A few days after the December 2016 elections in Ghana, a cartoon appeared in Uganda’s Sunday Monitor depicting a civics lesson in a classroom where the teacher asked the question: What is democracy? The response from the pupils was “Ghana.” This satirical take by a Uganda-based newspaper on the December elections was one of numerous […]
On December 7 2016, Ghana held its seventh national elections since the beginning of the Fourth Republic. [1] In the run up to the elections two questions stood out prominently. First, will the Electoral Commission (EC) be neutral and fair? Second, will there be violence during and after the elections? The first question did arise […]
In Ghana’s 2016 election six more women were elected to parliament than were elected in 2012; this brought the number of women members of parliament (MPs) to 36, or 13.1 percent of the total – up from 30 women MPs or 10.9 percent of the total in 2012. This is a 20 percent increase over […]
Media coverage of elections have come a long way since the transition elections of 1992. However, despite improvements, challenges still persist. Some commentators note that election coverage often fails to properly interrogate electoral issues, campaign promises and manifestos in a manner that demands accountability or enables the voters to make well-informed choices at the polls. Also, […]
South Africa is currently undergoing a resurgence in student protests, with students agitating for free, decolonized education. The most prominent of these movements are Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall. What, exactly, are RMF and FMF? In a nutshell, they are an expression of a deep problem haunting “post-colonial” Africa in general and South […]
Although not entirely unexpected, South Africa’s announcement that it had taken steps to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has baffled many observers. South Africa is generally seen as a champion of human rights, given its liberal constitution, the existence of a strong civil society advocacy for […]
