The Ghana Elections of December 2004: Bandwagons, Contested Memories and Likely Outcomes

Dr Paul Nugent from the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh has published widely on Ghanaian politics and history, and on the ethnicity factor in politics. He is the author of Big Men, Small Boys and Politics in Ghana (1995).

In December 2004, the NPP government of J.A. Kufuor will seek re-election after its historic victory at the polls four years ago. Most Ghanaians expect him to increase his majority in view of the doubts surrounding the credibility of the NDC candidate, John Atta-Mills, and the disarray of the smaller parties. If there is anything to the bandwagon effect – and a string of by-election victories suggests there might be – then the NPP could win handsomely. The NPP regime claims to have delivered on most of the promises it made in 2000, whereas the opposition parties insist that the economy remains fundamentally weak, little employment has been generated and that corruption has reared its ugly head. More interestingly, the NPP and the NDC have been engaged in a bitter struggle to enthrone their rival versions of history. Through the Truth Commission, the NPP has sought to convince Ghanaians that the Rawlings era was characterized by violence from beginning to end. The NDC has failed to counteract this bold rewriting of history. But it has used the murder and beheading of the Ya-Na in Yendi to insist that there is a recurrence of the Busia/Danquah's tendency to play fast and loose in the north. The NDC calculates that its chance of success lies in winning the three northerly regions and the Volta Region by a decent margin. There is a good chance that the bandwagon effect will be countered by a northern backlash against the NPP's mishandling of the Yendi crisis.