becoming a member of until they’ve deep conflict chests. At the very least below a second Mahama time period, a buddy who had beforehand voted for Akufo-Addo advised me after the outcomes have been in, he wouldn’t get his hopes up.
“Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you,” went the battle cry of Kwame Nkrumah’s Conference Peoples Get together throughout Ghana’s wrestle for independence. If solely the nation might overcome colonial domination, many hoped, then prosperity would comply with. The fact was extra bitter. Inside a couple of years of its independence in 1957, Ghana was struggling to safe sufficient international foreign money to fund imports and pay its money owed, driving up inflation and inflicting shortages of client items.
Within the years that adopted, Nkrumah’s rule grew more and more authoritarian: he handed a regulation permitting detention with out trial and later vested his workplace with the facility to nullify courtroom selections and take away judges. The financial system stagnated, repression intensified, and allegations of corruption relating to Conference Peoples Get together officers unfold. In 1966 the police and army overthrew Nkrumah in a Western-backed coup; he went into exile in Guinea and died in a Bucharest hospital six years later.
A succession of short-lived governments didn’t safe both democracy or financial development. In 1979 a gaggle of junior army officers undertook what they known as a “house cleaning” train, deposing the regime that they had served and executing eight of its senior members—together with three former heads of state—by firing squad. Troopers looted markets and retailers; the newly instituted Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) seized the property and property of foreigners and Ghanaians that it accused of dishonest dealings.
The AFRC’s chief was a younger flight lieutenant named Jerry Rawlings, the son of a Scottish father and a Ghanaian mom, who on the time of the coup was below trial by a military tribunal for mutinying in opposition to the junta. Later that 12 months Rawlings relinquished his energy to a democratically elected civilian authorities below Hilla Limann, a former diplomat—solely to depose that authorities in one other coup two years later. He would keep in energy for practically twenty years, first as a army ruler after which as an elected president.
Within the early years of his second flip as a army ruler, Rawlings superior a collection of radical populist insurance policies. Economically, he and his Provisional Nationwide Protection Council (PNDC), a quasi-military regime that succeeded the AFRC, rigidly enforced worth and lease controls, and inspired employees to take over the administration of state firms and boards. Slowly, in the meantime, they clamped down on democratic society, changing constitutional rule with rule by decree, dissolving parliament, disbanding political events, detaining residents with out due course of.
At first Rawlings loved a broad measure of recognition amongst junior troopers, cops, union employees, left-leaning technocrats, college students, conventional chiefs, and intellectuals. Numerous leftist actions—many impressed by Nkrumah’s ideology—additionally supported the regime, optimistic concerning the prospects of shifting the nation’s political tradition away from elite rule. However the nation’s financial system and morale quickly declined. Between 1982 and 1983 over 1,000,000 Ghanaians who had been expelled from Nigeria arrived in Ghana; in 1983 extreme drought and associated bushfires triggered a famine that killed tons of of youngsters and plunged a twelfth of all the nation into malnutrition, anemia, and kwashiorkor. These crises uncovered the bounds of Rawlings’s options to the nation’s financial challenges—notably its weak export financial system and its corresponding want for international foreign money reserves. Rawlings, for his half, was rising more and more paranoid, attacking a few of his former leftist allies and fracturing the broad coalition that had initially supported him. By 1984 Ghana had change into the poster youngster of African state “failure.” Roads have been falling aside, retailers lacked important gadgets, and skilled employees have been fleeing the nation.
Determined to reverse these developments, the Rawlings authorities undertook neoliberal “structural adjustment” reforms backed by the World Financial institution and the IMF. Beginning in 1984 the nation’s foreign money, the cedi, was considerably devalued, foreign-exchange transactions decriminalized, worth controls eliminated, and imports and exports liberalized. Comparatively liberal funding and buying and selling codes went into impact with the purpose of attracting shareholders; about 300 state firms have been offered off to people.
