Ghana’s Presidential Contest Shows Why Democracy Requires More Than Well-Run Elections

On December 7, Ghanaians voted to return former president John Mahama to office. Winning with 56.55 percent of the vote, Mahama handily defeated Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia.

Although the election was not flawless, Bawumia’s quick and gracious acceptance of defeat demonstrated the strength of Ghana’s democracy and reflected successful consolidation in the years following the country’s first democratic election in 1992. But this result—although remarkable for being unremarkable—also showcases remaining vulnerabilities. Examining these pressure points reveals opportunities for improvement, both in Ghana and in other middle-age democracies.

The Successes and Failures of Ghana’s Democratic Design

The story of modern democracy in Ghana is largely one of Jerry Rawlings, who led a coup on December 31, 1981, against the elected government. Although Rawlings came into office via nondemocratic means, he initiated and oversaw Ghana’s transition to democracy throughout the 1990s. By the time he stepped down in 2000, Ghana had an established, pro-Western democracy.

The legacy Rawlings left is crucial to understanding Ghana’s situation today. Rawlings himself initially ruled undemocratically. He sought to insulate himself from pushback and consolidate power within the executive by executing potential opponents and cracking down on civil society and freedom of expression. He also inherited weak institutions, economic strain, and ethnic and religious polarization—all factors that can portend failure for the fragile early years of a democratic transition.

Nevertheless, Rawlings—drawing heavily on his charisma and political and military experience—chose to initiate a transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy due to both internal and external pressure. Opposition groups were growing increasingly more vocal and more organized during the early 1990s. Additionally, Rawlings was influenced by the geopolitical environment at the time, in the wake of the Cold War. As countries around the world were removing the yoke of authoritarianism, Rawlings saw an opportunity to meet the moment in a controlled manner that would not threaten his power but could alleviate some of the pressure on his regime.

Furthermore, as head of one of the most heavily indebted countries in the world, Rawlings recognized that in order to continue to receive crucial financial assistance from the international community, he needed to engage in political reform. The transition was ultimately bolstered by significant external economic support, to the tune of $9 billion in loans in the 1980s and 1990s.

Rawlings also initiated a series of public consultations in the late 1980s to help inform what would become the democratic transition. So although he stacked the deck in his favor to ensure his own political survival during the early transition, he also secured important public buy-in to the process. The transition was meant in large part to ensure the survival of Rawlings and his party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), but the Ghanaian public benefited from real and meaningful reforms. These changes opened up the space for freedom of expression, created a robust civil society, and expanded the media landscape. Election transparency measures helped build public trust in the process—measures that also normalized the democratic processes that have been carried through to today.

Furthermore, Rawlings accepted the constitutionally mandated term limits in 2000, rather than amending the constitution to serve a third term, and set an important precedent that helped consolidate Ghanaian democracy. Rawlings was succeeded by his main political rival, John Kufuor. Kufuor defeated Rawlings’s vice president in the 2000 contest, while Rawlings oversaw the first peaceful transfer of power to an elected opposition in the country’s history.

Since then, power has consistently rotated between the NDC and the New Patriot Party (NPP). The previous three elections were also contested by the NDC’s Mahama, who came to power unexpectedly in 2012 while serving as vice president under John Atta Mills, who died in office. Mahama won the presidency in his own right in 2012 against the NPP’s Nana Akufo-Addo, before losing to Akufo-Addo in 2016 and 2020.

Although the almost rote trade-off of power among a small group of political elites demonstrates a capacity for peaceful transitions of power, it has created the perception that the Ghanaian political system has been captured by the powerful and well-connected. This is compounded by persistent rumors of corruption that have surrounded both Akufo-Addo and Mahama, and by the decisions of each to appoint family members to government positions.

This setup has created an unaccountable, elite-dominated system that is unable to meet the needs of ordinary people. The stunted political opposition during the early transition; the development of a constitution tailored to Rawlings, who died in 2020; and a strong and powerful executive contributed to the weak institutions that continue to plague Ghana today. However, the opportunities for improvement going forward are becoming increasingly clear.

