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Most often than not, some people argue that even in the most advanced democracies and industrialised countries such as USA and United Kingdom have a record of low rates of participation in local elections and so if turnout in local elections in Ghana is low what is the big deal about that? However, sight should not be lost on the fact that these countries’ democracies are well matured and they can also boast of well structured state institutions with a very good track record of performance. On the flip side, Ghana has a very young and fragile democracy which is just two decades old. Besides that, Ghana is situated within a continent where electoral disputes and political conflicts have been the conspicuous causes of most of the violent conflicts that had been witnessed in the African continent over the past two decades. Therefore, the voter apathy which characterises the District Assembly elections should be a matter of concern to all well meaning Ghanaians as well as all well wishers of Ghana’s democratic local governance dispensation which was supposed to be the bedrock of the overall national politics. While voter turnouts of the District Assembly elections have been markedly poor across all of the districts in Ghana, the participation rates in some of the districts are even lower. There are districts where only a few percentage of the electorate turn out, whereas in other districts most electorate participate. These differences do not seem to be purely coincidental. Figure 1 below shows the national average voter turnouts of District Assembly elections in Ghana since its inception in 1988/89 to 2006 when the last election was held in percentage terms.
 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1.0 INTRODUCTION 1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY Ghana, formerly known as Gold Coast, is a country situated in West Africa and was the first place in sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans arrived to trade - first in gold and later in slaves. It was also the first black African nation south of the Sahara to achieve independence from a colonial power, Britain on 6th March, 1957. Ghana is a rectangular-shaped country bordered to the north by Burkina Faso, the east by Togo, the south by the Atlantic Ocean and the west by Côte d’Ivoire covering a land mass of 238,533 sq km (92,098 sq miles). Its current estimated population is 23.9 million (UN, 2008). The current 4th Republican Constitutional multi-party democracy was started in 1992 and since that time Ghana has been able to conduct five successful national elections. In African political and administrative history, decentralisation is not new. From the colonial period until the third quarter of the 20th century, decentralizations prevailed in the form of deconcentration almost without exemption. |