These reforms, below Ghana’s specific circumstances, had some macroeconomic advantages. The nation’s complete quantity of imports and exports rose, lengthy traces to purchase meals staples slowly grew to become a factor of the previous, and inflation fell from the triple-digit heights it had reached within the late Nineteen Seventies and early Eighties. And but the Rawlings authorities had additionally effected these modifications below a reasonably extreme model of authoritarian rule. Political opponents and dissidents continued to be detained with out trial, jailed by kangaroo courts, chased into exile, or assassinated. The political local weather had change into extraordinarily chilly, dominated by a tradition of silence and dominated by a regime with little political legitimacy.
In 1992 Ghana started a proper transition to democracy. The nation enacted a liberal structure, giving in each to inside strain from home activists and to exterior prodding from its Western monetary backers. That November and December, for the primary time since 1979, residents voted in multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections, respectively. But it surely was in a number of senses a transition with out change. As in Pinochet’s Chile, sure provisions of the 1992 structure appeared tailor-made to let the president retain some autocratic powers—for example, the power to nominate mayors and select chief executives for native councils. Its “permanent transitional” provisions, in the meantime, gave blanket immunity to the 2 earlier Rawlings regimes. When the votes have been tallied, Rawlings was once more sworn into energy, this time as the primary president of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, with a lot of his earlier ministers in tow—now below the auspices of a brand new celebration known as the Nationwide Democratic Congress (NDC).
The primary opposition, the New Patriotic Get together (NPP), had boycotted the parliamentary elections, accusing Rawlings’s authorities of rigging them in his favor—a extremely believable cost, given the tight management he saved over the transition course of. The outcome was a de facto one-party legislature that over the following 4 years acted largely as a rubber stamp for the manager, ratifying worldwide loans and agreements he introduced and approving his nominees for numerous authorities our bodies with little scrutiny. And but human rights nonetheless improved, in deference to each the brand new structure and the expectations of worldwide donors. Illegally detained prisoners got here house from jail; opposition events operated extra freely and gained seats in subsequent elections; civil society opened up. The federal government nonetheless enthusiastically enforced legal libel legal guidelines, however in different respects it relaxed its censorship of the media, together with radio and tv.
Solely when the nation held its third multiparty election, in December 2000, did the Rawlings period come to an finish. That 12 months’s tightly contested race was markedly free and honest, thanks largely to technical help from the USAID-funded Worldwide Basis for Electoral Techniques. The outcome was that the NPP secured 99 of parliament’s 200 seats. Its candidate, John Agyekum Kufuor, gained 57 % of the favored vote.
Two years later parliament established the Nationwide Reconciliation Fee, which was tasked with investigating the human rights violations that Ghanaians had suffered by the hands of the state from the tip of the Nkrumah period to the beginning of the democratic transition. Of the offenses it cataloged, Rawlings’s AFRC and PNDC have been chargeable for 84 %, together with seizing property, taking hostages, abusing the judicial course of, and abducting, maiming, torturing, and disappearing a spread of victims, from political opponents to uninvolved civilians. The fee confirmed, to take only one instance, that in 1982 troopers had gang-raped a younger girl within the city of Tarkwa, thrown her unconscious physique into an deserted mine shaft, and left her to die.
The fee really useful a spread of reforms, together with establishing correct succession procedures for state workplaces and banning personal armies—like Rawlings’s Battalion 64—and politicized safety providers. In its early years Kufuor’s administration tried to implement a few of these measures, for example by paying token reparations to victims of state abuse and making an attempt to coach policemen and troopers concerning the ideas of human rights. However the measures have been by no means institutionalized in any concrete kind, and during the last twenty years they seem to have crumbled.
In different respects, nonetheless, the nation did spend Kufuor’s tenure shifting out of the shadow of army rule. Civil society, together with impartial suppose tanks and advocacy teams devoted to authorities probity and accountability, labored with out concern of violent repercussions. The financial system grew 4 occasions over; the federal government launched main social provisions like common well being protection, free maternal well being care, direct money transfers to poor households, and free meals for major college pupils. Even the allegations of graft and nepotism that acquired Kufuor voted out of workplace in 2008—it emerged, for example, that his son had purchased a resort subsequent to his personal residence with loans from state banks—by no means absolutely tarnished his fame for elevating the nation’s degree of democratic governance.
