Where Ghana Went Right: How one African country emerged intact from its post-colonial struggles, John Schram

Rawlings himself attributes some of his change of heart to Fred Livingston, then the Canadian High Commissioner to Ghana. Like Rawlings, he was an air force man who swore freely and liked to drink Scotch into the wee hours of the night. Back in Ottawa at External Affairs, I was incredulous to hear Livingston’s reports of these late-night chats with the head of a foreign government — yet also unsurprised, after my three years in Manila and four in London, to see what could be accomplished in diplomacy through good personal relationships.

Much later, after I returned to Ghana in August of 1994 as Canada’s High Commissioner, Rawlings confirmed to me that Livingston’s accounts were true. Like many African leaders, he had a soft spot for Canada. He and his ministers attributed to Canadians an integrity, altruism, and commitment that now may seem naive, but which was then not entirely misplaced. Connections and friendships that had grown between leaders of developing countries in the Commonwealth and la Francophonie and Canadian prime ministers — especially Trudeau and Mulroney, and later Chrétien — convinced Africans of Canada’s bona fides.

The feeling was mutual. By 1994, Canada, in concert with other donors and the World Bank, regarded Ghana as an all-too-rare success story. Many African governments had rejected World Bank sap aid and strictures altogether; others had taken them on only half-heartedly. Ghana had not only embraced structural adjustment, it had shown strong evidence of the improvement in economic growth and stability the saps were intended to bring. It had also seen one very large residual benefit: under Rawlings, Ghana grew into a mature democracy — here, too, an example for the continent.

After twelve years of rule, in 1992, Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress had submitted to national elections. These votes, and the ones held four years later, were judged by the donor community to represent the will of the Ghanaian people — a feat duplicated by few other African leaders. Each time, Rawlings and his National Democratic Congress party won, admittedly. But a larger victory was being won by my Legon mate Kwadwo Afari-Gyan and his electoral commission, which ran the votes with an impartiality, a transparency, and a professionalism unknown in much of the rest of Africa. The elections represented a victory for free speech and the media: the Rawlings era had spawned a flourishing opposition press and several private FM radio stations. These provided a constant flow of comment on popular call-in talk shows, ensuring that every step of the election process became instant public knowledge. And, of course, the elections were a triumph for those Ghanaians who had learned to bide their time in parliamentary opposition, confident their turn would come.

Which it did. In 2000, Rawlings stepped down at the end of his second term as elected president, as mandated by Ghana’s constitution. Perhaps he was drawn in by an immensely successful visit in 1998 from US president Bill Clinton; perhaps he was determined to be one of what was then being referred to as Africa’s “new generation” of leaders. But Rawlings did what so few of his counterparts elsewhere in Africa had done: he agreed to leave the fate of the ndc government in the hands of his chosen successor, the highly respected law professor, senior civil servant, and Legon Hall alumnus John Atta Mills.

By a small margin, Mills lost. Rawlings is said to have been deeply unhappy with Mills for conceding, but his successor held firm, and Rawlings was persuaded to accept his party’s move into opposition. John Kufuor and the New Patriotic Party took over. Kufuor won re-election in 2004, but now he, too, is a past president, and his party is once again in opposition. The story of how that happened is perhaps the single most remarkable proof of success in governance on the African continent since the independence wave.

When John Kufuor came to the end of his second constitutional term as president in 2008, he, like Rawlings, stepped aside, making way for yet another Legon Hall alum, his long-time rival and cabinet minister Nana Akufo-Addo. Akufo-Addo lost the 2008 presidential election by less than one percent — a difference of 40,500 votes out of nine million. For several hours, it seemed that Ghana could go the way of Kenya in 2007. Akufo-Addo was under party pressure to refuse to accept the tally, a move that would have inflamed ethnic loyalties.

But it didn’t happen. Akufo-Addo was persuaded by his old Legon mate Afari-Gyan — and, some say, by his countryman and friend, the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan — to follow his own good inclinations and accept that he had lost. For the second time in a decade, Ghana changed presidents and governing parties with less ado than the United States did when George W. Bush was declared president over Al Gore. And John Atta Mills became president.

Today the maturing democracy in Ghana is the envy of much of the continent. Freedom House, an American think tank, rates it as one of only nine African countries that are truly “free”: twenty-three others, including some with post-colonial histories rather like Ghana’s, such as Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya, are only “partly free.” The remaining sixteen are not free at all. Atta Mills, Akufo-Addo, and Afari-Gyan could show them a thing or two about how to run a democracy.

Since i moved on in 1998 from Ghana to Ethiopia, then in 2002 to Zimbabwe, I have dealt with many countries where the prognosis for Africa seems far from hopeful. There is little in Eritrea, Sudan, Angola, or Zimbabwe to suggest that the next decade will be better than the initial post-independence era. But flying into Accra each of these past twelve years — whether from the problems of Addis Ababa and Harare or, more recently, from the satisfied security of Queen’s and Carleton universities in Canada — has always brought me a blood rush of hope, not just for Ghana but for much of the continent.

Last June, I found myself being ushered into Atta Mills’s office, acting for a change not as Canadian High Commissioner seeking out the president, but as one aging university friend seeking out another. There was no Star beer on hand, but there was plenty of reflection. We concluded that we, our other Legon friends, Ghana, and Africa had come a long way over the years.

After our talk, I drove out to Legon Hall to speak with Atinga Naga, the man who had thumped those Daily Graphic newspapers into my room forty-five years ago. He had recently retired. Once a poor man from a northern village, a member of Ghana’s marginalized majority, he had achieved relative prosperity and secured a future for his children in Accra as part owner of a small shop in nearby Achimota, where he owns land and a house. My mates may have built castles in East Legon, but perhaps the best story for Ghana and for Africa belongs to Naga. Fifty years on from Africa’s great wave of independence, his is the dream most Africans still seek for themselves.
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