Guest blog post for Suffragio:
Ghanaian President John Atta Mills, 68, passed away on July
24, 2012. The former vice president of
Jerry Rawlings, the longtime charismatic military ruler of Ghana turned
democratically-elected head of state, Professor Mills was deferential to and
often overshadowed by Rawlings throughout his political career. The modest and scholarly Mills, who taught
law at the University of Ghana, first ran for the presidency himself in 2000,
when Rawlings was term-limited, but lost to opposition leader John Kufour of the
New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Ghana’s first peaceful change of power since
independence. In 2008, when Kufour
himself was term-limited, Mills ran against Kufour’s vice president, Nana
Akuffo-Addo, whom he trailed after the first round by a margin of 47.92% to 49.13%. However, Mills ultimately defeated
Akuffo-Addo in the second round, with a margin of 50.23% to 49.77%, making it
the closest peaceful election of its scale in modern African history. Perhaps even more surprising, closely
following the 2007 elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, the vote led to Ghana’s
second peaceful transition of power without a single life lost.
Professor Mills, said to have been at heart an academic
rather than a politician, was a stickler for the constitutional rule of law. By the end of his term Ghana was the fifth
least corrupt country on the African mainland according to Transparency International. When Ghana began offshore oil production for
the first time in 2010, Mills vowed to avoid the waste and corruption
associated with the oil industry in nearby Nigeria. Last month, Mills accepted nearly all of the
recommendations of the Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) to
comprehensively update Ghana’s constitution, with proposed amendments to be
submitted to popular referendum. The
CRC’s White Paper
called for, among other issues, abolition of the death penalty, protection of
consumer rights, constitutionalization of the right to a healthy environment,
and establishment of a comprehensive legal aid scheme. Whether the CRC’s recommendations will be
implemented remains to be seen should Mills’s ruling party, the National
Democratic Congress, lose the upcoming elections in December 2012 to the NPP.
Even at his death, the rule of law triumphed in Ghana when
Vice President John Dramani Mahama was sworn in within hours. In this way, Ghana avoided the same uncertainty
as when Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika passed away in office last April,
sparking speculation that Vice President Joyce Banda would be passed over for
the presidency in defiance of the constitution.
But unlike Ghana, Malawi’s change in power was dramatic—Mutharika ran an
unpopular regime, one bleeding support from foreign donors and dogged by street
protests, and Banda had previously been expelled from the ruling party. Nonetheless, the peaceful transfers of power
across the continent over the past year in Zambia, Senegal, Malawi, and Lesotho
may well prove that democracy is maturing in Africa for one simple fact: three
of these four countries, like Ghana, have experienced not just one but two peaceful
transitions of power since independence.
Andrew Novak is the
adjunct professor of African Law at American University Washington College of
Law. He has a J.D. from Boston
University and an M.Sc. in African Politics from the London School of Oriental
and African Studies—President John Atta Mills’s alma mater.