Then got here oil. In 2007 Ghana found as a lot as 3 billion barrels of crude off the western coast by the border with Côte d’Ivoire. The international firms doing the drilling owned—and nonetheless personal—the majority of the shares, however analysts like H. Kwasi Prempeh and George Asumadu argue that the nation has nonetheless struggled ever since with the so-called useful resource curse.1 At the same time as nationwide exports have risen, in different respects Ghana’s financial stability has declined: the brand new mineral wealth considerably expanded public spending, usually funded by oil-backed international loans, which left ample alternatives for graft.
There may be little denying that within the years following the invention of oil Ghanaian politics have change into more and more corrupt. The price of election campaigns has risen exponentially as working for workplace has change into an funding: winners get an opportunity to skim off the highest each of the oil earnings themselves and of associated contracts and investments, licit and illicit, flowing from international sources like Nigeria and the UK. Kufuor’s successors—first Rawlings’s former vice-president John Atta Mills after which John Mahama—bolstered some social welfare initiatives however grew steadily much less accountable to their residents. Underneath their tenure much less cash went to social packages just like the nationwide medical insurance scheme, which since 2003 had carried out a lot to lift the price of dwelling for the poorest. Inequality deepened: in accordance with Oxfam, the nation’s wealthiest 10 % now accounts for practically a 3rd of its complete consumption—greater than the underside 60 % of its inhabitants mixed.
Pius Utomi Elpei/AFP/Getty Photographs
Nana Akufo-Addo waving at supporters throughout his closing rally earlier than Ghana’s presidential election, Accra, December 5, 2012
When Akufo-Addo ran for the presidency in 2016, many Ghanaians hoped he would reverse these developments. Public service was the household enterprise. His uncle, J.B. Danquah, famously introduced Nkrumah again to Ghana in 1947 to kickstart the independence motion. (The pair had a falling-out two years later, when Nkrumah demanded self-government at a quicker tempo than Danquah had proposed.) His father, Edward Akufo-Addo, had been the chief justice within the late Sixties after which spent three years because the ceremonial head of state.
Nana Akufo-Addo had a patrician upbringing, however he was drawn to the gritty work of politics. In his college days he had been generally known as a pupil radical who ran in the identical circles as Fela Kuti and Hugh Masekela; in 1995 he had helped set up one of the crucial vital road protests in Ghana’s democratic historical past, an indication in opposition to tax will increase that represented the primary large-scale pushback in opposition to the democratically elected however nonetheless autocratic Rawlings authorities. When he grew to become legal professional basic and minister of justice in 2001, he overturned the libel regulation the dictatorship had used in opposition to activists. The next 12 months he spearheaded the Nationwide Reconciliation Fee.
He was additionally rich. Many citizens subsequently imagined that if he got the prospect to carry the very best workplace, he might resist the attract of self-enrichment and get to work institutionalizing a few of the progressive measures he had helped activists win. As a candidate he gained the endorsement of a various alliance: enterprise leaders, radical activists, conventional rulers, and Muslim and Christian clergy. When he took workplace on January 7, 2017, a lot of his supporters handled it as a second Independence Day. He was a loyal fan of Ghana’s nationwide soccer crew in addition to of Tottenham Hotspur. He proclaimed that Ghana would transfer “beyond aid”—past, that’s, dependence on Western establishments just like the World Financial institution and the IMF. What might go flawed?
One of many first indicators of hassle got here within the early months of 2017, when Akufo-Addo introduced the members of his authorities. Mahama had been chided for curating a “friends and family” cupboard when he appointed eighty-six ministers and deputies, together with some “without portfolio”—cupboard members who in principle have been merely unattached to anybody ministry however in observe have been gifted snug advantages with no duties. Akufo-Addo introduced a historic 125. His authorities appeared desperate to reward celebration loyalists: not solely did he create new, redundant ministries, however he appointed deputy ministers (typically two or three) the place there had beforehand been no want even for one. Some celebration loyalists obtained ambassadorial appointments; others have been pressed onto the payroll as “aides” or “communicators.”
