African democracy often seems like an oxymoron. We hear so much in the western press about corruption, failed states, dictatorships, ethnic violence, and disputed elections that many would be surprised to find that anything like ‘normal’ politics occurs in Africa. But in Ghana there has just been a very close presidential election that saw the opposition candidate win by the tiniest of margins. On 7^th January Professor John Atta Mills was sworn in as President, representing the National Democratic Congress (NDC) who displaced the New Patriotic Party (NPP) that had governed for two terms. The NDC conspicuously borrowed from President-Elect Obama’s campaign by arguing that ‘A Change We Need’ although in terms of economic policy there is not a lot to tell between the two main parties.

NPP election billboards in Accra.
[Images by Giles Mohan, © copyright Giles Mohan]

Although the credit crunch and global recession have affected many developing countries in terms of demand for their commodities and availability of credit, Ghana already had a huge budget deficit compared to the size of its economy. So, like all governments, it is concerned with what will drive the country’s economy. Last year, after much speculation, oil was discovered in the west of the country, mainly offshore, but with the possibility of land-based reserves. For a country dependent on oil imports and a massively over-stretched energy generation infrastructure this was great news. No sooner had the discovery been confirmed than the NPP president hailed Ghana’s economic problems to be greatly relieved. Domestically people were cautiously hopeful, but have witnessed the plight of their near neighbours in Nigeria who have massive oil wealth, but are dogged by corruption, environmental damage, and growing inequality and so are desperate that Ghana doesn’t go down the same path.

Internationally, the oil producers began arriving. Initially the discovery was through a UK-US consortium, but the Chinese were soon in negotiations to secure drilling rights in one of the off-shore blocks. The Chinese, like all industrialising countries, need to secure energy supplies and so see sub-Saharan Africa as a region that is under-exploited, although one with higher than average risks for investment. Already the Chinese are well-established in Sudan, Angola, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea with Ghana representing the latest addition to a string of producers bordering the Gulf of Guinea. With oil production due to begin within the next two years it is a critical period for Ghana and the new NDC government who have the benefits of this new revenue stream, but also need to manage the potential downsides.

Ghana’s energy problems run deep. When I was in Accra last month we had power cuts everyday as the water levels in the Volta Dam, Ghana’s main source of electricity, dropped during the dry season. Here, again, the Chinese are heavily involved in energy production through the construction of another hydro-electric dam in the north-west of the country at Bui, and a power plant near Accra.

Sign for the power plant near Accra built by a Chinese State construction company.[Images by Giles Mohan, © copyright Giles Mohan]

As part of China’s development assistance and more commercial considerations it has given low interest loans to the Ghana Government for the Bui Dam. The original plans to dam this part of the Black Volta River began in the 1920s and both the Soviet Union in the 1970s and the French in the 1990s looked at the feasibility of the project. However, it was the Chinese who offered the most favourable finance package and the cheapest tender, and got agreement from the Ghana Government in 2005. The Chinese contractor, Sinohydro, is a major multinational and is well under way to finishing the project with electricity beginning to flow in December 2011.

Although Chinese firms in Africa have been criticised for importing their own labour the agreement ensures that jobs go to Ghanaians with about 700 Chinese expatriates working on the project compared with 3000 Ghanaians. Already we have seen migration of job-seekers from other parts of Ghana to the remote Bui site. Bui is also a national park and about one-third of it will be lost to the dam with associated loss of land and wildlife. However, despite some rumours on the web about an anti-dam lobby we made inquiries among a number of NGOs in Ghana and not one of them seemed opposed to the dam, which will add 400 MW of power to the grid. And there are plans to build Bui City next to the dam, which one official optimistically said would be “like Dubai”. All in all, then, these are interesting times for Ghana where the people deeply crave the infrastructure of modernisation and have new lines of finance from China and the prospects of oil revenue.

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About the author

Dr Giles Mohan is a Reader in the Politics of International Development at the Open University. His research has examined politics in Africa, particularly ways in which rural communities access the government as well the role of diasporas in national politics.

