Ghana: The Victors and the Spoils

On December 7, 2024, the day Ghanaians went to the polls, a video of a voter went viral. A stocky elderly man in an oversize white tunic stands in front of a voting booth with the sun glistening on his bald head as he hectors his ballot. “Eight years are enough,” he tells it, gesticulating angrily. When poll watchers try to quiet him, he doubles down, raging in half-sentences. Onlookers in the shady patio of the surrounding compound laugh at the scene. Eventually he deposits the ballot—but not before jumping and holding both arms to the sky in what looks like an invocation.

Clearly his magic worked. Within hours the reigning New Patriotic Party (NPP) had been beaten so comprehensively that its candidate, Mahamudu Bawumia, conceded faster than probably any previous presidential contender had in Ghana’s history. The challenger, John Mahama, was hardly unfamiliar. The country’s president from 2012 to 2017, he had lost to the term-limited incumbent, the NPP’s Nana Akufo-Addo, twice before, in 2016 and 2020. This time, however, he was seen as a savior, a conquering hero. Thousands of joyful people poured into the streets across the country. A week after the results were certified, protesters in Sekondi, in Ghana’s Western Region, vandalized a bronze statue of Akufo-Addo, whom Ghanaians had started comparing to Nebuchadnezzar and the pharaoh of Exodus.

Eight years ago all of this would have been unthinkable. By the time Mahama had been ousted many considered him a spineless leader incapable of reining in his administration’s corrupt members, who took every chance they got to inflate contracts. (The transportation ministry, for instance, spent $1 million to paint about a hundred buses with the faces of the country’s leaders.) The years of Mahama’s presidency were characterized by a declining economy, frequent power outages that brought everyday life to a halt, and a spate of international scandals: during the 2014 World Cup cash had to be flown to Ghana’s national football team, the Black Stars, whose players were threatening to boycott the event over unpaid bonuses. Eventually Mahama and his brother were investigated by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office and the US Department of Justice, which suspected them of taking bribes to facilitate the sale of military aircraft. (They were ultimately cleared.) Ghanaians couldn’t wait to be free of him.

And yet so bitter was the experience under Akufo-Addo that anything else felt like a relief. Ghana has now spent fifteen years lurching from one corrupt administration to another; governance has slowly devolved into a form of spoils-sharing. But Akufo-Addo’s abuses of power—his administration’s dramatic, shortsighted efforts to weaken democratic levers and checks—hit many voters especially hard. When he first ran for Ghana’s highest office, he presented himself as a progressive candidate who could reverse the country’s democratic decline, only to fall short of even the first Mahama administration’s dismal record. In last year’s elections there was hardly a viable alternative to Mahama: no other contender had enough name recognition, and Ghana’s heavily monetized campaign system discourages candidates from joining unless they have deep war chests. At least under a second Mahama term, a friend who had previously voted for Akufo-Addo told me after the results were in, he wouldn’t get his hopes up.

“Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all else shall be added unto you,” went the battle cry of Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party during Ghana’s struggle for independence. If only the country could overcome colonial domination, many hoped, then prosperity would follow. The reality was more bitter. Within a few years of its independence in 1957, Ghana was struggling to secure enough foreign currency to fund imports and pay its debts, driving up inflation and causing shortages of consumer goods.

In the years that followed, Nkrumah’s rule grew increasingly authoritarian: he passed a law allowing detention without trial and later vested his office with the power to nullify court decisions and remove judges. The economy stagnated, repression intensified, and allegations of corruption regarding Convention Peoples Party officials spread. In 1966 the police and military overthrew Nkrumah in a Western-backed coup; he went into exile in Guinea and died in a Bucharest hospital six years later.

A succession of short-lived governments failed to secure either democracy or economic growth. In 1979 a group of junior military officers undertook what they called a “house cleaning” exercise, deposing the regime they had served and executing eight of its senior members—including three former heads of state—by firing squad. Soldiers looted markets and shops; the newly instituted Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) seized the property and assets of foreigners and Ghanaians that it accused of dishonest dealings.

