Abstract
This paper explores reactions to election results in the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana from the perspectives of the politics of belonging debates – the distinction citizens of the same nation-state make between those who belong and those who belong less in one of Ghana’s highly competitive electoral regions. It argues that multi-party democracy has intensified or given rise to social and political tensions or conflicts in some local communities rather than enhance democratic ideals and peaceful coexistence
Introduction
In early September 2004, I had barely settled in some remote village of the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana for fieldwork than my daily experience came to be dominated by conversations on the intense political campaigns for the upcoming December presidential and parliamentary elections. As elsewhere in the country, campaign operatives of the various political parties crisscrossed the length and breadth of the region in hopes of winning the votes of the rural folks. In the early weeks, some villagers mistook my field trips for a political mission, and wanted to know my party affiliation; others occasionally demanded gifts from me in apparent exchange for their assurances to help deliver votes to my supposed party. In villages of the Techiman, Kintampo, and Nkoranza districts, it was not uncommon for immigrant farmers from northern Ghana, who were the focus of my research, to initiate or eagerly participate in heated debates on the impending elections (see figure 1).
Map of study area.
In discussing these issues, I was especially struck by the acute awareness with which villagers spoke about the length politicians would go to win their votes. In the Nkoranza North constituency, many people cited a recent past by-election to fill a parliamentary seat vacated by a former Member of Parliament (MP), Eric Amoateng, who was battling legal problems in the United States, to illustrate how powerful politicians from Accra descend on hamlets and villages to readily intermingle with them in order to win their votes. Initially, I was not surprised that immigrants’ votes should be much sought after in a divided electoral region. Unlike urban migrants who may visit their home regions in the north to vote during general elections, rural migrants said they generally lacked the financial means to do so and stay put to vote in their current location of residence. However, the persistent references to northerners as an emerging constituency in local Brong politics led me to raise questions about how much this group could influence the politics of the host communities. If they actually did, would that affect the local hospitality accorded them and/or their continuous access to resources such as land?
In the afternoon of the elections, I talked to several voters in Sunyani (the regional capital) and surrounding areas about the chances of the various candidates and their parties. Many voters there predicted (correctly) that the New Patriotic Party ( NPP) was going to win the 2004 elections; the first term of the ruling Kufuor-led administration dubbed “positive change,” they claimed, was a huge success, and if voters from other parts of the country were to take the government’s achievements into account, the 2004 elections only provided an opportunity for Ghanaians to renew the mandate of the government, and in the words of one informant, “write the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) obituary once and for all.” By midnight as early election results from Techiman and Kintampo districts to the north trickled in, such optimism and bold predictions had begun to turn into anxieties for supporters of the ruling government. Provisional results from Kintampo North, Techiman North, and Techiman South constituencies showed that the opposition NDC had easily retained its parliamentary seats (see Table 2 for 2004 parliamentary results of the Brong Ahafo region). The immediate reactions in the capital city triggered commentaries on the city FM radio and streets that touched on voters’ regional belonging and citizenship, the main subject of analysis in the following pages.
Summary results of presidential elections in Brong Ahafo region since 1992.
CPP: Covention People’s Party. NDC: National Democratic Congress; NIP: National Independence Party; NPP: New Patriotic Party; PHP: People’s Heritage Party; PNC: People’s National Congress.
Source: Ghana Electoral Commission.
Summary of parliamentary results.
In the case of the Techiman North constituency to which I will return below, the ruling NPP party candidate, Professor Christopher Ameyaw-Akumfi, had not only failed to win the seat, but his defeat by Alex Kyeremeh of the NDC by a wide margin was viewed by many as a total upset. In accounting for the initial strong performance of the opposition NDC, I heard some NPP supporters point at the presence of the large number of northern immigrants in the constituencies, whom they said were decidedly NDC supporters who voted like their kinsmen in the north. The perceived influence of northern migrants in local electoral politics was not confined to Brong Ahafo, however. In the Kwahu South constituency of the Eastern Region, I heard similar statements attributing the defeat of the NPP parliamentary candidate who was also the district chief executive to northerners and the Ewe factor.
