On 7 December 1996, President Jerry Rawlings won his second multiparty election in Ghana, completing another important step in the building of sustainable political and economic institutions in that West African state. Previous elections, in 1992, ended in charges of fraud and an opposition boycott of the 200-seat, unicameral National Assembly. This time, however, important reforms in the electoral system and a spirited campaign by an opposition coalition gave Ghanaians a meaningful choice on election day. The opposition won a third of the seats in the Assembly, and can use this base both to scrutinize the Rawlings government and to build more effective political parties for subsequent elections.
While the election received less attention than it deserved in the international media, Ghana offers a series of hopeful lessons for African states struggling with the challenges of macroeconomic structural adjustment programs (SAPs) and the transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The case of Ghana also highlights the tendency in a number of African countries for soldiers who seized power through coups to reinvent themselves as democratic leaders. In such West African states as Niger, Togo, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Gambia, military leaders have remained in power in part by manipulating elections or by forcing the opposition to withdraw. President Rawlings of Ghana, a former air force officer, has cultivated a rural base of support that has allowed him to go from coup leader to winner of two multiparty elections--all while steering the country through a difficult period of economic reform.
Ghana has served as the preeminent test case of structural adjustment [End Page 65] in Africa. Following the virtual collapse of the formal economy in the early 1980s, the Rawlings government reversed its populist policies and adopted an SAP with the strong encouragement of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and bilateral donors. The results were dramatic. The country's GDP grew at rates of 6 to 7 percent annually from 1984 to 1988--the highest in sub-Saharan Africa at that time. These considerable economic accomplishments, however, began to stall in the early 1990s. The disputed 1992 elections and the subsequent opposition boycott of parliament raised questions about stability and made private investors wary.
The stakes in the 1996 election, therefore, were high. As the Financial Times put it: "If Ghana falters in its trailblazing role, not only will international confidence in the continent's capacity to recover be jolted, the credibility of the donors' development strategy for Africa will also be eroded." 1 Ghana could not afford to stand pat, and still less to repeat the contentious 1992 elections.