ACCRA: Ethnic splits between Ghana’s main regions are raising tensions around Sunday’s polls but are unlikely to trigger a repeat of the kind of electoral violence that ravaged Kenya a year ago or part of Nigeria last week.
Inter-ethnic violence killed more than 1,300 people after East African powerhouse Kenya’s elections in December 2007.
Hundreds of people were killed last week in ethnic fighting triggered by a local poll dispute in Jos, central Nigeria.
“What happened in Kenya has focused attention on these elections,” said Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at London think-tank Chatham House, of Ghana’s Dec 7 presidential and parliamentary polls.
“Because this election is so strategic, and is so close, the emotions are going to be very high. That’s why the international observers went in early,” he said.
Ghana’s President John Kufuor is stepping down after the maximum two terms in office during which his administration has revived the fortunes of one of West Africa’s major economies.
The discovery of crude oil, due onstream in late 2010, has added to hopes for the country of 23 million, which has attracted significant foreign investor interest.
The European Union deployed election monitors across Ghana a month ahead of polling day as one of a handful of international observation missions. Many say the polls are too close to call and recent months have seen sporadic violence in some areas.
“Election violence is not entirely new in Ghana, but ... it seems to me to be more than this country has experienced in the past,” Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, executive director of the independent Ghana Center for Democratic Development.
Ghana’s fortunes have certainly looked up since independence leader Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist ideals of half a century ago collapsed in a welter of coups and factional score-settling.
But anti-corruption campaigners and political opponents say Kufuor has concentrated too much power in his own hands and those of his Ashanti kinsmen. Opposition activists accuse the courts and police of bias towards Kufuor’s ruling party.
Some joke bitterly that anyone who’s anyone in Ghana these days has a double-barrelled surname – a common trait among the Ashanti and the wider Akan group of which they are part.
The Akan make up almost half of Ghana’s people and their regions around the central second city of Kumasi in Ghana’s gold- and cocoa-producing belt, have voted overwhelmingly for Kufuor’s ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).
It is fielding another Akan, Nana Akufo-Addo, to succeed him. Meanwhile the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has dominated the eastern Volta region and the north.
Northern tensions
Several people have been killed in election-related violence since voter registration began in mid-2008.
Most incidents have been in the less developed and generally pro-opposition northern part of Ghana, where political rivalries are often tied up with local land disputes, ethnic unrest and power struggles over influential traditional chieftaincies.
Local media have reported deadly arson attacks and politicians have said some people are stockpiling arms.
Both main candidates have picked northern running mates.
“I don’t think Ghana has ever been caught up in such fear towards elections,” said Dayo Olaide, economic programme officer for the Open Society Initiative for West Africa.
Still, the scale of the violence pales by comparison with that seen in some other African countries, and even with that seen in northern Ghana itself in the mid-1990s, when well over 1,000 people were killed in a series of disputes.
“Even with its imperfections here and there we’ve not seen anything like in Zimbabwe or Kenya,” Olaide said.
Some say floods of refugees from wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast in the past 20 years have had a sobering effect on those tempted to use violence for political ends.
In that time, former coup leader Jerry Rawlings, whose early years after seizing power in 1981 were stained with the blood of executed opponents, brought democracy, first as president and, since Kufuor’s 2000 election, as his most outspoken critic.
Rawlings and his NDC, whose candidate John Atta Mills is standing for president for the third time, draws much support from the Ewe ethnic group of the eastern Volta region, but have built a base in non-Akan areas, particularly the north.
“You could say the political landscape in Ghana and most of Africa tends to be ethnically oriented, that ethnic cleavage is always there,” said Yao Gede, a lecturer at the University of Ghana’s Legon Centre for International Affairs.
“With Rawlings the money came from the Ewe’s part; but other parts of the country have come to associate themselves with the NDC as well, so it is not so clear cut,” Gede said.
Gyimah-Boadi, of the Center for Democratic Development, takes heart that politicians and even a hip-hop singer have joined a campaign to discourage violence.
“In some ways the threat of physical violence ahead of the elections probably peaked about a month ago,” he said.
“Most Ghanaians recognise that in this republic we are trending upwards gradually and incrementally, and I cannot imagine the country giving this up for anything else,” he said.—Reuters
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