In this paper, I examine the local reactions to the results of the 2004/2008 general elections in some major constituencies of the region that I observed, drawing insights from the politics of belonging debate (Kobo, 2010; see also Kuba and Lentz, 2006; Tonah, 2009) to interrogate this local formulation that represents immigrants who are citizens of Ghana as “strangers” whose votes are viewed as “a factor” in local politics. Having successfully conducted relatively free and fair elections since 1992 with two alternations of power, Ghana has been held up as a model stable democratic state in Africa (Whitefield, 2009). I argue that a close examination of the local reactions, however, reveals that underneath this enviable profile of the country’s political dispensation are undercurrents of conflicts which flow from tensions and debates over regional belonging and citizenship which hold serious implication for peaceful democratic elections and host-immigrant relations.
The material upon which the following analyses are based was the result of a larger ethnographic research project I conducted in the Brong Ahafo region in 2004 and 2006. 1 Where necessary, the 2012 election results are also included to show their implications for electoral changes and pattern following the two previous elections. The major methods employed in the research were non-standardized oral interviews and participant observation; these were supplemented by close analysis of newspaper reports and results of the 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections. A total of about 54 random individual informants, including campaign operatives, polling agents in selected constituencies, and returning officers were interviewed. I also held extensive conversations with the district electoral officers of Kintampo, Nkoransa, and Techiman to gain their insights into specific reported events, challenges and strengths of the various parties in their districts. Prior to the actual elections, I asked northern settler farmers, among other questions, how they had voted in the previous 2000 elections, and how they were going to vote in the next 2004 general elections. And on elections day, I visited some polling stations to observe the voting process and voters’ reactions to the results in the immediate aftermath of the polls.
The stranger/citizen category and electoral politics: an analytical framework
In mature democracies such as the United States with frequent regional or interstate mobility, there has been debate over the extent to which political change can be engineered by the influx of new migrants into a given destination. At the core of the debate is the question of whether migrants are easily changed by the politics of the new place or it is the place that changes the politics of the migrants. On the one hand is a school of thought which holds that migration across a variety of states tends to shape the political leanings of migrants and natives alike over several decades, thereby engendering political change in future electoral cycles. The other hand is a view which posits that when a new population migrates into an area at a sufficiently slow pace, the recent arrivals may necessarily be absorbed without much notice and thereby be socialized into the political habits of the established majority residents (Gimpel and Schuknecht, 2001).
In their review of extant demographic data across major states, Gimple and Schuknecht, for instance, conclude that migration can indeed bring about political change in a given locale, but that such an impact on the destined locale may be slight or consequential, depending on several variables. These include factors such as the individual characteristics and strength, and of the political character of the new community, relative to the pressures for conformity with it: “When the volume of migration is high, most of the evidence points toward the idea that migrants change places. When an area is inundated with those of alien disposition, there will be less pressure to conform to the existing community’s value since those values are likely to be challenged by a larger group in which the migrants can find compatible social support for expressing divergent views” (Gimple and Schuknecht, 2001: 209). In Ghana as with other African countries, voters’ decisions are often informed more by the access to and control over resources than ideological considerations.
