Ghana’s December 7 elections explained

Nana Kwame Bediako, Alan Kyerematen, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia and John Dramani Mahama

 

The upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections slated for December 7 may turn out to be arguably one of the most hotly contested that Ghana has seen in a while.

At the core of the race is the rivalry between the two main contending political parties and their candidates, Mahamudu Bawumia of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and John Dramani Mahama of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), over the management of the country’s economy, low trust in institutions and deepening social polarisation.

Several groups have advocated for peaceful elections, a crucial request judging by the heated debates that have emerged from the different political interests promoted even before the campaigns started.

At the top of the list of public concern is the economy. The country is facing what has been described as its worst economic crisis since the return to democratic rule. For the first time in its history, Ghana defaulted on its USD 30 billion sovereign debt in 2022, plunging the economy, as inflation shot past 50% and the cedi depreciated dramatically against the dollar.

Going against its own promise, the government turned to the IMF for a US$ 3 billion bailout. As part of the bailout conditions, the government implemented a debt restructuring that imposed cuts on local bondholders, triggering protests from pensioners. While inflation has since slowed to a little above 20%, the cost of living continues to bite.

Mahama and the NDC have made the December 7 elections a referendum on the eight years of the Akufo-Addo-Bawumia administration. Mahama’s campaign has blamed the sharp economic downturn on incompetent management of the economy and reckless borrowing by the Akufo-Addo administration, singling out Bawumia for blame owing to his background as an economist and his role in the Akufo-Addo government as head of the economic management team.

With virtually all key economic indicators far worse now than they were at the time of the 2016 campaign, when Mahama was president, the NDC resurrected utterances about the economy and economic management made by Bawumia and Akufo-Addo during the 2016 and 2020 campaigns and turned them against the NPP.

Bawumia and the NPP, on their part, have blamed the country’s economic crisis, including the sharp depreciation of the cedi, on a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ripple effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a rise in global interest rates.

Strange as it sounds, the Bawumia campaign has also tried to distance their candidate from the poor economic records of the Akufo-Addo administration, arguing that as vice president, and head of the government’s economic team, Bawumia was not even as powerful in matters of economic policy as the finance minister.

Bawumia has promised a new economic direction that would shift significantly from the Akufo-Addo government, including the cancellation of certain unpopular taxes, promoting digitalisation initiatives and policies as a way to jump-start the economy.

Other issues that have been at the core of campaigns are corruption and illegal artisanal gold mining, known as ‘galamsey’.

Unable to shake off accusations of corruption levelled against his government during the 2016 campaign, Mahama has struck back against the NPP, pointing to the many high-profile corruption scandals and widespread accusations of nepotism against the Akufo-Addo government.

The galamsey problem is a persistent one, which appears to have grown in scale on the NPP’s watch, with devastating impacts on the environment and ecology, affecting critical water bodies that serve communities across the country. There has been widespread public outcry over what many describe as the government’s lethargic approach to the crisis, fuelled by allegations of the party’s complicity in the activities.

Beyond the blame game and promises, both the NPP and NDC have been silent about their strategies to fund the growing list of campaign and manifesto promises, including promises to cut unpopular taxes, or what measures they would take to address the country’s recurring economic difficulties.

Even with the large support both parties enjoy across the country, there is widespread scepticism about their ability to deliver on their promises and address growing concern that the country’s economic crises will persist.

Rules of the game

Ghana’s presidential and parliamentary elections are held once every four years, in compliance with a timetable spelled out in the country’s 1992 Constitution. Both presidential and parliamentary elections have been held on the same day since the December 1996 elections, although this is not a constitutional mandate.

Out of a population of roughly 35 million, 18,774,159 are registered to vote in the upcoming December 7 elections. The country has been divided into 276 single-member constituencies, each further divided into 40, 975 polling stations, including 328 special voting centres, where voting takes place in-person on election day.

For members of parliament, the election is based on the first preference plurality rule. However, in the presidential election, a candidate must obtain at least a simple majority of the valid votes cast. Where no candidate on the presidential ballot is able to obtain a majority of the votes in the initial round of voting, a run-off election between the two candidates with the highest number of votes must be held within twenty-one days of the first election to decide the winner.

All disputes arising from the elections would only be entertained by the courts based on figures and assessments issued by the Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC) at the conclusion of the process, considering that it is the body entrusted by the constitution with the organisation, conduct and management of all aspects of the elections, including registration of voters, qualification of parties and candidates, printing of ballot papers, counting of votes, and declaration of results. The constitution also specifies that the EC is ‘not subject to the control or direction of any person or authority’ in the performance of its functions.

While the constitution emphasises the independence of the commission’s executive body, comprising the chairperson and two deputies, issues have been raised regarding the provision that grants the president the powers to hire and fire them, even if for clearly stated reasons and in accordance with a quasi-judicial ‘impeachment’ process that is triggered by a petition to the President and overseen by the chief justice.

