Source: The Wall Street Journal Vendors in Accra, Ghana, hawk memorabilia Friday in anticipation of President Obama's visit, his first to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office. News International/ZUMA Press
When it’s all over, on his first presidential trip to sub-Saharan Africa, President Barack Obama, the first black U.S. president, will have spent only one day in Ghana on a visit that began today following the G-8 summit in Italy. But what this trip lacks in duration is more than made up for by what it symbolizes.
The only sub-Saharan stop on the president’s visit, most analysis indicates that Ghana is being singled out for good behavior in a region where rule of law is the most endangered of concepts. While not perfect, unlike many sub-Saharan African nations, (including Nigeria, that despite its oil-fueled potential for great wealth and power, continues to be the picture of instability) Ghana has instituted market and political reforms that have grown the economy and resulted in smooth transitions of power in the most recent presidential cycles.
As Reuters has reported, “Obama's Ghana visit has triggered a bout of angst in Kenya, his ancestral homeland, and Nigeria….Nigeria has an appalling record of organizing transparent polls and ethnic violence after a disputed election in Kenya in 2007 killed at least 1,300 people and shattered its image as the region's stable economic powerhouse.”
Despite all of Ghana's progress, observers and Ghanaians alike say the country needs to guard against “democratic setbacks,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Transparency is still weak, checks and balances ineffective, news media independence isn't well established and power is too centralized....
Cautious appraisals of the current situation should be understood against the backdrop of the past, which for Ghana was quite different than the present.
In the early days of post-Colonialism, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ghana was the very picture of far-left authoritarianism. The cultish nationalist leader was Kwame Nkrumah, who was treated as a demi-god. Even school children were encouraged to sing, “Kwame Nkrumah, he will never die!." Nkrumah did die, of course, and many of the Africans who went for higher education to Moscow--where Nkrumah was celebrated--came back, ironically, with a distaste for communism. Meanwhile, a failing economy and corruption—and a bit of CIA help—precipitated a coup in 1966 and Nkrumah, who was more popular in the rest of Africa than at home, wound up in exile, ultimately dying in communist Romania. Now Ghana even has a free market think tank, the Imani Center in Accra. But the past is never too far away: Accra also boasts a major monument to Kwame Nkrumah.
Ghana has made tremendous, positive strides and President Obama’s visit underscores that. For a country independent only since 1957, and with transparent multi-party elections for less than two decades, it has done much more than most of its neighbors to create democratic and market stability. For those reasons alone, it’s nice to see good governance, market and other reforms rewarded.