In many communities of West Africa, the construction of the “citizen”/“stranger” category has long been a major determinant of one’s access to and the allocation of resources. Several decades ago, Fortes (1975) noted that because access to land and inheritance of other economic resources in the southern Akan region of Ghana were largely predicated on one’s membership to a matrilineage (Abusua), most immigrants from the northern and Sahelian regions were often excluded from the right of allocation and ownership to such resources because of their status as strangers. In a recent comparative review of debates over property, authority, and citizenship in the region, Berry (2009) traces the construction to the colonial period during which colonial authority used such categories to rule perceived subjects through the chiefly families. She notes that rising demand for land and increased production for the commercialized market land transactions in the post-colonial period has further intensified struggles over land, often reigniting local debates over where to draw the lines between locals and strangers across the sub-region. In the Akan region in particular, where chiefs’ authority over land is both proprietary and territorial (Berry, 2009:30 ff), such debates are more widespread as strangers obtained farming rights from a chief or chiefs who claim jurisdictions over the land in question. While the stranger/citizen category role in the allocation and access to resources has received extensive treatment in the Ghanaian social science literature (see Berry, 2009; 2001 Boone and Kwame Duku, 2012; Kuba and Lentz, 2006), the empirical record on how this registers and shapes electoral politics in Ghana’s Fourth Republic and the resulting tensions in local communities is much scarcer. 2
The factors impinging on election outcomes and voter behavior in Ghana have generally been explained in terms of either the rational choice theoretical framework, according to which voters’ political alignments are determined by the party or candidate’s performance on issues, signifying an evaluative and mature behavior on their part, or ethnicity or primordial instincts and past rivalry among various regions and groups (cf. Whitefield, 2009). In the latter case, a voter’s decision is often an expression of an allegiance to a group or ethnicity. Political ideology and the incumbency advantage (Bawumia, 1998; Fridy, 2007; Kelly and Bening, 2007; Nugent, 1995, 1999; Whitefield, 2009) have also been cited to explain election outcomes, so that voter alignment can be determined by macro-structural factors that favor the dominant two political parties in the country (Lindberg and Morrison, 2005, 2008; Nugent, 1999). In her analysis of the 2008 general elections, Whitefield (2009) attributed the competitive nature of the polls to the emergence of a de facto two-party system. She argues that the major two parties in the county – the NDC and NPP – were able to mobilize voters around two ideological traditions which date back to the early post-independence era at the expense of the smaller ones due to their ability to consistently mobilize core supporters across existing social cleavages such as ethnicity, region, urban/rural, and social status. The result is that “each party has strongholds, and the outcome of elections are determined by so-called swing regions which contain a large number of floating voters who are not party loyalists and may swing their votes based on government performance” (cf. Whitefield, 2009: 623).
The breadth of the core–periphery analyses helps to reveal general voting patterns and the ideological basis for the success of the two dominant political parties, but they do not fully capture contextual politics and how post-elections and between events may also influence elections in certain constituencies or regions (Tronvoll, 2009). As the 2008 elections, for example, show, the so-called core regions such as Ashanti and Volta regions – the strongholds of the NPP and NDC respectively with solid support bases – did not settle the ultimate outcome of the most fiercely fought presidential elections in Ghana’s history. Instead, it was results of Tain – a rural and obscure constituency in Brong Ahafo – a peripheral region that handed the election to the NDC. The results of the 2008 presidential elections thus raise a vital question: if ethnicity and party ideology loom large in electoral outcomes in Ghana (Arthur, 2009; Nugent, 1995; 2001), to what extent did these factors determine results in areas such as Brong Ahafo where support for the two major parties seems evenly divided, even as it is predominantly Akan and home to the late Kofi Abrefa Busia – the one time leader and ideological godfather of the NPP?
Brong Ahafo is a perfect site to observe and analyze how migration affects election outcome because it is rural and one of the largest recipients of immigrants in Ghana (Abdul-Korah, 2007; Ghana Statistical Service, 2002). Since 1992, the region has been an up and coming swing constituency, and the national and international attention it garnered for its decisive role in the 2008 elections means that it would continue to get its share of attention in the upcoming 2016 and future elections. In this paper, I aim to show that the swing electoral status of the Brong Ahafo is partly the result of changing demographic circumstances which have complicated existing political fault lines that resulted from past relations of the original inhabitants of the Brong Ahafo and their former Ashanti overlords and the subsequent creation of the region in 1959. Moreover, because the existing literature on electoral politics in Ghana has tended to focus on the role of ethnicity (Ichino and Nathan, 2013; Lindberg and Morrison, 2008) and the contest between the two major parties, the NPP and NDC (Fridy, 2007), little attention has been paid to the fierce intra-party contests and among different factions within the parties. I will show that in Brong Ahafo northern immigrants, who (for reasons that will be made clear) have been loyal supporters of the NDC led by those who manage to work their way up the party structures and expect to be rewarded, often collide with the so-called local supporters and the chiefly families. This intra-party rivalry partly underpins the discourses of belonging and transcends party allegiance.