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The recent local elections prompted me to reflect on the meaning of the ballot box. When I went to vote last week, a tarnished and rather battered box lay humbly on a chair: how, I thought, could this humble object be both fount and symbol of British democracy? And if it is under threat, which it appears to be, in particular from postal voting, does this subtly change the latent understandings of what our democracy is?

By ‘latent’ I am emphasising a psychological approach to ideas. Namely, the idea of democracy like any idea, has some underlying meanings, which are perhaps not often very explicit or conscious.

On 28^th April, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust published a damning report into called Purity of Elections in the UK: Causes for Concern. It shows how the mechanics of UK elections have been tampered with to the extent that the UK now has the lowest public confidence in free and fair elections in Western Europe. Voters can now obtain a postal vote by simply requesting one, whereas they used to have to demonstrate they needed one because they would be away from home, or because of work commitments preventing attendance in person. Now, instances of poll rigging are not rare; the Rowntree report refers to 42 convictions for electoral fraud in the last 7 years. Rowntree is not alone in its criticism; the Council of Europe, the Electoral Commission and the Electoral Reform Society have all highlighted serious defects. The clearest way to clean up the system is individual registration. But crosses on postal votes for a whole household can easily be made fraudulently by the nominated householder.

So the danger of postal voting is that individual voters are denied their vote. The Rowntree report says that cheating is not exclusive to any one party or group, but that in the cases of some groups, extended family and kinship networks are mobilised to secure support for particular candidates, and patriarchs and ‘community leaders’ find it all too easy to collect the votes of weaker members of their group. Only 46 per cent of British Asians regard postal voting as safe, according to the report. When there was a parallel concern in sectarian Northern Ireland, postal votes were limited to those who could prove genuine inability to get to a polling booth; and each voter registers individually. But, the government says that postal voting is ‘more convenient’.

So, what is the meaning of voting and what part does the ballot box as a technology of democracy play? As Tony Benn has often said, election day is a great day because only then is every one of us equal in power. You can vote or spoil your paper in privacy. Your vote counts no more and no less than anybody else’s. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights stipulates ‘universal and equal suffrage, held by secret vote guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the elector’.

A vote concerns the expression of views on a collective state of affairs and so it follows that these must be collectively addressed. Elections are a modern version for the meeting place in which citizens gathered to decide the issues of the day. In a world of large populations, citizens can no longer gather together in one place, so they elect proxies – representatives – whose legal standing depends on virtual gatherings: periodic collections of votes by the non-present body of citizens. From painted balls in the clay jars of antiquity to the glass, wooden, and then metal boxes of more recent centuries, voting systems have always signified a self evident simplicity and directness. A real, physical piece of paper, the ballot, is dropped into the box. So long as you know your own vote will both be counted and count towards the final outcome of the election, the system is legitimate.

The psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott wrote perceptively some decades ago about democracy, saying that it can be defined as society well adjusted to its healthy individual members. That is, it assumes maturity for its members; but I’d turn this around to say that the very act of voting in a public space is what helps to create maturity. What are the accepted qualities of democratic machinery? he asked. In his view its essence is the free vote by secret ballot. This ensures the freedom of the people to express deep and private feelings, to vote someone in or to vote someone out. The secret ballot provides a space for individuals to take full responsibility for themselves.

One final thing occurred to me when I went to vote: the act of going to a place to vote brings one into an encounter, however brief and perfunctory, with one’s fellow citizens as citizens. The latent meaning of the ballot box is that it makes people gather, however temporarily. Thus it both symbolically and actually constitutes the very idea of a link between how individual people vote (a vote) and the aggregate (the vote). A vote is a gathering. But postal votes are surely part and parcel of the mantra of consumer choice in which the conception of public, shared space where all are equal is unimportant.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

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It’s an interesting prospect that the next American president could be the son of an African man (and a white woman) who went to a majority-Muslim school as a boy. But to what extent is the candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama really related to this individual man, to his policies or skills as a legislator or thinker? Will his identity as an African-American prove to be the most important factor for his success or failure as the Democrat candidate, whether or not he uses it to manipulate popular perception?

