(C) OpenDemocracy
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Ghana president Akufo-Addo: from democratic darling to anti-protest overlord [1]
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Date: 2023-10
“You might as well kill us!” That, ‘ku me preko’ in Twi, was the chant heard across Ghana in May 1995, when a 17% increase in value-added tax sent 100,000 people onto the streets.
Protesters were led by Nana Akufo-Addo, who was at the time an opposition figure and is now the Ghanaian president. Their message was simple: the tax was a death sentence. In a major political victory for Akufo-Addo, the tax policy was reversed.
Akufo-Addo soon became seen as a custodian of free speech and the rule of law, a reputation he further burnished in the 2000s as attorney-general. In 2015, two years before being voted in as president, he was critical of police overreach by the government during protests for electoral reforms, saying: “Brute force by the police against unarmed citizens exercising their constitutional rights should be a thing of the past.” During his inauguration speech in 2017, Akufo-Addo urged Ghanaians “to be citizens, not spectators”.
Nearly three decades on from the 1995 protests, history is repeating itself. Ghana is facing an economic downturn and high taxes. Ghanaians are heeding Akufo-Addo’s call; they are being citizens, not spectators. Only now, it is him they are protesting.
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Where the president was once an ally, he is now squarely an opponent. Akufo-Addo, who came to political power through resisting authority and championing people’s rights to protest, is now accused of suppressing them, sometimes violently, leading activists to call his tenure a “disguised dictatorship”.
In October 2019, law students tried to march to Jubilee House, the president’s office, to demand reforms to legal education. They were met by police firing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons. Multiple arrests were made, and some protesters even sought refuge in the nearby Canadian consulate.
The following June, activists who gathered to oppose state violence and police brutality became victims of their own protests. Security forces dragged away the group’s leader and later fired at others who demanded his release.
The government has also used the courts to stifle protests. In August this year, an injunction filed by the police stopped opposition politicians from protesting the Bank of Ghana, which posted record losses of 60 billion Ghanaian cedis ($5.2bn) and has been accused of gross mismanagement.
Most recently, on 21 September, the birthday of the late independence hero Kwame Nkrumah, activists in Accra, the capital, were arrested and beaten by police. The protesters had mobilised under a non-partisan umbrella movement known as ‘Occupy Julorbi House’, a deliberate misspelling of Jubilee House.
The plan was to picket the country’s seat of authority for three days, but a police warning that the area was a security zone the day before the demonstration scared off some would-be protesters. Fifteen minutes in, when only 20 people had gathered, officers swooped in to make arrests. At least 49 protesters were eventually arrested as more people arrived.
“It was like mosquitoes descending on you and biting you as hard as possible,” said Amelia Amemate, one of the 49 arrested.
The protesters were taken to the Accra Regional Command, where they allege they were beaten. Amemate told openDemocracy she watched six plain-clothes officers beat up one protester while uniformed officers stood back and watched. She said she was then beaten with a cylindrical object that she didn’t recognise until bruises and swellings mapped her body – leaving her needing medical attention.
“They were not willing to take me to the hospital to leave a record, so the only thing they could get me was a block of ice,” Amemate said.
The detained protesters were also allegedly not allowed to contact lawyers. Amemate said an officer at a smaller police station in Accra, where she was transferred for holding, suggested this was due to an “order from above”. “[He said that] nobody should visit us. No family members and no lawyers. It felt like being kidnapped,” Amemate said.
Lawyers allied with the movement who had been alerted to the arrests – in some cases by protesters who sent messages before their phones were seized – still went to the police stations to assist. But they say they were misled by the police, who gave false information about where detainees were being held.
The detainees were eventually released after more than 12 hours in custody. The following day, police released a statement acknowledging the arrests, but denying accusations of abuse. The government has yet to comment on the allegations, though the governing New Patriotic Party’s youth wing condemned the “action of the police force” but questioned the basis of the protest.
A clearing agent for corruption
Many Ghanaians believe protests are justified given the country’s staggering inflation, economic mismanagement, increase in cost of living and reports of corruption.