This subject has been raised as one of the reasons many anticipate that the elections may prove highly controversial as those who do not emerge victorious may claim executive influence over the commission as reason for their loss.

The NDC already voiced apprehensions about the transparency of the current EC leadership since the last Mahama-appointed chair and members of the Commission were removed and replaced by appointees of Akufo-Addo in 2018.

While the leadership changes at the EC followed due constitutional process, the NDC has maintained that the changes were politically motivated and done in bad faith to enable the NPP to appoint a partisan commission. Since then, the NDC and the EC have clashed over a number of election-related issues, a situation aggravated by the fact that the NPP has openly sided with the EC in these disputes.

In the lead up to the December 7 elections, the NDC has raised questions about the integrity of the electoral register, calling for an independent audit of the register, a demand both the EC and NPP have dismissed as a red herring.

The likelihood of such events have dictated the tone of the campaigns. There is widespread apprehension that the divergence between the two parties’ trust in the electoral commission, the judiciary and other state institutions involved in ensuring election integrity could lead to disturbances.

The main contenders and their strategies

The EC has qualified 12 candidates, comprising eight from political parties and four independents, to be on the presidential ballot for the elections. However, the exercise is expected to be a two-horse race between the NPP and the NDC.

The NPP’s Bawumia, the current two-term vice president to President Akufo-Addo, a former deputy governor of the central bank and an economist by training, was considered a political outsider when he was first picked by Akufo-Addo as his running mate on the NPP ticket for the 2008 presidential elections.

His reputation as a political greenhorn stirred serious opposition to his emergence as the party’s presidential candidate, triggering a divisive internal primaries campaign, which ended with one of the main contestants, former trade minister Alan Kyerematen, resigning from the party and launching an independent bid for the presidency.

Bawumia is the first Muslim to be selected as the presidential candidate of a major political party in Ghana and the first NPP presidential candidate to come from outside the party’s Twi-Akan ethno-linguistic base.

It is believed that Bawumia chose his vice-presidential candidate, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, former minister of energy in the Akufo-Addo administration (and formerly minister of education) and a member of parliament for one of the NPP’s strongholds in Kumasi, the party’s traditional home because of the political leverage the choice offers.

As a Christian and an Asante (Akan) from an influential NPP political family, Prempeh’s choice gives the NPP ticket the ethno-regional and religious balance considered politically obligatory in a country that is predominantly Christian (71%) and Akan (46%).

His decision is seen as a calculated strategy to hold and deepen the NPP’s electoral dominance in the vote-rich Ashanti and Eastern regions and using his candidacy to checkmate the NDC’s traditional dominance in the North as well as the Muslim-populated communities in the rest of the country.

Mahama’s campaign, on the other hand, seeks to maximise the party’s vote harvest in its traditional non-Akan strongholds while outperforming the NPP in the North and the coastal Akan communities of the Central and Western Regions.

Winning the coastal (non-Twi) Akan vote has been indispensable to NDC’s electoral victory in past general elections, political observers say. In addition, the party is counting on dissatisfaction with the state of the economy to give it an electoral advantage among urban voters, particularly the youth.

While no one predicts a win for him, Alan Kyerematen’s independent candidacy could frustrate the NPP’s plans to outperform its historically strong showing in its electorally indispensable Kumasi stronghold, which is also Kyerematen’s home-base and where he has a loyal following, most of whom are also NPP defectors.

Another independent candidate of note is Nana Kwame Bediako, 44. A real estate entrepreneur, Bediako projects himself as the candidate for a new generation and has targeted the disillusioned urban youth vote with an eclectic message of hope and prosperity and a pan-African renaissance.

The combined effect of their candidacies, particularly in the face of youth disillusionment with the two establishment parties, could push the two-horse race into a second round of voting.

Between the two top contenders lay great expectations and also mounting scepticism from segments of the population.

Regional and international significance

The two main parties describe themselves as ideological opposites, the NPP being the conservative, centre-right party and the NDC the social democratic, centre-left party. However, in substance there is little policy distance between them in the government’s relations with international or regional actors.

However, regional political observers say should the December 7 elections go badly, there is a risk that the parties would regionalise or internationalise any ensuing conflict, as each party tries to draw different regional or international interests and actors to its side.

Ghana’s strategic location, straddling the Sahel to its North where military juntas have recently overthrown democratic governments in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger over security concerns, places it at the forefront of discussions about the greater geopolitical infleuence on its national political stage.

Given the recent break of the three Sahelian states from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), coupled with the country’s frosty relations with the military junta in Burkina Faso over the presence of Russian military resources in the region, a disorderly election outcome in Ghana could assume wider regional security ramifications, particularly if it led to a breakdown of civilian control or spread to the country’s border communities.

Such a crisis, many say, would represent a severe reversal not only for Ghana and its stable democratic project but for the fortunes of democracy in West Africa as a whole.