What got me thinking about the possible meanings of ‘Obama’ was the entry of media tycoon and daytime Queen of the air Oprah Winfrey into Obama’s campaign at the end of last year. I wondered then how the personas of the ‘two Os’ could together alter the fortunes of the Obama campaign. I also wondered how her television fan base overlaps  with the political demographic that is so crucial for Obama. At their first rally together in South Carolina on December 8th, Obama drew attention to the unique nature of the event, given their ethnic origins: ‘Me being here is so unlikely…Just like Oprah being where she is so unlikely’. They were able to deploy the public personas they had already constructed through opening up their personal lives to the public – for Obama this was in two memoirs written before he was even a senator. They appealed directly to the state’s demographic (African Americans make up nearly half of all Democratic voters in this traditionally republican-voting state), peppering their speeches with ‘y’all’ and ‘you folks’. After making several references to church attendance, beauty parlours and God, Obama then danced to a Stevie Wonder song and invoked Martin Luther King: “But I’m not in this race because of the odds. I’m in it because of the ‘fierce urgency of now’’.

Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama.
[Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Accessed from FlickR and used under Creative Commons license.]

7.6 million viewers watch Oprah's show a day. Will her endorsement of Obama be one of his greatest assets? Perhaps it will serve to further racialise Obama’s image, and then we have to assess if that will help or hinder him.  Whether Oprah's popularity will translate into votes for Obama in the state’s Jan. 26 primary is an open question, but it does seem the case that Winfrey’s popularity has got him out of the starting blocks pretty quickly, allowing him to tap a swathe of hitherto disinterested or disaffected black voters. Oprah's tour came as Obama had cut into Hillary Clinton’s support among female voters in some states and the opinion of US pollsters does seem to be that Winfrey could help Obama draw more middle-aged and older women, the core of Winfrey’s talk show viewership. For the key to any endorsement by celebrities is to win people over who are not already in your camp. Women account for more than half of the state’s black Democratic vote. So if her support makes a difference, it is likely to be amongst women, also considered a crucial part of Clinton’s base in early voting states. But black female voters are also prime target for the primaries in southern states, hence Winfrey’s mention of the large number of beauty parlours in South Carolina. She said, ‘We love to keep our hair done, don’t we?’ She added, ‘I know what it means to come from the South,’ a reference to her childhood in Mississippi. One middle-aged black woman interviewed after the rally said to a journalist that she admired Oprah and Obama because ‘they’re both self-made, positive African Americans’.

I think Obama is an ambiguous character; he both uses and doesn’t use his ethnic identity. He has, no doubt, very little choice in this. I think he has to capitalise on this ambiguity, as Ophrah has so successfully done. Of course it's inevitable that he’s accused of ‘acting like he’s white’ by radical blacks. Also inevitable is the danger of democrats voting for Hillary Clinton because they don’t believe a black man can win the presidency – a kind of disingenuous projection of racism onto others that makes you think of a favourite children’s joke: ‘whoever smelt it, dealt it!’ Just as important, though, is the problem of class. In the US it's common to speak in coded terms of ‘beer track’ and ‘wine track’ candidates. Obama’s biggest problem could be that he’s regarded as a brainy 'wine track' liberal and thus may lose out to a rival, Clinton, whose support is firmly rooted in the blue-collar, non-college degree communities. This seems to have been the case in the New Hampshire primary of Jan 8th.

Obama’s credibility and popularity with the electorate as a whole will I think rest on him being an African-American in a country founded on slavery who plays down the destructive aspect of racial divisiveness - he is indeed a 'positive', 'post-racial' African-American. Although he is young and relatively inexperienced compared to Clinton, you could argue he is indeed more 'urgent'. And that's because, as Andrew Sullivan has recently argued in the US magazine Atlantic Monthly, he may be able to bridge the fissures that threaten American culture, represented by the great divide between white secular-minded liberals and neo-conservative religious fundamentalists. Can he hold a mirror up to America in which it sees itself in multi-ethnic unity? However, to successfully attract the black vote in order to achieve the Democratic nomination is one thing; he also must successfully represent the economically marginalised and socially conservative voters across the US. Perhaps this is an even bigger challenge.

More on the 2008 US election

• Tears in her eyes
• Is there a double standard for women in public?
• Sarah Palin: when politics is personal, ignorance is a woman

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.

Subscribe to Jessica Evans's posts