This article was originally published by the Annual Review of Political Science.
GROWING UP IN A NEW NATION
I was just old enough in 1957 to raise the flag of the newly independent Ghana. It was the first in sub-Saharan Africa. As symbolized by the black star in the middle of the nation’s flag, Ghana was the hope of the continent. I have had the privilege of dedicating my life to observing, documenting, and influencing some of the most critical political transitions in Ghana and the African continent.
Mine is a story of widening horizons and expanding visions of what was possible for me, as well as for democracy in my country and across my continent, and of good fortune and good people coming my way at many turns. It is also an account of how I have sought to manifest in my life and career lessons learned from home about the importance of public service and advocacy, and how I have tried to pass on to my students, junior colleagues, and young friends the benefits of the mentoring and capacity building I received from my elders.
My story begins on October 2, 1953, in Abirem, a cocoa farming village in Ghana’s southern forest belt. My parents were of humble means, but we never went hungry; they were barely educated, but they valued education. Even under bare-bones circumstances—no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing—my parents dreamed for their children, all 13 of us, and were eager for us to take full advantage of the opportunities that independence promised. At about 5 years of age, I was enrolled in the local Anglican primary school.When the time came for middle school, the nearest one was seven miles away, an intimidating trek for any preteen, especially in my case, afflicted as I was with a polio infection in my infancy that left me with severely limited phys ical mobility. Consequently, my parents moved to New Abirem, a new village with a new middle school. Their commitment to my education must have driven my enthusiasm for schoolwork.
My education on the human condition began then as well. As church and community elders, my parents counseled people and settled the disputes in our home. And I, mostly at home given my limited physical mobility, was all ears from the next room, of course. Looking back, home is also where I picked up some of my public service and advocacy spirit. Despite their modest material circumstances, my parents made time and found the means to help others. My mother, who had no education, lobbied parents to take their children to school. When you complained about money, she simply told you to eat less meat.
Frequent visits to Accra, the capital city, exposed me to professional and lifestyle possibilities beyond my small village. There, my elder sister (who had some postsecondary education), her husband (who obtained a master’s degree from the University of Ghana and was a secondary school headmaster at the time), my maternal uncle (a UK-trained lawyer and judge), and his wife served as my early role models. Exposure to this fancy uncle likely motivated me to switch my childhood career dream from pastor to lawyer.
School vacations in my maternal hometown, Akyem Oda, a vibrant town about 50 miles from New Abirem, sparked my political education. There, my step-grandfather gave me tours of local institutions of governance. After sitting in the gallery of the magistrate court, where battles between lawyers were spectator sport for him, he would rush home and animatedly recount the moves, feints, and shifts in the arguments.
The nation-level conflict between the incumbent Kwame Nkrumah–led Convention People’s Party and the opposing United Party created rivalries among families and friends. When the banner headline of the national newspaper announced the conviction and jailing of our local district commissioner (governor), my step-grandfather, who loathed the man, rushed out of the bedroom, where he had been reading, to the door of the compound’s toilet, turned around, and declared exactly how he planned to use the front page. Akyem Oda also happened to be the main arena for a bitter dispute over traditional authority. I became highly keen about politics, and the role of women in that chieftaincy dispute would become the subject of my undergraduate long essay.
SECONDARY SCHOOL: POLITICAL PUBERTY
By the time I entered Oda Secondary School in 1967, Ghana had entered a new phase. The army overthrew Nkrumah’s elected but increasingly despotic government in 1966, replacing it with the military- and police-led National Liberation Council. In class, I gravitated toward the humanities, much to the credit of my teachers, especially Osei-Owusu, who made me see economics as a foundational social science discipline, which has since underpinned my understanding of political economy and politics.
However, my best education in public affairs came through my peers. My schoolmates and I stayed up late debating the merits and demerits of the military coup. We split hairs over which party and candidate deserved victory in the general elections scheduled for 1969: the anti-Nkrumah opposition group, now reincarnated as the Progress Party, and its Oxford-trained flagbearer, Professor Kofi Busia, or the more charismatic Nkrumah minister turned liberal, Komla Gbedemah, and his National Alliance of Liberals. Busia would win, but only for the military to return and topple him 30 months later. I decried this coup vehemently: It robbed me of the dramatic and entrancing debates in Parliament.
Ghana was also finding its place in the world, and international events drew our attention. We argued animatedly over Muhammad Ali’s boxing matches with Joe Frazier, which we read as an underdog’s fight against the US establishment. A war between the state and secessionist Biafra in nearby Nigeria also got us talking. Along the way, I became an avid reader of newspapers and magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and Ghana’s Legon Observer. Flying through an eclectic range of reading material and becoming a regular listener of radio news made me better informed than most of my peers, giving me an edge in our debates.
I felt increasingly confident in my opinions, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 did much to instill in me skepticism about populist appeals. So, I was untroubled to find myself out numbered as I raged against uncritical adulation of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founding president, and later against the unilateral repudiation of Ghana’s external debts by the country’s second military junta, the National Redemption Council (NRC). I tended to side with the perceived underdog in most conflicts (e.g., Ali over Frazier, junior students at school being treated unfairly by my bullying peers). I was unafraid of authority and could advocate for fellow students. This was likely why I was one of two students tasked to represent the student body in negotiations over the quality of school meals. My schoolmates nicknamed me Dr. Agama, after the outspoken leader of the opposition in Parliament. This, together with my exploits as leader of our school’s debate team, which won several interschool competitions, bolstered my confidence that a sterling legal career lay ahead of me.
