Ghana National Elections

This Sunday, December 7^th, Ghana will hold its Presidential election. It was an amazing experience to be in Africa as the U.S. elected its first African-American President and it has been very exciting to see first-hand the political campaigning during an election year here in Ghana.

Here is the lowdown as I see it (based upon my casual observations for 2 months… these are not official party platforms or descriptions)…

As in the U.S., there are 2 major political parties here in Ghana. They are the National Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The current President (since 2000), John Kufor, is a member of the NPP and is not running for re-election. The NPP’s candidate is Nana Akufo-Ado and the NDC’s candidate is Prof. Atta Mills. The NPP is the more conservative party here and is often likened to the U.S. Republicans. Its flag colors are red, white, and blue and its symbol is an elephant. The NDC is the more liberal of the two parties and is often likened to the U.S. Democrats. Its symbol is an umbrella. Both parties offer different general themes to their campaigns… The incumbent NPP: “We Are Moving Forward” and the challenging NDC: “We Are Changing.” Each message comes complete with its own theme song and dance! The NPP’s case seems to basically be that they have been in power for the past 8 years and under their leadership Ghana has made great progress. The NDC argues that the NPP has become extremely corrupt and the executive leadership must change parties to end the corruption.

It is very hard to get a good gauge on where the country stands because the polling here is not so prevalent and the support for the candidates varies greatly between regions of the country. For instance, our training site is in the Eastern Region, which heavily favors the incumbent NPP, but much of the rural North (Upper West and Upper East Regions) is more supportive of the challenging NDC.

Two other regionally popular parties are the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) and the People’s National Convention (PNC), which also both have candidates for President. In the Presidential election, a candidate must receive 50% of the votes cast plus one in order to claim victory. If this does not happen, there will be a runoff between the top two candidates (at a date not yet determined, but sometime in December). Since the race seems to be very close between the top two candidates and the minor parties are likely to take a substantial (5-10%?) portion of the popular vote, I think a runoff election is very likely. In the last contested Presidential election in Ghana, the CPP candidate “gave” all of his votes to the NPP, which put that party over the 50% threshold. I am not quite sure exactly how that process works, but the CPP candidate in this election has stated that his party will not be reapportioning its votes this time around.

Whatever the outcome of the election(s), everyone in Ghana has been trying to assure that the voting will be both fair and peaceful. In recent history Ghana has been a role model country in Sub-Saharan Africa for a stable government. Another peaceful transfer of power would continue this trend and send a strong signal to the rest of the continent (and world) that Ghana is a safe and stable place to invest in. As for the Peace Corps Volunteers, we will all be together during the elections. The 100+ current volunteers will all be having a conference and the 41 trainees (me) will be staying with our homestay families in our training villages. We hope that the election(s) will take place in a safe and fair manner and that we will be able to move into our communities soon afterwards!