Democracy Has Failed To Meet Aspirations Of Many Ghanaians — Speaker | Parliament

The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has decried the state of the country’s democracy for failing to meet the aspirations of many Ghanaians.

Delivering the 2024 University of Ghana (UG) Alumni Lecture, last Thursday evening, Mr Bagbin said even though the country had enjoyed more than 30 years of political stability, democracy had not delivered the necessary dividends to drastically improve the lives of people.

“The question on many of our citizens’ minds is ‘has democracy really delivered’?  That is a very legitimate question,” he said.

The Speaker partly attributed the problem to the 1992 Constitution, the basis of the country’s democracy, which, he said, was mainly enacted to achieve political stability.

“I venture to submit that the focus of the final brains behind the Constitution was to achieve political stability. If my guess is right, I must admit we have succeeded in doing just that at the expense of development. We now have to move on to focus on development,” he added. 

No faith 

Mr Bagbin stressed that most Africans, including Ghanaians, had lost faith in democracy, with many people seeing it as a sham that served the needs of a few, leaving others to fend for themselves.

Quoting the October 2023 edition of the Economist magazine, he said: “Africans are frustrated about the sham that passes for ‘democracy’ in most countries.  They are also fed up with the flimsy states that provide neither security nor prosperity.”

Further, relying on the Afrobarometer report, he said such sentiments had led to lack of confidence in democracy, with an “increasing attraction to military rule and intervention”.

He warned that the country ought to take remedial steps to transform its democracy in order to counter such sentiments.

“While our country remains an island in a turbulent region, it is not immune to the conditions that have given rise to the growing declining faith in democracy among our people,” Mr Bagbin pointed out.