Ghana showcases African democracy
Coup era over
ACCRA, Ghana, Dec 2, (AP): The year was 1966 and a 7-year-old boy named John Dramani Mahama was standing by the door of his boarding school, wondering why his father wasn’t there to fetch him. The Easter holiday was approaching, classes were done, and everyone else had left.
But as Mahama would relate in a memoir, his father didn’t show up. He was in jail and Ghana was in the throes of a coup d’etat, dashing the hopes kindled just nine years previously when the former British colony became an icon of Third World liberation – the first in sub-Saharan Africa to be freed from European colonialism. Today, those hopes are alive again. After five coups and decades of stagnation, the West African nation of 25 million is now a pacesetter for the continent’s efforts to become democratic. It’s having another presidential election on Friday, with televised debates between the candidates, campaign messages on Twitter and Facebook, biometric voter IDs, plus a culture that has taken to peaceful politics with gusto.
And a leading candidate is John Mahama, who grew up through the coups, became president after democracy took root, and this fall published “My First Coup d’Etat,” a memoir that has won international acclaim.
Democratic
His candidacy itself is a model of democratic procedure. He became vice president under John Atta Mills in the 2008 election, and took the helm with parliamentary approval after Mills died the following July. Now he is the first sitting president to debate his challengers on television. In a race that opinion polls say will be close, he is vowing to preserve Ghana as a showcase of good governance, enjoying “the respect that we deserve, as we have since we gained independence first in sub-Saharan Africa.”
It’s an ambition shared by the electorate. “We won’t allow our country to fall back to what it used to be,” said Awaku Yirenkyi, a tour guide leading schoolchildren around the mausoleum of Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of independent Ghana and a touchstone figure in modern African history. Yirenkyi remembers himself at age 7 during a spell of dictatorship when he stood in food lines with his mother, hoping to buy a single sardine. Now 37, he sees Ghana’s success as the fruit of “a collective, deliberate effort” to put the repressive past behind it.
In the debates, complete with signing for deaf viewers, the candidates fielded questions ranging from tackling corruption to family planning and