The AFRC’s leader was a young flight lieutenant named Jerry Rawlings, the son of a Scottish father and a Ghanaian mother, who at the time of the coup was under trial by an army tribunal for mutinying against the junta. Later that year Rawlings relinquished his power to a democratically elected civilian government under Hilla Limann, a former diplomat—only to depose that government in another coup two years later. He would stay in power for nearly two decades, first as a military ruler and then as an elected president.

In the early years of his second turn as a military ruler, Rawlings advanced a series of radical populist policies. Economically, he and his Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), a quasi-military regime that succeeded the AFRC, rigidly enforced price and rent controls, and encouraged workers to take over the management of state companies and boards. Slowly, meanwhile, they clamped down on democratic society, replacing constitutional rule with rule by decree, dissolving parliament, disbanding political parties, detaining citizens without due process.

In the beginning Rawlings enjoyed a broad measure of popularity among junior soldiers, police officers, union workers, left-leaning technocrats, students, traditional chiefs, and intellectuals. Various leftist movements—many inspired by Nkrumah’s ideology—also supported the regime, optimistic about the possibilities of shifting the nation’s political culture away from elite rule. But the country’s economy and morale soon declined. Between 1982 and 1983 over a million Ghanaians who had been expelled from Nigeria arrived in Ghana; in 1983 severe drought and related bushfires caused a famine that killed hundreds of children and plunged a twelfth of the entire nation into malnutrition, anemia, and kwashiorkor. These crises exposed the limits of Rawlings’s solutions to the country’s economic challenges—notably its weak export economy and its corresponding need for foreign currency reserves. Rawlings, for his part, was growing increasingly paranoid, attacking some of his former leftist allies and fracturing the broad coalition that had initially supported him. By 1984 Ghana had become the poster child of African state “failure.” Roads were falling apart, shops lacked essential items, and trained workers were fleeing the country.

Desperate to reverse these trends, the Rawlings government undertook neoliberal “structural adjustment” reforms backed by the World Bank and the IMF. Starting in 1984 the country’s currency, the cedi, was significantly devalued, foreign-exchange transactions decriminalized, price controls removed, and imports and exports liberalized. Relatively liberal investment and trading codes went into effect with the aim of attracting shareholders; about three hundred state companies were sold off to individuals.

These reforms, under Ghana’s particular conditions, had some macroeconomic benefits. The country’s total volume of imports and exports rose, long lines to buy food staples slowly became a thing of the past, and inflation fell from the triple-digit heights it had reached in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And yet the Rawlings government had also effected these changes under a fairly severe brand of authoritarian rule. Political opponents and dissidents continued to be detained without trial, jailed by kangaroo courts, chased into exile, or assassinated. The political climate had become extremely chilly, dominated by a culture of silence and ruled by a regime with little political legitimacy.

In 1992 Ghana began a formal transition to democracy. The country enacted a liberal constitution, giving in both to internal pressure from domestic activists and to external prodding from its Western financial backers. That November and December, for the first time since 1979, citizens voted in multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections, respectively. But it was in several senses a transition without change. As in Pinochet’s Chile, certain provisions of the 1992 constitution seemed tailored to let the president retain some autocratic powers—for instance, the ability to appoint mayors and choose chief executives for local councils. Its “permanent transitional” provisions, meanwhile, gave blanket immunity to the two previous Rawlings regimes. When the votes were tallied, Rawlings was again sworn into power, this time as the first president of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, with many of his previous ministers in tow—now under the auspices of a new party called the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The main opposition, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), had boycotted the parliamentary elections, accusing Rawlings’s government of rigging them in his favor—a highly plausible charge, given the tight control he kept over the transition process. The result was a de facto one-party legislature that over the next four years acted largely as a rubber stamp for the executive, ratifying international loans and agreements he presented and approving his nominees for various government bodies with little scrutiny. And yet human rights nonetheless improved, in deference to both the new constitution and the expectations of international donors. Illegally detained prisoners came home from jail; opposition parties operated more freely and gained seats in subsequent elections; civil society opened up. The government still enthusiastically enforced criminal libel laws, but in other respects it relaxed its censorship of the media, including radio and television.

