A brief Ghanaian interlude

Given some important developments in Ghana, I hope you won’t mind if I take the liberty of temporarily suspending discussion of Ouaga to return to Cape Coast for a couple of posts. We’ll get back to Ouagadusty shortly.

Today is Monday, Dec. 1, a significant day as it marks the final week of the months-long campaign for president of Ghana. And you can tell things are ramping up. The billboards are getting bigger and the boosters louder. The parties’ respective colors are so ubiquitous one wonders if they were dropped from a passing plane. You cannot walk down the street without seeing someone in a t-shirt or hat or wearing a party scarf tied around their neck or head.

Last week, the ruling party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), brought its candidate, Nana Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to Cape Coast for a rally at Victory Park, a large concrete slab occupying some prime beach real estate just a couple hundred yards from Cape Coast Castle. It is common for the parties to truck in supporters, and the streets were filled with tens of thousands wearing the red, white and blue of the NPP.

Music blared from stacks of speakers in the back of trucks. Cheers went up and rippled across the crowd. Vendors selling NPP shirts, hats, fans, flags and even, inexplicably, cowboy hats did a brisk business. One would’ve thought by the singing and dancing and carrying on that the election had already been won. And those inclined to believe election fraud is unavoidable may assert just this.

The truth is this is serious business. Only the fifth election in the country’s young democracy, a lot is at stake. On the one hand, the two terms of President John Kufuor’s administration are largely considered a success. He has initiated various infrastructure improvements, including an ambitious road project, begun a public health program, discovered oil off the coast, and done it all while promoting democracy and transparency.

President Kufuor has also enjoyed high-profile visits in 2008 by U.S. President George W. Bush, a man not distinguished by his love of travel, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development, among others. This has further contributed to the country’s rising reputation as not only a star of hope in Africa but a new, contributing member of the brotherhood of nations.

On the other hand, Ghana is no stranger to political violence. Since gaining independence from the British in 1957, the country has more than once been the victim of bloody coups, military putsches and political assassinations.

And with the first two elections going to one party and the last two to another party, many see this election as the true test. As Kufuor cannot be re-elected, will Ghana continue down the road toward peaceful democratic rule, or will it slide back into a morass of corrupt petty dictatorships?

The posters one sees with the headline “Ballots not bullets” illustrates how nervous some are about how that question will finally be answered. The Daily Graphic, Ghana’s longest-running newspaper, is full of articles referring to the election in terms like “do or die” and “the mother of all elections.”

Editorials, meanwhile, run virtually every day in which the writer calls upon his countrymen to choose the path of peace during the election. Let’s hope, for the sake of Ghana, that readers take this request to heart.

(Picture: Voting directions)