THE TURBULENT 1970s AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GHANA
I arrived at the University of Ghana, Legon, in 1974. I was devastated when I failed to make the grade for admission into the law program. Legon offered me modern languages instead. Af ter being convinced by relatives not to take the radical step of dropping out in disappointment and enduring a humiliating start in a Russian language class, good luck came my way. I managed to switch to political science, philosophy, and ancient history. I harbored hope that they would prepare me for future law studies. But, alas, I found my freshman year political science courses so invigorating that I was cured of my obsession with studying law. I had found my intellectual calling.
Legon’s humanities and social science program was a wonderfully rich intellectual arena for the times. The campus offered lectures, symposia, and colloquia that complemented what we learned on our own. Our lecturers were roughly divided between socialists, Marxists, and leftists on the one hand and capitalists, liberals, conservatives, and right-wingers on the other. They jousted constantly over a variety of issues: the true causes of African economic underdevelopment and the pathways for overcoming it, liberal democracy versus developmental dictatorship as the ideal political system for achieving development, the role of traditional African values versus Western values in national development, internal versus external factors as the main drivers of the spate of military coups in Africa, and the like. Marxist scholars such as Drs. Eboe Hutchful and Emmanuel Hansen delivered lectures on colonialism and Africa’s underdevelopment and on the political and philosophical ideas of Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and Julius Nyerere. Drs. Joe Peasah and Yaw Saffu pointed us toward endogenous factors as key explanations for African nations’ lackluster development and the growing incidence of military coups.
Professor Kweku Folson, head of the Political Science Department, became a key mentor. My prestigious role as his research assistant entailed reading and summarizing newly published new left books and articles. Under his sway, I grew closer to Popper’s (1945) open society philosophies than to the au courant Marxist–Leninist theories. It was from him that I learned how to use theoretically grounded and logical arguments to challenge passing and sometimes shallow intellectual fads—and to do so without rancor or bitterness. Against my mates’ populist, conspiracy-driven arguments about how the West underdeveloped Africa, I typically pushed liberal and empiricist lines. I honed these skills as an active participant in mock debates in my residential hall and other informal public squares.
STILLBORN SALVATION: HOW I CAME TO HATE MILITARY RULE
When Colonel—soon-to-be self-appointed General—Acheampong announced another coup in 1972, university students were strong supporters. To them, we had been saved from the elitist, kleptocratic, neocolonialist government. Here came the soldiers with military discipline and populist initiatives, including Operation Feed Yourself, aimed at boosting food self-sufficiency, and cancellation of the deposed civilian government’s much hated loan scheme for university students. I hardly shared these sentiments. Looking back, it also offended my antiauthoritarian instincts and must have triggered in me a deep and abiding resentment for the usurpation of the people’s will, a resentment that would drive my future career in prodemocracy advocacy.
Relations began to sour in the mid-1970s. Under Acheampong’s rule, we experienced military and police abuse of the human rights of ordinary citizens, high-handed treatment of government critics, economic mismanagement, and rampant corruption. Our student-led street demonstrations against these abuses were often met with brutal crackdowns and campus closures. When the military regime tried to impose Union Government (UNIGOV)—a form of no-party government in which the military, police, and civilian population would share power equally—we joined the country’s mainstream politicians to advocate openly for a return to multiparty democratic rule.
Although my polio-related mobility impairment prevented me from participating physically in the antigovernment demonstrations, I played my part in the struggle as an enthusiastic producer and disseminator of antigovernment samizdat. I also got a personal taste of the embattled military government’s willingness to use violence to achieve its goals. I was a monitor for the opposition NO campaign in the March 1978 UNIGOV referendum when gun-toting soldiers drove up to the polling station, fired warning shots, and carried the ballot boxes away. Around the same time, I was at an opposition symposium when a group of thugs emerged from the audience to disrupt the proceedings by throwing whatever they could find at the speakers and overturning tables and chairs. Such encounters seeded a deep loathing for military and authoritarian rule that would stay with me.
Our calls would be answered in an unexpected way. We rejoiced when, in July 1978, a palace coup removed General Acheampong from office. The reconstituted junta leadership lifted the ban on party politics, put in motion the process to write a new constitution, and set a date for multiparty elections. However, another coup took place before those elections could be held.
GRADUATE SCHOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS: EXPANDING HORIZONS
I left Ghana in March 1979 with a scholarship to pursue doctoral studies at the University of California, Davis (UCD). Professor Donald Rothchild is the reason I went there. I had developed a close friendship with Donald (and his wife) when he was a visiting professor at Legon. I had taken his classes and served as an assistant on his Ghanaian political economy and public policy research. Naturally, he became my main doctoral dissertation adviser and, eventually, my research and authorial collaborator (Gyimah-Boadi & Rothchild 1982, 1990; Rothchild & Gyimah-Boadi 1981, 1986, 1989). I learned a lot from him, especially the discipline of conducting meticulous research, making scholarly arguments that acknowledge different viewpoints, and doing as many drafts as necessary to turn out a decent final product.
Professor Rothchild was UCD’s powerhouse Africanist political scientist, and I took all his African and non-African courses. The courses of professors Joyce Kallgren (on China, Japan, and Mexico) and Alex Groth (on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe) vastly expanded the universe of my comparative politics knowledge well beyond Africa, Western Europe, and the United States. I owe much of what I know about public policy analysis and development management to Professors George Downs and Richard Gable, respectively. The agricultural sciences were the main focus of UCD’s first-rate scholarship. I took advantage of this by enrolling in courses in international agricultural development and studying the interlinkages between agronomical and social science factors in developing nations’ agricultural development. I wrote a doctoral dissertation called “The State and Agricultural Development: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policy in Ghana” (Gyimah-Boadi 1986).