Only when the country held its third multiparty election, in December 2000, did the Rawlings era come to an end. That year’s tightly contested race was markedly free and fair, thanks in large part to technical support from the USAID-funded International Foundation for Electoral Systems. The result was that the NPP secured 99 of parliament’s 200 seats. Its candidate, John Agyekum Kufuor, won 57 percent of the popular vote.

Two years later parliament established the National Reconciliation Commission, which was tasked with investigating the human rights violations that Ghanaians had suffered at the hands of the state from the end of the Nkrumah era to the start of the democratic transition. Of the offenses it cataloged, Rawlings’s AFRC and PNDC were responsible for 84 percent, including seizing property, taking hostages, abusing the judicial process, and abducting, maiming, torturing, and disappearing a range of victims, from political opponents to uninvolved civilians. The commission showed, to take just one example, that in 1982 soldiers had gang-raped a young woman in the town of Tarkwa, thrown her unconscious body into an abandoned mine shaft, and left her to die.

The commission recommended a range of reforms, including establishing proper succession procedures for state offices and banning private armies—like Rawlings’s Battalion 64—and politicized security services. In its early years Kufuor’s administration attempted to implement some of these measures, for instance by paying token reparations to victims of state abuse and attempting to educate policemen and soldiers about the principles of human rights. But the measures were never institutionalized in any concrete form, and over the last two decades they appear to have crumbled.

In other respects, however, the country did spend Kufuor’s tenure moving out of the shadow of military rule. Civil society, including independent think tanks and advocacy groups dedicated to government probity and accountability, worked without fear of violent repercussions. The economy grew four times over; the government introduced major social provisions like universal health coverage, free maternal health care, direct cash transfers to poor households, and free food for primary school pupils. Even the allegations of graft and nepotism that got Kufuor voted out of office in 2008—it emerged, for instance, that his son had bought a hotel next to his private residence with loans from state banks—never fully tarnished his reputation for raising the country’s level of democratic governance.

Then came oil. In 2007 Ghana discovered as much as 3 billion barrels of crude off the western coast by the border with Côte d’Ivoire. The foreign companies doing the drilling owned—and still own—the bulk of the shares, but analysts like H. Kwasi Prempeh and George Asumadu argue that the country has nonetheless struggled ever since with the so-called resource curse.¹ Even as national exports have risen, in other respects Ghana’s economic stability has declined: the new mineral wealth significantly expanded public spending, often funded by oil-backed foreign loans, which left ample opportunities for graft. 

There is little denying that in the years following the discovery of oil Ghanaian politics have become increasingly corrupt. The cost of election campaigns has risen exponentially as running for office has become an investment: winners get a chance to skim off the top both of the oil profits themselves and of related contracts and investments, licit and illicit, flowing from foreign sources like Nigeria and the UK. Kufuor’s successors—first Rawlings’s former vice-president John Atta Mills and then John Mahama—bolstered some social welfare initiatives but grew steadily less accountable to their citizens. Under their tenure less money went to social programs like the national health insurance scheme, which since 2003 had done much to raise the cost of living for the poorest. Inequality deepened: according to Oxfam, the country’s wealthiest 10 percent now accounts for nearly a third of its total consumption—more than the bottom 60 percent of its population combined.

When Akufo-Addo ran for the presidency in 2016, many Ghanaians hoped he would reverse these trends. Public service was the family business. His uncle, J.B. Danquah, famously brought Nkrumah back to Ghana in 1947 to kickstart the independence movement. (The pair had a falling-out two years later, when Nkrumah demanded self-government at a faster pace than Danquah had proposed.) His father, Edward Akufo-Addo, had been the chief justice in the late 1960s and then spent three years as the ceremonial head of state.

Nana Akufo-Addo had a patrician upbringing, but he was drawn to the gritty work of politics. In his university days he had been known as a student radical who ran in the same circles as Fela Kuti and Hugh Masekela; in 1995 he had helped organize one of the most significant street protests in Ghana’s democratic history, a demonstration against tax increases that represented the first large-scale pushback against the democratically elected but still autocratic Rawlings government. When he became attorney general and minister of justice in 2001, he overturned the libel law the dictatorship had used against activists. The following year he spearheaded the National Reconciliation Commission.

