Fruit for Dessert: Ghana Fun Facts

As I wait for the ball to get rolling on my project at work, I thought I would take the opportunity to learn a bit more about Perez Hilton i mean the Ghanian Political Structure. Hopefully this would better help me understand the issues that Abantu for Development is trying to tackle. Setting on this task, I paid a visit to my reliable and wise old friend Mrs. Wikipedia (that’s right, I made wikipedia female... take THAT patriarchy... job done.).

I will admit it is very tempting to copy and paste the whole page as political systems are sometimes difficult for me to grasp. In fact, I soon had to consult Dame Wikipedia once more to remember how the Canadian government is structured.

After a few seconds of reading, I found myself humming the tune to “I’m just a bill, sitting on capital hill” from the School House Rock Saturday Morning Cartoon. Here’s a link to the video if you don’t remember:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEJL2Uuv-oQ

Rather than blatantly plagiarizing from wikipedia and other internet sources, I will do so somewhat secretly and write a few facts about Ghanian politics. AND I SHALL CALL THEM “FUN FACTS” so as to make it more exciting. Kind of like parents who give their children fruit for dessert rather than chocolate cake (“Mmmm, Bobby, aren’t these dried apricots to DIE FOR?? Just like your own Happy Birthday cake!”).

GHANA FUN FACTS will be a reoccurring blog entry and will be posted intermittently... otherwise this will take much too long.

GHANA FUN FACTS!!! Edition #1

Ghana Fun Fact #1: In 1957 Ghana (then called the Gold Coast) achieves independence from UK. The first Sub-Saharan nation to do so!

Ghana Fun Fact #2: Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana’s first President. He was with the then new Convention People’s Party. To this day, many Ghanians seem to speak very highly of Kwame Nkrumah. It seemed he introduced great democracy into the country and managed to lessen the shock of transitioning out of colonial rule. He worked very well with interest groups - labour, youth, women etc. He set a strong precedent for future leaders of the country.

Ghana Fun Fact #3: Ghana is a constitutional democracy with multi-party system. Though two major parties seem to dominate: the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party. I haven’t quite learned the major differences yet between the two parties. And based on my conversation with Ghanians, I can tell there is no overwhelming majority on which party is preferred. I

Ghana Fun Fact #4: The current president is Professor John Atta Mills, member of the NDC. He was sworn in as president in 2008 and will be keeping this title until 2012. Campaigning for the next election has already begun!

I’m still trying to understand whether people vote for the president directly or elect a member from their constituency... Belinda tells me you do both. Mystery solved.