From my perch in California, I continued to follow the political developments in Ghana keenly, mainly through West Africa magazine and the BBC’s Focus on Africa radio show. I was pained by my inability to participate directly in the process of reinstalling democratic rule. I lamented in particular that I had just missed the heady political developments in the summer of 1979, when a group of junior military officers led by Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings (a.k.a. Junior Jesus) overthrew the junta that had overthrown the Acheampong junta that had overthrown the Busia government. (Yes, such were the days!)
Rawlings’s Armed Forces Redemption Council canceled the planned elections and embarked on a housecleaning exercise, which included the extralegal execution of three previous military leaders. Fortunately, the Rawlings junta quickly rescheduled elections and in September 1979 handed over power to the elected civilian government of Dr. Hilla Limann. Unfortunately, just 2 years later, Junior Jesus staged his second coming, overthrowing the Limann government and returning to power as a military ruler under the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). This began Ghana’s longest period under a military ruler. He remained head of state for 11 years as a military ruler, which were followed by 8 years as an elected president.
RETURN TO GHANA: THE REVOLUTIONARY DAYS
As a beneficiary of the state’s funding for my education, I always intended to return to the University of Ghana to teach. However, the Ghanaian economy was in dire straits by the time of my graduation from UCD. A repatriation package from the International Organization for Migration enabled me to return and take up an appointment in the Department of Political Science. Basic consumer goods and supplies—bread, toilet paper, fuel for cooking and transport, etc.—were in short supply. You got electricity for a few hours per day if you were lucky. Extreme political repression, capped by a dusk-to-dawn curfew, chilled social life.
My American then-girlfriend and eventual wife, Brooks Anne Robinson, cushioned me from the worst of 1980s Ghana. We met at UCD in 1983 through Professor Rothchild. In 1985, we made plans to go to Ghana together the next year. But those plans seemed doomed when she decided to accept an offer to join the US Foreign Service. Serendipitously, Accra was her first overseas assignment. Thus continued our relationship, with her arrival in Ghana a month after me in 1986, followed by marriage in 1988, on the eve of her transfer to Nigeria. Rothchild was one of our witnesses. Brooks’s material contribution to our life together saved me from needing to moonlight in odd nonacademic jobs to supplement a meager salary, as my colleagues had to do.
Sadly, Legon in 1986 was a pale shadow of the institution that had nurtured me a decade earlier. Many of its best scholars had left the country; foreign exchange shortages had led to an acute shortage of books and other reading materials; and scholars were virtually cut off from the mainstream of global knowledge production. In their place, propaganda literature, such as Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book and Kim Il Sung’s Juche Idea, was abundant. Nonetheless, I found teaching there deeply rewarding and enjoyable professionally, even as I had to mind my words and watch my back. I was happy to be able to update the syllabi and provide reading materials for the undergraduate and graduate courses I taught (comparative politics, political economy of African development, public administration, and public policy). The students thirsted for knowledge and seemed to enjoy the exposure to concepts and ideas new to them.
Additionally, some of postcolonial Africa’s momentous political and economic developments were unfolding in the country, so Ghana provided an ideal base for me to research and write about African politics. With the economy in a tailspin and its revolutionary policies a failure, the Rawlings–PNDC regime had largely discarded its radical populist policies and quasi-socialist programs: the selling of basic consumer goods through people’s shops, the taking over of management boards by workers, and the confiscating of private assets.
Despite spouting anti-imperialist slogans and expressing solidarity with the communist/ Eastern Bloc countries, the ostensibly left-wing junta executed a sharp U-turn in late 1983, implementing World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF)–backed neoliberal economic reform programs. These featured massive currency devaluation, public sector job retrenchment, and privatization of state-owned enterprises. The rhetoric of popular power and empowerment of the downtrodden gave way to a bitter reality of full-blown repression in which a culture of silence (Adu Boahen 1989, Gyimah-Boadi 1990) was created through multiple strategies: deployment of state security agencies and assorted government-backed vigilantes and enforcers against political opponents, extralegal detention, kangaroo courts, and rigid press censorship, among others.
During those challenging years, I devoted my research to systematically documenting the politics of the PNDC government. Very little had been written about the regime, its policies, and outcomes—aside from technocratic World Bank and IMF reports, episodic accounts in maga zines, damning appraisals by detractors (often disaffected comrades), and hagiographic accounts. With a grant from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, I convened a group of scholars at the University of Ghana to undertake a sober and balanced appraisal of the Rawlings–PNDC regime. Our findings were published in a volume I edited, Ghana Under PNDC Rule (Gyimah-Boadi 1993).
I was particularly interested in analyzing the political context that sustained the implementation of the PNDC’s highly controversial structural adjustment program. To facilitate my understanding of the politics of its implementation, I joined the National Redeployment Management Committee, the government body charged with supervising the programs to rehabilitate Ghanaians affected by the public sector job retrenchment. I wrote about this in a journal article and sev eral book chapters (Gyimah-Boadi 1990, 1995a,b; Gyimah-Boadi & Essuman-Johnson 1993; Gyimah-Boadi & Jeffries 2000).
Ghana’s 1980s neoliberal economic reform project attracted the attention of some of the world’s best political economy of development scholars working on Africa, including John Loxley (University of Manitoba), John Toye (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex), Jeffrey Herbst (Princeton University), and Tom Callaghy (University of Pennsylvania). Discussions with them broadened my perspectives on and deepened my understanding of the pol itics of African and Ghanaian neoliberal economic reforms. Through Callaghy, I gained exposure to leading economic reform technocrats of the 1980s from Kenya, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe and learned about their challenges.
WRITING ON AFRICA FROM AFRICA
In 1991, I relocated to Swaziland to join my wife on her third US Foreign Service posting. From the other side of the continent, I continued to document and analyze the autocratic Ghanaian government’s handling of the growing domestic and global pressure for political liberalization (Gyimah-Boadi 1993, 1994a,b, 1995b). By that time the PNDC had conceded to pressure from the domestic prodemocracy opposition as well as the World Bank/IMF and other Western creditors and begun to restore multiparty democratic rule in Ghana.