He was also wealthy. Many voters therefore imagined that if he were given the chance to hold the highest office, he could resist the allure of self-enrichment and get to work institutionalizing some of the progressive measures he had helped activists win. As a candidate he won the endorsement of a diverse alliance: business leaders, radical activists, traditional rulers, and Muslim and Christian clergy. When he took office on January 7, 2017, many of his supporters treated it as a second Independence Day. He was a devoted fan of Ghana’s national football team as well as of Tottenham Hotspur. He proclaimed that Ghana would move “beyond aid”—beyond, that is, dependence on Western institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. What could go wrong?

One of the first signs of trouble came in the early months of 2017, when Akufo-Addo announced the members of his government. Mahama had been chided for curating a “friends and family” cabinet when he appointed eighty-six ministers and deputies, including some “without portfolio”—cabinet members who in theory were simply unattached to any one ministry but in practice were gifted comfortable benefits with no responsibilities. Akufo-Addo announced a historic 125. His government seemed eager to reward party loyalists: not only did he create new, redundant ministries, but he appointed deputy ministers (sometimes two or three) where there had previously been no need even for one. Some party loyalists received ambassadorial appointments; others were pressed onto the payroll as “aides” or “communicators.”

Close family members benefited especially lavishly. Not only did the president’s cousin, Kenneth Ofori-Atta, become the finance minister, the government administered some of its loans through Databank, an investment bank he had cofounded. “It becomes suspicious,” the head of a civilian nonprofit called the Ghana Integrity Initiative said on a radio show in 2022, “if that particular organization keeps on getting all the awards.” The investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni used right-to-information requests to uncover that Ofori-Atta’s bank earned $9.2 million from Ghana’s borrowings. This controversy was playing out at a moment when the country’s finances were less than stable: in 2022 the government went to the IMF for help and tried to balance the books by slashing state bonds that comprised the savings of millions of citizens. Since February 2025 the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) has been investigating Ofori-Atta, who denies any wrongdoing, for “corruption and corruption-related cases.”

A month into Akufo-Addo’s presidency, meanwhile, the ministry of finance and the revenue authority hired a new company called Strategic Mobilization Ghana Limited (SML)—which seemed to have no other clients—to protect the revenue of the country’s gold and oil industries. Ghana’s public procurement agency, which oversees the transparency of state contracts, rejected the deal three times, according to reporting by an investigative outlet Awuni founded called The Fourth Estate, but the finance ministry went ahead with it anyway, although significant questions remained about what work SML was doing and what results it could claim. (SML denied any wrongdoing and, last year, sued Awuni for defamation.) The government ended up agreeing to pay the company $100 million a year—more than all the money it gave to nineteen of Ghana’s twenty-seven ministries.

To thank God for his election victory, Akufo-Addo promised to build a cathedral. It was to hold a five-thousand-seat auditorium (expandable to 15,000), a central hall, chapels, a music school, an art gallery, and Africa’s first Bible museum, with apparent support from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Many observers questioned the wisdom of pursuing such a project in Ghana—which is not a desert of Christian places of worship—amid a recession. Initially the total cost was estimated at $100 million; the government promised only to provide the land and seed money for fundraising from local churches and Ghanaian Christians abroad.

Already, however, the state has spent $58 million on the project. The firm of the building’s architect, David Adjaye, reportedly received more than $20 million. By now the projected cost of finishing the cathedral has reportedly grown to $400 million, not including compensation for the homes of judges and the foreign embassies that were demolished to clear the site, which still lies empty. Ghanaians have started calling it “the most expensive hole in the world.”

One could be forgiven for thinking of Ghana as a theocracy. Over the past decade and a half, political Christianity has been steadily on the rise; in 2011 President John Atta Mills declared at a church convention that “Christ is the president of Ghana.” In a 2018 document called Vision 2023, the Church of Pentecost—the country’s largest Christian  denomination, with an estimated 3.6 million members—outlined a plan to “possess the nations” and “transform every sphere of society with values and principles of the kingdom of God.” Paula White, Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser, makes regular visits to Ghana to meet with prominent church leaders.