Shut relations benefited particularly lavishly. Not solely did the president’s cousin, Kenneth Ofori-Atta, change into the finance minister, the federal government administered a few of its loans by means of Databank, an funding financial institution he had cofounded. “It becomes suspicious,” the pinnacle of a civilian nonprofit known as the Ghana Integrity Initiative stated on a radio present in 2022, “if that particular organization keeps on getting all the awards.” The investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni used right-to-information requests to uncover that Ofori-Atta’s financial institution earned $9.2 million from Ghana’s borrowings. This controversy was enjoying out at a second when the nation’s funds have been lower than secure: in 2022 the federal government went to the IMF for assist and tried to steadiness the books by slashing state bonds that comprised the financial savings of thousands and thousands of residents. Since February 2025 the Workplace of the Particular Prosecutor (OSP) has been investigating Ofori-Atta, who denies any wrongdoing, for “corruption and corruption-related cases.”
A month into Akufo-Addo’s presidency, in the meantime, the ministry of finance and the income authority employed a brand new firm known as Strategic Mobilization Ghana Restricted (SML)—which appeared to don’t have any different shoppers—to guard the income of the nation’s gold and oil industries. Ghana’s public procurement company, which oversees the transparency of state contracts, rejected the deal 3 times, in accordance with reporting by an investigative outlet Awuni based known as The Fourth Property, however the finance ministry went forward with it anyway, though vital questions remained about what work SML was doing and what outcomes it might declare. (SML denied any wrongdoing and, final 12 months, sued Awuni for defamation.) The federal government ended up agreeing to pay the corporate $100 million a 12 months—greater than all the cash it gave to nineteen of Ghana’s twenty-seven ministries.
To thank God for his election victory, Akufo-Addo promised to construct a cathedral. It was to carry a five-thousand-seat auditorium (expandable to fifteen,000), a central corridor, chapels, a music college, an artwork gallery, and Africa’s first Bible museum, with obvious help from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Many observers questioned the knowledge of pursuing such a challenge in Ghana—which isn’t a desert of Christian locations of worship—amid a recession. Initially the whole price was estimated at $100 million; the federal government promised solely to offer the land and seed cash for fundraising from native church buildings and Ghanaian Christians overseas.
Already, nonetheless, the state has spent $58 million on the challenge. The agency of the constructing’s architect, David Adjaye, reportedly obtained greater than $20 million. By now the projected price of ending the cathedral has reportedly grown to $400 million, not together with compensation for the properties of judges and the international embassies that have been demolished to clear the positioning, which nonetheless lies empty. Ghanaians have began calling it “the most expensive hole in the world.”
One might be forgiven for considering of Ghana as a theocracy. Over the previous decade and a half, political Christianity has been steadily on the rise; in 2011 President John Atta Mills declared at a church conference that “Christ is the president of Ghana.” In a 2018 doc known as Imaginative and prescient 2023, the Church of Pentecost—the nation’s largest Christian denomination, with an estimated 3.6 million members—outlined a plan to “possess the nations” and “transform every sphere of society with values and principles of the kingdom of God.” Paula White, Donald Trump’s religious adviser, makes common visits to Ghana to fulfill with distinguished church leaders.
Final 12 months parliament handed a draconian anti-LGBTQ invoice that criminalizes homosexuality and imposes harsh penalties, together with imprisonment, on folks and establishments that advocate for the nation’s homosexual and lesbian communities. One of many regulation’s fundamental backers, a gaggle known as the Nationwide Coalition for Correct Human Sexual Rights and Household Values, has ties to a far-right American evangelical group, the World Congress of Households, which the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle has designated a hate group. Evangelical rhetoric suffused the 2024 presidential campaigns. Earlier than the election Mahama sought the imprimatur of a gaggle of clergy, kneeling all the way down to obtain their prayers. His opponent, Mahamudu Bawumia, belongs to the nation’s Muslim minority, which accounts for about 20 % of Ghana’s inhabitants. However he, too, frequented Christian church buildings and made homophobic feedback.
Maybe probably the most dangerous idea seeping into Ghana’s society from the church—and specifically from a model of the prosperity gospel that enjoys broad reputation within the nation—is the parable of the moment miracle. Prior to now twenty years many Ghanaians have come to tolerate seeing public officers and politicians purchase sudden wealth and have misplaced curiosity in probing the place it got here from. A flurry of overnight-transformation tales saturate the headlines, framed as in the event that they have been inspiring reasonably than indicators of potential dishonesty. As one commentator put it in an op-ed this previous March, “We’re not mad about corruption in Ghana—we’re just jealous it’s not our turn yet.”