The move to Swaziland proved a boon to my scholarly career. I took a teaching position in the Department of Political and Administrative Studies at the University of Swaziland. A much lighter teaching load and ample supply of teaching material freed up my time to write and present papers at international conferences in Egypt, Ghana, Israel, Madagascar, Senegal, South Africa, the United States, and Zimbabwe, among others. The position also enabled me to write up the materials I had previously gathered on various civic associations in Ghana and their engagements with the Ghanaian state and society in the 1980s (Gyimah-Boadi 1994a). This sparked my interest in studying the links between civil society and African democratic development.
In Swaziland, my research began to focus sharply on the processes of dismantling authoritarian political structures and replacing them with democratic ones—processes that had been inspired and informed in Ghana and elsewhere on the African continent by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. I, of course, was more than thrilled to fan the flames of the zeitgeist from my vantage point as an academic and advocate. Next door in South Africa, the apartheid system was being dismantled. To the east, postwar Mozambique was opening up. It even looked like the Swazi monarchy might loosen its grip on the nation. It didn’t. It still hasn’t.
CONNECTING WITH THE WORLD OF THINK TANKS
My next relocation (in the tow of my wife and family) took me to Washington, DC, from 1994 to 1997. A 1-year faculty position at American University’s School of International Service and adjunct teaching jobs in the African studies programs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and Georgetown University exposed me to new currents in international affairs and the political economy of development, including the East Asian developmental state literature. Teaching undergraduate courses on African history, precolonial civilizations, and political thought vastly expanded the depth and breadth of my knowledge of my home continent.
Most consequential was exposure to the world of think tanks. A fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1994–1995) came with a garden-view office at the Smithsonian Castle and super smart research assistants. The research I did there deepened my understanding of the linkages between civil societies and Africa’s democratic transitions. My Journal of Democracy article “Civil Society in Africa” (Gyimah-Boadi 1996) is one of the main publications emanating from the fellowship. A US Institute of Peace senior fellowship gave me a perch at the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) International Forum for Democratic Studies(1996–1997). In addition to helping place my research on African democratization in the broader historical and global context, the fellowship at NED exposed me to a wide network of democratic development scholars and practitioners. (This is where I got the inspiration for my future Ghanaian and African democracy research and advocacy organizations.) NED also cemented an important personal and professional relationship with Professor Larry Diamond of Stanford University. He gave me the rare opportunity to meet, and in some cases work with, luminary scholars in the field of comparative democratization, such as Marc Plattner, Terry Lynn Karl, Thomas Carothers, Guillermo O’Donnell, and Philippe Schmitter. I also had the chance to collaborate with Nicolas van de Walle at the now defunct Overseas Development Council.
During this time, I began to have doubts about the wholesale applicability of the East Asian developmental state ideas to Africa’s economic renewal. I came to see differences in context as barriers. One major obstacle was, and still is, the postcolonial African state’s persistent political legitimacy deficit. This is inherent in the nascent state’s lack of organic roots in the societies and proto-nations upon which it was grafted during colonial rule; bureaucratic incapacity, arising from overextending the minimalist, control-oriented, colonial-era public service to a maximalist, development-oriented one after independence; overpoliticization of public administration; weak adherence to bureaucratic norms; etc. This is in addition to other hindrances related to governments’ improvidence, systematic abuse of citizens, and endemic corruption (abetted for more than 30 years by the Cold War–era superpowers). I elaborated at length on this, and made the case for democratic governance as an important complement to the multiethnic late-developing African nation’s economic and social development, in my University of Ghana professorial inaugural lecture in 2005 (Gyimah-Boadi 2010) and in my work with van de Walle (Gyimah-Boadi & van de Walle 1996).
BACK TO GHANA
I returned to Ghana in June 1997, thanks to my wife’s providential second posting to Accra as the US Embassy’s director of public affairs. I threw myself back into my old department at Legon with the rich experience gained from teaching a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses internationally, becoming a full professor in 2003.
Rawlings was still around, but as an elected president following the country’s return to democratic rule in 1993. In 1992, he swapped his military fatigues for civilian attire and rebranded his PNDC junta as a political party—the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The NDC contested and won the presidential and parliamentary polls. That made teaching at the university a little less politically risky this time. However, a big question still hung over the nation: Would Rawlings leave peacefully at the end of his second term in 2000?
NEW DIRECTIONS: LINKING SCHOLARSHIP AND ADVOCACY
While pursuing a teaching career in mid-1998, I shifted my career sharply toward more direct engagement with the Ghanaian and African democratization project. I founded the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana, or the Center) with Dr. Baffour Agyeman-Duah and William Yeboah. Agyeman-Duah, a political scientist who had studied at the University of Denver, shared my vision of building a professionally managed civil society organization whose democracy and governance advocacy would be grounded in research. He was my deputy for 7 years, until he left for a United Nations position in Liberia. His expertise in civil–military relations was just right for lifting Ghana from its postmilitary rule status quo into full-fledged civilian-led democracy. His flair for television and radio engagements helped boost CDD-Ghana’s profile in the public sphere in a very short period. Our third cofounder, Yeboah, was a high-level private-sector accounting and finance professional and a long-standing close personal friend. He was instrumental in establishing a robust finance and administration framework for the Center in his role as nonexecutive director and treasurer.
