| BOOK
REVIEW
Ghana: Transition to Democracy
EDITED BY: Kwame A. Ninsin
PUBLISHER: Codesria Book Series, B. P. 3304, and Dakar, Senegal
PAGES: 252; PRICE: $25.00
REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG in Ottawa, Canada
Ghana: Transition to Democracy, written by 8 leading social
scientists, reveals that the journey towards political order is not an easy one, more
especially in the African in the African political context where incompatible ethnic
groups were forcibly jammed together to form nation-states without recourse not only to
their consent but not informed by their history and culture. The recurring bloody
conflicts in the north of the country attest to the hurdles in the journey to order.
The 3 January 1993 elections that brought democracy to Ghana is the
starting point of this book. But this is not the first time Ghana has gone through
transition to democracy in its 40 years of independence though there are similarities in
the present and the past ones. The running sign in the past and present transitions is
that the incumbent military regime, which always control the transition to constitutional
rule, bows to massive pressure, setting up constitutional body to write democratic
constitution.
The book states that despite the varying degrees of intensity and
mass involvement it was only after 1988 that the PNDC bowed to pressure and agreed to
liberalise politics and introduce a democratic constitution. The key demands of the
pro-democracy forces, still working to entrench democratic values, was to replace the
authoritarian military regime and its institutions, rule and procedure with democratic
one, based on consent obtained through electoral processes in which the universal
franchise applied, as is government based on rule of law. This is crux of the transition
politics.
The book takes as its working definition the idea that "a
political transition does not necessarily consummate a democratic order. Rather, it marks
an important beginning of a long and difficult process." The central issues in the
Ghana political transition include institutional disarray, normative incongruents,
recurring political instability, institutional breakdown as well as extreme civil
disorders, under the Rawlings military junta.
It is in this context that the contributors look at the Ghana
transition from the strands of the structural adjustment programme, the civic
associations, political parties and multiparty politics, state organisations, democracy
and control over Ghana’s military and security establishments, the international
community, the press, and elections, democracy and elite consensus.
All these strands interplay and impinge on the transition process,
"intertwining relationships between economic and political liberalisation, the
institutional and non-institutional structures in the emergence of national mass
consciousness and movements, and the connections between the military, party and chances
of sustainable democratic transitions."
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