Ghanaians have, in any case, gotten used to seeing graft go unpunished. Throughout his marketing campaign Akufo-Addo promised to make corruption a dangerous enterprise. The accountability for prosecuting such instances had beforehand belonged to the legal professional basic and justice minister, sometimes high members of the governing celebration and the administration, who would hesitate to cost anybody affiliated with both. Akufo-Addo as a substitute opened an workplace for a particular prosecutor in January 2018, to which he appointed Martin Amidu, a troublesome lawyer who had served because the legal professional basic and minister for justice below John Atta Mills.
By the tip of 2020, nonetheless, Amidu insisted that the workplace’s promise had been dashed. It lacked the funding, he stated, to arrange amenities, rent employees, and start investigations. (One of many president’s representatives on the time blamed Amidu for not requesting the funds.) The manager, he alleged, had in the meantime been interfering together with his work—most alarmingly in a case over state mineral income. Earlier that 12 months the ministry of finance had included an organization known as Agyapa Royalties Restricted within the offshore tax haven of Jersey, within the British Islands, by means of which it deliberate to route many of the nation’s future royalties from gold mining leases. The federal government would retain a 51 % stake; the remaining 49 % of the shares can be listed on the Ghanaian and London inventory exchanges, with the purpose of producing between $500 million and $750 million.
Civil society teams criticized the deal, and for good purpose: it had been rushed by means of parliament regardless of an opposition boycott; it required the state to dump a good portion of its future gold income at a wildly undervalued charge; it granted Agyapa a full tax exemption; and it contracted advisory work from Databank. Finally the deal was dropped within the face of each incessant civil-society protests and litigation within the courts. However by then $12 million had already flowed out of the state’s coffers as cost for “administrative and advisory services.”
Amidu accused the president of making an attempt to suppress the outcomes of his investigation into the deal. He claimed {that a} week after he submitted his report in in mid-October, he acquired a go to at his house at 5:36 within the morning from Ofori-Atta, the finance minister, implicitly urgent him to drop the investigation. (Ofori-Atta later stated he visited Amidu as a result of he had heard the prosecutor “was not feeling well.”) After one other week glided by, he launched the sixty-four-page report back to the press—then resigned later that month. Amidu concluded that the president had deceived him: removed from “the innocent flower of anticorruption,” he stated, Akufo-Addo was corruption’s “mother serpent.” The president issued a strenuous denial, accusing Amidu of “errors of fact” and insisting that he had been desperate to learn the findings and pursue justice.
Amidu’s successor as particular prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, has additionally gone public with allegations of presidency interference—this time singling out the courts. In November 2023 he held a dramatic press convention during which he argued that the judiciary was undermining his efforts to freeze property and maintain flight dangers and stopping his workplace from persevering with investigations on instances involving associates of the governing celebration. He summed up his predicament by quoting a well-liked highlife track: “I’m a lonely bird. I have sacrificed my soul to do my best. I’ll do what I can, and when my time is up, I will go.”
Maybe probably the most startling indicators of the Akufo-Addo administration’s antidemocratic flip have been its use of violence and its disdain for the press. The US State Division’s studies on Ghana during the last eight years have proven a sample of arbitrary, illegal, and extrajudicial killings; merciless, inhuman, and degrading therapy, together with torture, of detainees by the federal government or on its behalf; arbitrary arrests and detentions; and severe restrictions on free expression, together with violence and threats in opposition to journalists. In simply the primary fifteen months of the administration, seventeen journalists have been reportedly attacked by assailants starting from troopers and soccer followers to safety guards, none of whom have been prosecuted. Safety forces raided some radio stations that had criticized members of the NPP and shut down others. Between 2016 and 2023, Ghana fell from twenty-sixth to sixty-second on the Reporters With out Borders World Press Freedom Index.