More than 14 million Ghanaians, 41.1% of the total population, experience multidimensional poverty, according to the annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey. The World Bank reports that nearly 850,000 were pushed into poverty last year.
“If you compare the purchasing power of the cedi in 2017, when this government came [to power], to now, the cedi has lost about 60% [of its value] because of inflation,” Alfred Appiah, an economist and data scientist, told openDemocracy.
Ghana’s central bank has also come under fire, not just for its massive losses but for imprudent projects like a new office building that cost more than $120m and allegedly circumventing Parliament to print excessive amounts of money to lend to the government, fuelling inflation, which the Bank initially denied. Later, it said it did this to “save the economy”.
Small business owner Geraldo Amartey told openDemocracy that he has barely made a profit since opening his roadside eatery in 2020 because many food items have tripled in price. A box of chicken that cost GHS90 in 2021 is now GHS265. A bag of rice, once GHS200, now costs GHS360. Amartey does not want to hike his prices to match the inflation. To cut costs, he laid off three of his four employees.
“We are scared that when we increase our prices, our sales are going to drop. We just keep the prices and reduce the quantity of the food. That keeps us going,” he said.
Akufo-Addo has also been accused of defending ministers in his government who have faced allegations of egregious corruption.
In 2021, the president was perceived as defending his health minister, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, who breached procurement laws by purchasing Russian vaccines at inflated prices on the black market, rather than from a certified manufacturer. Despite calls from opposition groups and campaigners and Parliament confirming he had flouted the law, Agyeman-Manu kept his job.
Earlier this year, the then minister of sanitation of water resources, Cecilia Dapaah, made headlines when she brought a charge against her domestic staff for allegedly stealing $1m, €300,000 and millions of Ghanaian cedis – all in cash – from her home. Since Ghanaian ministers earn GH¢16,000 on average, questions were raised over how she came into such wealth, and Dapaah was arrested on suspicion of corruption. She has not been charged and has denied wrongdoing, telling a court hearing over the freezing of her assets that the funds were donations for the funeral of her late brother and for his children’s school fees.
After Dapaah’s resignation, and prior to her arrest, Akufo-Addo issued a congratulatory statement thanking her for loyalty to the “image and standing of the government”, confident that “her integrity will be established”.
Akufo-Addo’s place in history
Many Ghanaians believe Akufo-Addo’s record in government is recontextualising his place in Ghana’s political history.
“In retrospect, [the 1995 Ku Me Preko demonstration] was a piece of political opportunism,” said Yao Graham, the coordinator of Third World Network-Africa, a research and advocacy group.
Graham said that previous protest movements in Ghana have had siloed interests. For example, only unions protesting to protect pensions or only middle-class citizens mobilising because of cuts to investments. This has meant the working class and middle class have seldom stood together against a government.
But in recent protests, most notably #OccupyJulorbiHouse, this is changing, with protesters united beyond usual political divisions. Doctors, lawyers and accountants have rallied alongside students, small business owners, drivers, artists and jobless youth, united not just by the prevailing political and economic crises but an active disrespect of the establishment.
For Graham, this unification is largely due to the government’s “outrageous abuse of process” in using the courts and police to stifle dissent. “When you do that, you are actually destroying people’s respect for the law,” he said.
But he believes the Akufo-Addo government will continue its hostility to dissent: “Given that this government has dug the deepest economic hole this country has been in since the early 1980s, it will be even more desperate to pretend that everything is okay.”
Yet the protest organisers say they will persist. They are currently in talks with the police to hold protests in December, to coincide with the government’s annual ‘Year of Return’ campaign. The initiative, which calls upon diaspora all over the world, but particularly African-Americans, to visit Ghana, generates good press for the government and increases tourism. The protest leaders say they intend to challenge the government’s positive PR spin that all is well. They vow to show visitors the “real Ghana”.
The offices of the president did not respond to openDemocracy’s repeated requests for comment.
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