CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
BACKGROUND OF STUDY
The end of the Cold War gave a major boost to the democratic movement in Africa. Multi- party democracy with its dominant feature of conducting periodic elections thus became prominent on the continent. This was the period when international financial support especially from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), became conditional in order to deny autocratic governments easy access to financial support unless they adopted and adapted to democracy. This wave of democratisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the pace of autocratic regimes that were pro-communist in various parts of Africa to embrace political reforms and Ghana was not an exception. The motivation for most African autocratic leaders was to succumb to this international pressure for continued Western funding.
Multi-party elections became more pronounced in Africa during the 1990s than ever before. According to Hyde and Marinove (2012), a total of 151 multi-party elections were organised in Africa between 1945 and 1990. By the end of 2000, the number of countries holding regular multi-party elections had quadrupled compared to the Cold War era (Van de Walle, 2002). Almost eighty percent (80%) of the elections conducted were won by incumbent parties and nearly two-thirds of these were considered not to have been free and fair. It brought to light that majority of the multi-party elections conducted flouted democratic standards.
The conduct of elections is an inextricable component of democratic system of governance. Elections represent the most feasible institutionalized approach for ensuring the rule of the people by the people and for the people (Lindberg, 2006). Through elections citizens can exercise their political rights of alternating or endorsing a particular political administration. Article 21 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that, “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of governments as expressed in periodic and genuine elections”. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) also provides that “every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity to vote and be elected at genuine periodic elections” (Heyns, Killander; 2007).
In the 1992 Constitution of Ghana, Article 42 states that “every citizen of Ghana of eighteen years of age or above and of sound mind has the right to vote and is entitled to be registered as voter for the purposes of public elections and referenda”. This underscores voting in an election as both a political and civic right for every citizen of a country when elections are organised. Globally, the outcome of elections varies. Some are desirable, others are not. For example, the outcome of elections in some Asian countries like India, Pakistan, Philippines and Malaysia were characterised with violence leading to loss of human lives, property, injuries and chaos. In the Philippines 75 people were killed prior to the May 2007 elections, while 80 others were wounded in election violence (Atuobi, 2008).
Some countries on the African continent are not exempted; Zimbabwe, Kenya (2007/ 2008), Uganda, Ethiopia, Chad, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Cote d’lvoire (2011) have experienced election violence. In the case of the 2003 Nigerian Federal Elections, at least one hundred people were killed and several were injured. About six hundred people were reported killed
in the December 2007 presidential election violence in Kenya following disputes over the results (Cyllah, 2010: 5).
Ghana has undergone six (6) major successive elections since 1992 to 2012. These have been internationally acclaimed by countries, institutions and personalities as being free and fair. Although these successive elections have been recognised as free and fair by both local and international election observers, election related violence is not entirely absent. There have been eyewitness accounts and several reports of election violence in Ghana in each of these elections (Ghana Election Reports, 1992 – 2012). Instances of these were reported by the immediate past chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan. He noted: “as a result of vandalism which occurred in certain constituencies after the December 7, 2004, balloting, the results in those constituencies were slow in arriving at the head office for collation” (Elections Report, 2004: 50).