Last year parliament passed a draconian anti-LGBTQ bill that criminalizes homosexuality and imposes harsh penalties, including imprisonment, on people and institutions that advocate for the country’s gay and lesbian communities. One of the law’s main backers, a group called the National Coalition for Proper Human Sexual Rights and Family Values, has ties to a far-right American evangelical organization, the World Congress of Families, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group. Evangelical rhetoric suffused the 2024 presidential campaigns. Before the election Mahama sought the imprimatur of a group of clergy, kneeling down to receive their prayers. His opponent, Mahamudu Bawumia, belongs to the country’s Muslim minority, which accounts for about 20 percent of Ghana’s population. But he, too, frequented Christian churches and made homophobic comments.

Perhaps the most harmful concept seeping into Ghana’s society from the church—and in particular from a version of the prosperity gospel that enjoys wide popularity in the country—is the myth of the instant miracle. In the past two decades many Ghanaians have come to tolerate seeing public officials and politicians acquire sudden wealth and have lost interest in probing where it came from. A flurry of overnight-transformation stories saturate the headlines, framed as if they were inspiring rather than signs of potential dishonesty. As one commentator put it in an op-ed this past March, “We’re not mad about corruption in Ghana—we’re just jealous it’s not our turn yet.”

Ghanaians have, in any case, gotten used to seeing graft go unpunished. During his campaign Akufo-Addo promised to make corruption a risky venture. The responsibility for prosecuting such cases had previously belonged to the attorney general and justice minister, typically top members of the governing party and the administration, who would hesitate to charge anyone affiliated with either. Akufo-Addo instead opened an office for a special prosecutor in January 2018, to which he appointed Martin Amidu, a tough lawyer who had served as the attorney general and minister for justice under John Atta Mills.

By the end of 2020, however, Amidu insisted that the office’s promise had been dashed. It lacked the funding, he said, to set up facilities, hire staff, and begin investigations. (One of the president’s representatives at the time blamed Amidu for not requesting the funds.) The executive, he alleged, had meanwhile been interfering with his work—most alarmingly in a case over state mineral revenue. Earlier that year the ministry of finance had incorporated a company called Agyapa Royalties Limited in the offshore tax haven of Jersey, in the British Islands, through which it planned to route most of the country’s future royalties from gold mining leases. The government would retain a 51 percent stake; the remaining 49 percent of the shares would be listed on the Ghanaian and London stock exchanges, with the aim of generating between $500 million and $750 million.

Civil society groups criticized the deal, and for good reason: it had been rushed through parliament despite an opposition boycott; it required the state to sell off a significant portion of its future gold revenue at a wildly undervalued rate; it granted Agyapa a full tax exemption; and it contracted advisory work from Databank. Eventually the deal was dropped in the face of both incessant civil-society protests and litigation in the courts. But by then $12 million had already flowed out of the state’s coffers as payment for “administrative and advisory services.”

Amidu accused the president of trying to suppress the results of his investigation into the deal. He claimed that a week after he submitted his report in in mid-October, he got a visit at his home at 5:36 in the morning from Ofori-Atta, the finance minister, implicitly pressing him to drop the investigation. (Ofori-Atta later said he visited Amidu because he had heard the prosecutor “was not feeling well.”) After another week went by, he released the sixty-four-page report to the press—then resigned later that month. Amidu concluded that the president had deceived him: far from “the innocent flower of anticorruption,” he said, Akufo-Addo was corruption’s “mother serpent.” The president issued a strenuous denial, accusing Amidu of “errors of fact” and insisting that he had been eager to read the findings and pursue justice.

Amidu’s successor as special prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, has also gone public with allegations of government interference—this time singling out the courts. In November 2023 he held a dramatic press conference in which he argued that the judiciary was undermining his efforts to freeze assets and hold flight risks and preventing his office from continuing investigations on cases involving affiliates of the governing party. He summed up his predicament by quoting a popular highlife song: “I’m a lonely bird. I have sacrificed my soul to do my best. I’ll do what I can, and when my time is up, I will go.”