Serving as the Center’s executive director gave me enormous space to provide intellectual leadership. We designed our logo around the Akan adinkra symbol Kuronti ne Akwamu to reflect the Center’s liberal democracy ethos.3 We created flagship programs and publications, such as Democracy Watch, a quarterly newsletter that systematically tracks the progress of Ghana’s democratic development, highlights key areas of stagnation and retrogression, and suggests ways of overcoming them. (I was also the general editor of the Center’s other publications: Critical Perspectives, Conference Proceedings, and Occasional Papers.) For 15 years, I curated the annual Kronti ne Akwamu Lecture, a national platform for distinguished scholars and practitioners of democracy and inclusive development to share their insights with the wider Ghanaian public. Speakers have included Larry Diamond (who gave the inaugural lecture), Naomi Chazan (from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Between 1998 and 2014, the year I retired from Legon at age 60 (the statutory retirement age for Ghanaian public university employees), I juggled my work as a full-time lecturer with executive leadership of the Center. This meant waking up early and driving from my house to the university, to the Center, and finally back home in the late evening. The two positions were mutually supportive: My CDD-Ghana work benefited enormously from my Legon teaching. Both deepened my appreciation of the nation’s democracy-building prospects and challenges. At the same time, Legon gave me access to very bright undergraduate and graduate students who I could bring into the Center.
As CDD-Ghana established itself in the early 2000s, my profile as a scholar drew strong overseas academic political science and policy researchers to the Center. It gave our young researchers rare opportunities to learn at the feet of distinguished scholars such as Robert Bates (Harvard University), Richard Joseph (Northwestern University), Peter Lewis ( Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies), Lauren MacLean (Indiana University), Staffan Lindberg (University of Florida), Robin Luckham and Richard Crook (Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex), and Sam Hickey (University of Manchester).
INDEPENDENT NONSTATE RESEARCH AND ADVOCACY INSTITUTION BUILDING
Like most start-ups, CDD-Ghana began life modestly: The first year’s rent for office premises cost US$20,400, and basic office supplies (furniture, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery, etc.) were personal donations. (I used my family property in Accra as collateral for the highly usurious bridging loan, which we retired early thanks to a US$20,000 interest-free loan from my wife.)
The Center, however, enjoyed rapid growth, thanks to the quality of our work and our demonstrated commitment to accountability and corporate governance. We invested heavily in accounting and finance guidelines, which included appointing the global accounting and management firm KPMG as an external auditor right from the start. When I retired as executive director 20 years later, the staff had grown from 5 to 50 members (half of them with advanced degrees and/or professional credentials), the average annual budget was US$6 million, the Center owned its office premises, and other solid assets were worth more than US$5 million.
The Center also faced considerable political challenges in its early years. Few members of the Ghanaian political, economic, and bureaucratic establishment were willing to associate openly with the Center for fear of being blacklisted by the government or facing other reprisals. The Rawlings–NDC government found it difficult to live with an independent, outspoken, and internationally well-connected research and advocacy group. My fundraising success and longstanding association with the United States, especially my being the spouse of a US diplomat, fueled suspicions about our presumed links to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other Western intelligence agencies. In the mid-2000s, the NDC, then in opposition, boycotted CDD-Ghana, unfairly accusing us of structural bias after our survey indicated that the public was satisfied with the results of the latest national elections, which they had lost.
In time we overcame these challenges and gained respect even among our most ardent detractors and skeptics. As they have alternated between government and the opposition, the country’s two main political parties have appreciated the ideological and philosophical consistency of the Center’s commentary on national political issues. I think they have also recognized the professionalism, impartiality, and integrity with which we work. The ethnic, regional, and political diversity of our staff and governing board membership has also helped. Two of our founding board members took ministerial positions in New Patriotic Party (NPP) administrations, and one became a minister in the John Atta Mills–NDC government and the running mate of the party’s presidential candidate in the 2020 and 2024 elections.
The Center has grown to become Ghana’s go-to source for evidence-driven analysis as well as critical and independent opinion on topical public policy and public interest issues. Among peer organizations in Ghana, the Center is considered the leader in civil society advocacy, representation, and voice. It is also among the first of a new generation of civil society organizations in Ghana, following the end of military rule in 1992, to successfully manage a transition from its founding leadership. CDD-Ghana has extended its civic society organization leadership and advocacy footprint and influence beyond Ghana to the West Africa subregion through initiatives such as the West Africa Election Observers Network and the West Africa Democracy Solidarity Network.
I am especially proud that CDD-Ghana has established a solid tradition of using its political and technocratic clout to advocate for the rights of the socially and economically marginalized. It played a leading role in getting Ghana’s Persons with Disability Act (Act 715) passed in 2006. It has led research and advocacy for the adoption of noncustodial sentencing options in Ghanaian criminal justice administration. This record continues under the Center’s new leadership, which is leading the pushback against the Ghanaian Parliament’s moves to criminalize homosexuality. The Center has a well-earned reputation for being able and willing to speak truth to power through impactful critical media commentary, press releases, and other publications.
High-quality research has been key to CDD-Ghana’s success: It has allowed us entry into national-level conversations on politically sensitive issues such as election integrity, official corruption, abuse of power, and social exclusion. Its public opinion and diagnostic research findings were key drivers of civil society anticorruption initiatives in Ghana, notably the development of the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan in 2014. However, I learned an important lesson along the way. As a technocratic nongovernmental organization, the long-term success and sustenance of our advocacy initiatives have tended to depend on linkage with civic bodies that are more organic and have large memberships, such as trade unions, teachers and nurses associations, and faith-based groups.
ON THE FRONT LINES OF DEMOCRACY BUILDING IN GHANA
Ghana’s latest experiment with democratic rule—its Fourth Republic—was only 5 years old when CDD-Ghana was founded. The political space then was fairly open, but vestiges of authoritarian rule persisted. For instance, the democratically elected government was intimidating judges, and elements of the military-security establishment were resisting subordination to civilian authority. We invested in programs to democratize civil–military relations. This included providing forums for ex-military rulers from the West Africa subregion to share personal experiences with their Ghanaian counterparts on postretirement public service options.