Ghana in Rawlings’ Shadow

More than two decades later, the legacy of choices made during the Rawlings era, including a combination of horizontal accountability mechanisms and a highly centralized system, continue to shape Ghanaian democracy.

For one, the country’s democratic system struggles to hold its leaders to account. A small group of elites dominate Ghanaian politics, and they are perceived by many Ghanaians to be using the state to enrich their networks rather than to serve the public interest. Since Mahama first took power in 2012, the proportion of Ghanaians who are satisfied with the state of Ghanaian democracy has declined from 74 percent to 51 percent. According to a 2022 Afrobarometer survey, 94.2 percent of Ghanaians thought that at least “some” of the president and his staff are corrupt.

Rawlings’s decision to consolidate executive power and limit the extent to which the judiciary, in particular, can act as a check to the executive is partially responsible for this situation. And as a result, Ghanaian institutions are manipulable by elites. For example, the constitution of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, ratified in 1992, empowers the Supreme Court to adjudicate disagreements and disputes around election outcomes. However, the constitution places no cap on the number of justices seated on the Supreme Court, so a new president could add justices to the court to seek outcomes in the president’s favor.

Today, trust in the Supreme Court is at a low. A survey conducted by Afrobarometer in 2024 found that 91 percent of Ghanaians thought that all or some of the judiciary was corrupt. A study from the University of Ghana School of Law found that Supreme Court justices tended to vote in favor of the parties that appointed them, with NPP-appointed justices more consistently voting in the NPP’s favor. These concerns were exacerbated by two incidents earlier in the election, one in which the Supreme Court restored control of Parliament from the NDC to the NPP, and another in which the chief justice and president, Akufo-Addo, sought to add five new justices to the Supreme Court, just five months ahead of the election. Without a completely independent judiciary, the powerful cannot be effectively policed, limiting the ability of the Ghanaian system to truly deliver for the Ghanaian people.

Lessons for Ghana and Others

Ghana’s election outcome offers some important takeaways for the country and for other middle-aged democracies. First, even a flawless electoral process is not sufficient to sustain democratic consolidation. Ghana has a strong political culture with a robust civil society and independent media that have helped keep democracy moving forward. And the NPP and NDC have matured into parties that are not personality-based. However, for Ghana to fully consolidate its democracy and to restore public trust, the government must engage in further decentralization and empower the institutions outside of the executive.  

Second, public apathy, particularly among the youth, can feed a vicious cycle where elites are not incentivized to seek broad public participation in decisionmaking. Ghana has approximately 18.8 million registered voters, of which more than 10 million are between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But this election saw a significant drop-off in voter participation, with 60.9 percent turnout—significantly lower than the 78.9 percent of Ghanaians who voted in 2020.

For Ghana to sustain a democratic future, a new political class will need to emerge. This group must be willing to both address the persistent corruption that erodes public trust in institutions and impedes economic growth and take serious steps to address the abysmal economic conditions facing many Ghanaians, including unemployment, inflation, and cocoa and gold sectors rife with problems.

Here the international community has a role to play as well. Ghana is facing the highest levels of public debt in the country’s history. It is the fourth-most-indebted country to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Africa, having received seventeen IMF bailouts. The IMF and other donors can do a better job of ensuring accountability in public spending from the Mahama administration. The donors should push to break Ghana’s cycle of unsustainable debt burdens by supporting a new debt restructuring mechanism. The IMF and similar institutions should also provide economic assistance to Ghana’s most vulnerable to ensure that the structural economic reforms the country must undertake do not have adverse effects on those already suffering from sky-high inflation and unemployment levels.

Ghana’s democracy story is often painted as a success. With more than thirty years of uninterrupted democracy, Ghana has much to be proud of. But, as it steps out of Rawlings’s long shadow, it must take on the most persistent challenges facing the country and empower the Ghanaian people to have a true voice. How a country is governed requires more than well-run elections.