THE WHITE House’s choice of Ghana as President Barack Obama’s only port of call in sub-Saharan Africa this weekend has triggered widespread envy.
The visit, his first to Africa since becoming president, is also being interpreted as a snub to those governments with particularly poor records of corruption, administration and tainted elections.
“It makes sense that Obama would want to go to Ghana. Because Ghana is everything we are not,” wrote journalist Ayisha Osori in the Nigerian daily This Day. “Ghana is a shiny example of a West African country which has turned itself around and is doing well.”
“It’s a little bit of recognition of Ghana’s progress in democratic growth, peaceful electoral turnover, especially in a region otherwise full of reversals and disappointments,” said E Gyimah-Boadi, head of the Accra-based Centre for Democratic Development.
Politically stable, Ghana stands out in a chaotic neighbourhood. Nigeria, the regional oil power, has been hit by frequent militant attacks, pipeline explosions and kidnappings. Kenya, the homeland of Obama’s late father, was the site of a disputed 2007 presidential election that resulted in more than 1,000 deaths.
Ghana, with a population of 23.8 million and an average 5 per cent annual growth since 2001, has become a regional leader since its transition from military rule to a multiparty democracy in the early 1990s.
“People are coming to understand what democracy is,” said Emmanuel Akli, editor of the Chronicle newspaper. “We are in a volatile region, and it’s only Ghana that is really practising democracy.” – (LA Times-Washington Post service)