The political atmosphere was heavy with anxiety as Ghana approached its 2000 elections; President Rawlings was constitutionally barred from contesting, and the victory of his handpicked successor was not guaranteed. Against this backdrop, CDD-Ghana deemed it crucial to focus its work on supporting the country’s nascent democracy to advance toward consolidation. In 2000, the Center established the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) to promote election integrity. The Coalition has since played a strong watchdog role in all national and local government polls and by-elections. Through CODEO, CDD-Ghana has pioneered tools for electoral accountability in Ghana—and beyond—including using parallel voter tabulation and advocating for greater transparency at every stage of the polling process. The Center has also helped establish and shape similar coalitions in other African countries, including Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Liberia.
The victory of the presidential candidate of the opposition NPP, John Kufuor, in the 2000 polls and his assumption of office in January 2001 gave Ghana its first experience of electoral turnover. The new Kufuor–NPP government announced plans to establish a South African–style truth commission. I saw the initiative as essential, but I was deeply concerned about the possibility of it becoming an instrument for witch-hunting and revenge. After all, many members of the new administration and party, including the president himself, had been victims of Rawlings’s extralegal detention and/or asset confiscation; some had even been exiled. In this respect, the most consequential contribution I made to Ghana’s democratic consolidation was to formulate and operationalize a suite of interventions to ensure that the Kufour government’s national reconciliation program, which was to be implemented by the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC), was just, equitable, and nonretributive.
Over the next 5 years, the Center embarked on a comprehensive program of activities to ensure that the national reconciliation process was transparent and inclusive. We started with the formation, in March 2001, of a broad-based Civil Society Coalition on National Reconciliation, with CDD-Ghana as its secretariat. I recruited the coalition’s two dozen members—leaders of apex secular and religious bodies and eminent citizens.4 Our nationwide public opinion survey helped gauge levels of citizen support, apprehension, and expectations for the national reconciliation program. We mobilized top-notch international expertise on transitional justice, human rights, and postregime accountability. We invited experts such as Dr. Alex Boraine, former deputy chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Professor Douglass Cassel, former legal counsel of the Truth Commission for El Salvador, to contribute to the development of Ghana’s legislative framework for the national reconciliation program. The experts worked closely with Ghanaian lawmakers to draft a more inclusive National Reconciliation Commission Act in 2002 (Act 611), which mandated that the NRC hearings cover abuses under all governments, military and civilian, from the year of Ghana’s independence, 1957, to the start of the Fourth Republic, 1993, instead of focusing narrowly on the Rawlings era.
Following the NRC’s public hearings and submission of its final report, CDD-Ghana conducted nationwide public education on the report and its recommendations. We produced and disseminated popular, reader-friendly versions of the report (in English and local languages). We also undertook another nationwide opinion survey to evaluate the public’s satisfaction with the outcome of the NRC process as well as future expectations.
Additionally, we advocated publicly for the implementation of the NRC’s recommendations, particularly those relating to human rights, the rule of law, and security sector reform. We strongly advocated for the incorporation of transitional justice principles in security sector training, university curricula, and research programs. We also monitored the disbursement of token monetary reparations the NRC ordered the state to pay in acknowledgment of victims of abuse.
CDD-Ghana provided an ideal institutional base for my role in cofounding and incubating two of Ghana’s premier anticorruption civil society organizations: the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), which is the national chapter of Transparency International, and the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC). The former is dedicated to mobilizing the power of ordinary citizens and citizen groups to fight corruption, while the latter brings together relevant state agencies and independent nonstate organizations to combat corruption. I led GII’s and GACC’s registration as legal corporate entities, assembled their respective governing council members, and served on those councils for more than 10 years.
PAYING IT FORWARD
The Center gave me opportunities to pass on some of the fruits of mentorship, professional guidance, and collegiality I have enjoyed from others throughout my career. It has enabled me to support Africanist scholars from all over the world conducting research in Ghana. It also gave me the privilege of supporting the intellectual and professional development of more than a dozen young research and program staff. One of them is Dr. Joseph Asunka, who began as a CDD-Ghana staff member, went on to doctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and today is CEO of Afrobarometer. Others, like Drs. Edem Selormey and Kojo Asante, are now occupying senior-level positions at the Center after pursuing doctoral studies in the social sciences abroad. I must also put it on record that some of my mentees have become close professional collaborators, guides to nearly all things modern and technological, and close personal friends.
Beyond my institutional roles, I have enjoyed many opportunities to influence the discourse on African democratization—its twists and turns, prospects, and challenges. This has been achieved through paid consultancies, commissioned reports, service on democratic governance-related international boards, publications in popular and scholarly journals (see, for instance, Gyimah-Boadi 2021, 2022, 2023; Gyimah-Boadi et al. 2021), and speaking roles at international forums. One highlight was helping the African Development Bank create a framework to incorporate political governance criteria and protocols into both its lending and development assistance programs. Another was helping to design democracy, accountable governance, and human rights indicators as a member of the Technical Advisory Council of the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (2008–2020). Roles as an adviser to former German President Horst Köhler’s Partnership with Africa initiative and comoderator of the Partnership’s high-level dialogues on African development (2006–2008) enabled me to highlight the importance of liberal democratic values in African development prospects.