Many of those abuses have been carried out by a mixture of state safety brokers and vigilante teams affiliated with the NPP, amongst them Delta Power, Invisible Forces, Kandahar Boys, Bamba Boys, Alidu Mafias, and Bolga Bulldogs. (The NDC, too, has its personal vigilante teams, like The Hawks and the Azorka Boys.) These teams, from which the state safety forces usually draw their members, grew to become more and more emboldened. On the primary day that Akufo-Addo took energy, Invisible Forces beat up a safety official from the earlier administration who’d had the audacity to stay round on the govt mansion regardless of the change in authorities. Two months later Delta Power violently eliminated a regional safety coordinator from his workplace on the grounds that one of many gang’s members deserved the job as a substitute. When the assailants have been arrested and brought to courtroom, their allies barged in throughout the session, overpowered the safety personnel, and freed them. These figures, too, have been finally arrested—just for the state to drop the case.
All of this instability has taken a major toll. The cedi’s worth declined by 40 % throughout simply 9 months in 2022. Unemployment amongst younger adults practically doubled over Akufo-Addo’s eight years in energy. Authorities spending on social welfare, at 1.4 % of GDP, nonetheless stays decrease than that of a few of Ghana’s poorer neighbors. These circumstances are probably solely to worsen: Akufo-Addo’s administration saddled Ghana with extra debt than all of the earlier governments within the nation’s historical past mixed. It can take simply twelve years, consultants predict, for the nationwide pension purse to expire.
Olympia De Maismont/AFP/Getty Photographs
A district headquarters of the New Patriotic Get together within the lead-up to the presidential elections, Accra, Ghana, December 2, 2024
The widespread feeling within the nation was a way of powerlessness, anger, and vertigo. Lamentations about Akufo-Addo have been always heard on public buses. Many voters felt a form of disgust on the sight of the president touting Pan-Africanist beliefs within the worldwide press or dashing to supply sympathy when Notre Dame burned whilst he froze out native media, ignored the youth protesting his nation’s harsh financial circumstances, and provided a deflating response when, in 2023, overspill from the Volta River dam price hundreds of individuals their properties. Even a supposedly progressive president, it now appeared, would condemn Ghana’s folks to crumbs.
In on a regular basis dialog, family who lived by means of the times of the dictatorship recommend that the present ambiance resembles the one previous the collection of army coups and countercoups that adopted the Nkumrah years. Nowadays violence at all times appears simply on the verge of breaking out. It isn’t unusual to listen to folks marvel aloud why, if the highly effective go across the regulation, they shouldn’t, too. On social media and within the streets, peculiar Ghanaians brazenly fantasize concerning the want for “three or four Rawlings” to punish the political elite.
Even after many years of democracy, many nonetheless appear connected to the logic of the coup—the concept political victors deserve their spoils. Shortly after final 12 months’s election, NDC supporters broke broke into workplaces, meals provide warehouses, development websites, and even a manufacturing unit to evict their present incumbents. Clearly, they appeared to suppose, these employees owed their jobs to political favor; now that Mahama had gained it was his supporters’ flip to reap the advantages. Appointees to authorities positions have been feted as in the event that they have been celebrities. On his arrival on the nationwide regulation enforcement headquarters, the brand new inspector basic of police was welcomed by a joyous throng of individuals, a few of whom sprayed money on him—a observe normally seen at Nigerian weddings and different social occasions. Younger celebration members march to state companies to demand jobs from their newly appointed bosses.
Mahama has promised a reset. Seven months in, a lot consideration stays targeted on simply how you can punish the earlier administration’s corruption. The sadly named Operation Recuperate All Loot (ORAL) has obtained over two thousand instances of alleged official corruption from the final eight years. It’s investigating thirty-six significantly high-profile ones, by means of which it hopes to get well $20 billion. In the meantime, nonetheless, Mahama’s legal professional basic has dismissed instances that the Akufo-Addo authorities was prosecuting in opposition to politicians and businessmen who occur to be affiliated with the brand new authorities, and state safety has hardly stopped its vigilante-style hounding of opposition figures. It isn’t clear whether or not any techniques are rising to forestall this authorities from falling again into its outdated habits—or worse. We discover ourselves, as Nkrumah put it, knocking on the door of the political kingdom but once more.