Perhaps the most startling signs of the Akufo-Addo administration’s antidemocratic turn were its use of violence and its disdain for the press. The US State Department’s reports on Ghana over the last eight years have shown a pattern of arbitrary, unlawful, and extrajudicial killings; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, including torture, of detainees by the government or on its behalf; arbitrary arrests and detentions; and serious restrictions on free expression, including violence and threats against journalists. In just the first fifteen months of the administration, seventeen journalists were reportedly attacked by assailants ranging from soldiers and football fans to security guards, none of whom were prosecuted. Security forces raided some radio stations that had criticized members of the NPP and shut down others. Between 2016 and 2023, Ghana fell from twenty-sixth to sixty-second on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.

Many of these abuses were carried out by a mix of state security agents and vigilante groups affiliated with the NPP, among them Delta Force, Invisible Forces, Kandahar Boys, Bamba Boys, Alidu Mafias, and Bolga Bulldogs. (The NDC, too, has its own vigilante groups, like The Hawks and the Azorka Boys.) These groups, from which the state security forces often draw their members, became increasingly emboldened. On the first day that Akufo-Addo took power, Invisible Forces beat up a security official from the previous administration who’d had the audacity to stick around at the executive mansion despite the change in government. Two months later Delta Force violently removed a regional security coordinator from his office on the grounds that one of the gang’s members deserved the job instead. When the assailants were arrested and taken to court, their allies barged in during the session, overpowered the security personnel, and freed them. Those figures, too, were ultimately arrested—only for the state to drop the case.

All of this instability has taken a significant toll. The cedi’s value declined by 40 percent across just nine months in 2022. Unemployment among young adults nearly doubled over Akufo-Addo’s eight years in power. Government spending on social welfare, at 1.4 percent of GDP, still remains lower than that of some of Ghana’s poorer neighbors. These conditions are likely only to worsen: Akufo-Addo’s administration saddled Ghana with more debt than all the previous governments in the country’s history combined. It will take just twelve years, experts predict, for the national pension purse to run out.

The widespread feeling in the country was a sense of powerlessness, anger, and vertigo. Lamentations about Akufo-Addo were constantly heard on public buses. Many citizens felt a kind of disgust at the sight of the president touting Pan-Africanist ideals in the international press or rushing to offer sympathy when Notre Dame burned even as he froze out local media, ignored the youth protesting his country’s harsh economic conditions, and offered a deflating response when, in 2023, overspill from the Volta River dam cost thousands of people their homes. Even a supposedly progressive president, it now seemed, would condemn Ghana’s people to crumbs.

In everyday conversation, relatives who lived through the days of the dictatorship suggest that the current atmosphere resembles the one preceding the series of military coups and countercoups that followed the Nkumrah years. These days violence always seems just on the verge of breaking out. It is not uncommon to hear people wonder aloud why, if the powerful go around the law, they shouldn’t, too. On social media and in the streets, ordinary Ghanaians openly fantasize about the need for “three or four Rawlings” to punish the political elite.

Even after decades of democracy, many still seem attached to the logic of the coup—the idea that political victors deserve their spoils. Shortly after last year’s election, NDC supporters broke broke into offices, food supply warehouses, construction sites, and even a factory to evict their current incumbents. Clearly, they seemed to think, those workers owed their jobs to political favor; now that Mahama had won it was his supporters’ turn to reap the benefits. Appointees to government positions have been feted as if they were celebrities. On his arrival at the national law enforcement headquarters, the new inspector general of police was welcomed by a joyous throng of people, some of whom sprayed cash on him—a practice usually seen at Nigerian weddings and other social events. Young party members march to state agencies to demand jobs from their newly appointed bosses.

Mahama has promised a reset. Seven months in, much attention remains focused on just how to punish the previous administration’s corruption. The unfortunately named Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) has received over two thousand cases of alleged official corruption from the last eight years. It is investigating thirty-six particularly high-profile ones, through which it hopes to recover $20 billion. Meanwhile, however, Mahama’s attorney general has dismissed cases that the Akufo-Addo government was prosecuting against politicians and businessmen who happen to be affiliated with the new government, and state security has hardly stopped its vigilante-style hounding of opposition figures. It isn’t clear whether any systems are emerging to prevent this government from falling back into its old habits—or worse. We find ourselves, as Nkrumah put it, knocking on the door of the political kingdom yet again.