GIVING VOICE TO ORDINARY AFRICANS
In 1998, on the sidelines of a conference on African democratization, Afrobarometer was born. It is the product of my chance meeting with two American Africanist political scientists: Mike Bratton, then a professor at Michigan State University, and Bob Mattes, then affiliated with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. We found ourselves lamenting the lacunae in knowledge about the values and preferences of the mass of people living in Africa and the tendency for elites and pundits to substitute their views for those of citizens. We resolved to tackle this challenge by piloting public opinion surveys in selected African countries. I have experienced some of the highest highs of my professional career as part of this 25-year journey of creating this essential resource for African scholarship, policy making, and democratic development.
Our first point of pride came at the dawn of the new millennium, with the successful completion of the first round of Afrobarometer surveys in 12 African countries and finalization of the resulting data set. We achieved implicit validation of our concept that ordinary Africans could be polled scientifically like citizens in any other region, proving wrong the skeptical reviewers of our proposal for a National Science Foundation grant.
Several developments between 2003 and 2005 brought us closer to our principal goal of helping give voice to ordinary Africans. They include Afrobarometer winning the American Political Science Association’s award for best data set in comparative politics in 2003; the appearance of Afrobarometer findings in The Economist magazine on April 1, 2004 (albeit under the cantankerous headline “confused democrats”) (The Economist 2004); the publication of the Bratton et al. (2005) book (which drew liberally from Afrobarometer’s data set and underscored what public opinion can teach us about political and market reforms in Africa);6 and, above all, the successful completion in 2005 of the third round of Afrobarometer surveys (in 16 countries), which brought us to the three-data-point threshold and made our data usable for trend analysis.
Afrobarometer was originally formed as a partnership between three independent institutions—Michigan State University, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, and CDD-Ghana. While a network of national partners collected the data and disseminated findings in surveyed countries, Bratton initially served as executive director, and Michigan State University was the project management unit. However, Africanizing Afrobarometer’s leadership and management was a key goal from the start. So, in 2008, when I stepped into the role of executive director, key management functions moved to Accra. With this, I began to feel like a part of the process of decolonizing African studies. From a purely personal vantage point, this was Afrobarometer’s next big milestone.
TO THE EDGE AND BACK
Over the next 8 years, Afrobarometer continued to expand—to 20 countries in Round 4 (2008–2010), and then 35 countries in Round 5 (2011–2013)—and gain credibility, visibility, and impact. In 2016, we were confidently preparing for Round 7 surveys when we suddenly ran into a severe financial storm. A key funder, the Canadian government, had dropped out of the consortium of Afrobarometer donors in 2012, but we had strong assurances for funding from our other donors. So, we were unpleasantly surprised in mid-2016 when funding from two of them—the Department for International Development in the United Kingdom and the US Agency for International Development—became highly uncertain. Moreover, support from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, another large donor, was contingent on our ability to cover a minimum of 33 countries, a target at risk given the loss of major funders. Our fundraising outreach to Silicon Valley foundations and European bilaterals and multilaterals had not yielded positive results. We were compelled to inform network members about the acute funding crisis, make plans to scale down Afrobarometer’s coverage from 36 to between 15 and 22 countries, reduce sample sizes, retrench staff, and freeze salaries.
After weeks of sleepless nights, it was a huge relief when Afrobarometer’s friends came in with offers of generous financial, in-kind, and symbolic support to help us overcome the threat. The Swedish International Development Agency committed to an increased funding level for the next 5-year period to encourage other funders to come on board. The US Agency for International Development and the US State Department cobbled together significant intra-agency funding for the Round 7 surveys and related activities. Strong advocacy by old and new friends of Afrobarometer was a crucial factor in this renewal of support. For example, a former US assistant secretary of state for Africa wrote a guest column on why African policy making needed Afrobarometer. He subsequently organized his fellow living ex-holders of that office to write a letter making a strong case for long-term US government agency support. Professor Larry Diamond at Stanford University wrote powerful letters introducing me and Afrobarometer to more than a dozen Silicon Valley philanthropic foundations. Dr. Mo Ibrahim used his powerful voice to canvass support for Afrobarometer funding on global platforms. A battalion of prominent American and European Africanist scholars, researchers, and Africa-related policy actors embarked on letter-writing campaigns to spread the news about Afrobarometer’s funding crisis and the need to save it. [University of Birmingham’s Nic Cheeseman (2016), for instance, wrote an opinion piece in Democracy in Africa titled “Save the Afrobarometer: Why African Opinion Polls Are So Important.”]
All of these efforts led to the emergence of new friends. The Hewlett Foundation’s US$1 million contribution was particularly dramatic, as was a US$200,000 unsolicited donation from a source that requested anonymity. The National Endowment for Democracy offered US$100,000 in bridge funding. This massive show of support represented a real vote of confidence and was a reflection of the value that Africa-related policy actors and researchers placed on Afrobarometer’s work.
TOWARD SUSTAINABILITY
While painful, Afrobarometer’s 2016 financial crisis generated new opportunities. In addition to driving a significant expansion in our pool of funders, it helped our transformation from a loose network of partners to a technically and financially viable institution. New grants, especially one from the Open Society Foundations, supported Afrobarometer’s organizational development, institutional strengthening, and professionalized fundraising. In 2019, 20 years after its founding, Afrobarometer was incorporated as an independent legal corporate entity based in Accra. I took on a new position as CEO under the direction of a new Board of Directors. We also formed an International Advisory Council to provide strategic guidance to the network and facilitate linkages to high-level policy actors and prospective funders. The council has been composed of distinguished Africans and Africanists such as the former president of Liberia and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström, and author and BBC talk show host Zeinab Badawi. Johnnie Carson, the former US secretary of state for Africa, is its chair. Afrobarometer’s founding leadership also transitioned to a younger generation of professional managers and technical teams.
By the time I completed my tenure as its chief executive in 2021, Afrobarometer boasted a full-time staff of more than 40 people in five African countries and the United States and an annual budget of more than US$4 million donated by nearly 20 bilateral and multilateral agencies and philanthropic foundations. We sailed through the COVID-19 pandemic and global financial crisis to achieve key goals: completing Round 8 surveys, covering 34 countries; expanding our pool of funders; and significantly raising overall funding levels. Afrobarometer’s findings now represent the views of more than 75% of the African population. Thanks to a hugely expanded communication capacity, our survey findings are reaching Africa-related scholars and policy actors throughout the world, thereby delivering on our explicitly democratic goal of giving voice to the people in public policy and decisions that impact their lives. We continue the important work of building African capacity to undertake surveys, analyze the data, and disseminate the findings widely to Africa-focused policy actors at the national, continental, and global levels.
Afrobarometer’s impressive accomplishments since its leadership transition—such as completing Round 9 surveys (2021–2023) in an unprecedented 39 countries—have also confirmed term-limited leadership as crucial to governance. Importantly, the successful transition shows that African institutions can survive, as long as the older generation does not hoard leadership.
Looking back at Afrobarometer’s successes during my tenure as its executive head for more than a decade and as Board chair since then, I can only laugh at the insecurity I secretly harbored at the time I took over from Professor Bratton. I was afraid of ending up like the long list of Africans who had run their countries into the ground after taking over from white colonial overlords. When David Pilling (2021) of the Financial Times described me as “[t]he man who helped make ordinary Africans’ voices heard,” I had the immodest elation of feeling more Seretse Khama than Robert Mugabe!
AFROBAROMETER AND AFRICAN DEMOCRACY
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War have significantly shaped my world and career over the past 35 years. The change embodied by these events ushered in Africa’s third-wave democratization processes that have provided a focus for my research and writing since the early 1990s. It created a political environment for research, analysis, and publications on African politics without fear of government reprisals or self-censorship. It also opened the way for me to confound and operate democracy and accountable governance nongovernmental think tanks and advocacy organizations.
Personal memories illustrate the change: In 1988, as I took my bath before presenting a public lecture at the University of Ghana on the politics of economic reform in Ghana under Rawlings’s military government, I felt it necessary to have my teaching assistant, Kwasi Ofori, stand behind my bathroom window to watch out for potential assailants. It may have been unnecessary paranoia on my part, but a few days after, a national security officer approached the university’s vice chancellor to demand a copy of my lecture. A decade later, the political environment was sufficiently liberalized for the founding of CDD-Ghana, though I was still followed sporadically by government spies. By 2016, Ghana was so free that CDD-Ghana could publish preelection poll findings indicating that the incumbent president and his party were likely to lose the impending election. And I could take showers without sentinels!
The Afrobarometer story, too, speaks to the kind of opportunities for political governance work in Africa that have opened up since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Our survey instrument includes questions on politically sensitive topics (such as government performance, official corruption, and election integrity). Our first round of surveys could cover only 12 countries, reflecting the closed political environment prevailing at the time. Africa is now sufficiently open to allow Afrobarometer to regularly conduct surveys and disseminate its findings in more than three dozen countries.
In fact, the surveys enjoy the cooperation and buy-in of most African governments, which grant access to national population census frames (from which our samples are drawn) and enumeration area maps (which guide the selection of households for the interviews). In most countries, our national partner must secure a government permit to undertake fieldwork. This permit has been delayed in some cases but is routinely granted in most. It is even more remarkable that policy actors, including government leaders across the continent, now regularly use Afrobarometer survey findings.
It has been especially gratifying to be able to cite Afrobarometer data confirming resilient popular support for democratic governance norms and institutions across the continent. This is a powerful way to counter commonplace assertions that, on account of their multiple material deprivations, ordinary Africans are indifferent to the form of government under which they live. Indeed, the strong popular aversion to “life presidency” plus support for two-term constitutional limits on presidential tenure expose tenure extension bids as contrary to the wishes of the average citizen, and therefore purely self-serving.
But the job is one of constant effort and vigilance. Africa’s democratization project has come under severe attack in recent years from forces within and without. External actors, notably China and Russia, are actively promoting nondemocratic alternative forms of government in Africa. Internally, elected governments and their allies are hijacking democratic institutions, processes, and dividends. Adventurous soldiers are seizing power for themselves. They are taking advantage of the West’s preoccupation with countering Chinese and Russian influence and its retreat from the promotion of democratic governance.
For now, I am fulfilled by the small role I have played in establishing CDD-Ghana and Afrobarometer. They and their cohort of post-Berlin Wall–enabled independent research and advocacy organizations, as well as the scores of mentees of mine who are undertaking human rights, rule of law, and accountable governance research and advocacy, have contributed significantly to Africa’s democratic transition and consolidation. They are also helping to stem the continent’s current tide of democratic backsliding and elite capture. My best hope is that they continue to thrive.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It has been more than five decades since I left my native village, but I have built my own along the way. My life and career have thrived and flourished largely because of the tremendous social capital endowed on me by many citizens of this village. Prominent members of this community of benefactors include my dearly departed parents and early role models Albert Gyimah and Afia Adoma as well as a long line of friends, teachers, mentors, and professional colleagues, only some of whom are mentioned in this essay. The input of several people has helped to substantially improve the quality of this article. They include my ever-supportive wife, Brooks Anne Robinson, who brought her expertise in public diplomacy to help me get the right message across; Anakwa Dwamena, currently a doctoral student in anthropology at Princeton, who added his journalistic touch to the article; Kobina Aidoo, a development communications expert, who helped highlight the impact of my endeavors in the context of Africa’s development; and Brian Howard, head of Afrobarometer’s publications, who took editorial pains to sharpen the piece.
I am forever grateful to all my villagers, mentioned here or not.