To proceed further, however, a brief review of the politics of belonging debates and their implication for electoral politics in Ghana is provided to help frame how local discourses interpret and represent immigrants’ participation in Brong local politics. Next, I describe the region’s heterogonous population to underscore its competitive electoral politics and also suggest that its swing status stems partly from settlement history and the influx of immigrants from the north and that these local reactions are largely a manifestation of the struggle over resources and contest over representation (Berry, 2009).
Democratization and the politics of belonging
Over the past few years, a broad consensus seems to have emerged among scholars that a return to multi-party democracy in sub-Saharan Africa bodes well for the continent. Thanks to multi-party democracy, so the argument goes, there is hardly a social group or community that has not felt the need for its members to communally articulate their daily concerns in both civil and political the power to vote has not only sensitized rural people to their rights as citizens of the nation-state, but has also helped to broaden the political space for civil society and local community participation in governance. A few skeptics, however, point to the unexpected corollary of the Intermational Monetary Fund (IMF) neo-liberal inspired democratization and new style of development policies, arguing that these policies have served to circumvent the African state with unintended consequences (Berry, 2009). Political liberalization and decentralization is a welcome development, but critics charge that in a pluralist ethnic environment without strong local level institutions, the competitive nature of electoral politics which entail struggles for power and control over resources can be a recipe for violence.
In the 1990s, Geschiere and Gurgler (1998; Gugler, 1998) first called attention to the rise of the politics of belonging and its implications for multi-party elections. According to them, the discourse triggers contest over representation and belonging in which one’s home region and village now assumes new importance as a crucial source of power. In transition and consolidating democracies such as Ghana, this stranger/citizen is couched in a discourse of belonging that excludes certain groups from their full rights as national citizens by distinguishing “between citizens who belong and those who belong less.” To ensure their political survival and continued access to government posts and finances (Chauveau, 2006: 227), politicians often resort to playing the ethnic card by invoking one’s place of belonging. Hence “who can vote where, or stand as a candidate, are questions that now loom large in the larger cities and most densely populated areas where the fear by locals of being out voted by more numerous “strangers,” tend to reach such a pitch that defense of the autochthony seems to take precedence over national citizenship"(Geschiere and Gugler, 1998: 313; Lentz, 2006c; Lentz and Nugent 2000).
In central Africa, there exists an extensive literature that points to a series of violence that erupted in the wake of the transition to multi-party elections because of the obsession with the defense of autochthony. This discourse is rooted in the French colonial policy of distinguishing between “natives” and “citizens” (Cueppens and Geschiere, 2005; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh, 2000). In West Africa, democratization and the accompanying neoliberal reforms have produced a similar destabilizing effect in some hitherto stable nation-states rather than lead to the stable transition to democracy envisioned by the architects of neoliberal reform. In Cote d ‘Ivoire, Berry (2009: 39) notes that “Tensions between autochthones and strangers over access to land in the closing cocoa frontier converged with emerging lines of conflicts over resource control of the state, helping to create a popular audience receptive to candidate’s xenophobic appeals, and reinforcing the country’s slide into civil war.” The conflicts generated by the authotchony and allocthony discourse is hardly a francophone problem. In fact, such conflicts have spilled over in Anglophone countries such as Ghana, resulting in tensions and conflicts that are not necessarily triggered by political manipulation from above but also from below (cf. Boni, 2006; Lentz, 2006a; Tonah, 2009).
In Ghana, Ichino and Nathan (2013: 344-347) underscore the role of ethnicity and identity politics in the 2008 elections but argue that the phenomenon is less pronounced in urban areas where a voter may feel a weaker attainment to his own co-ethnics when he is surrounded by more non-co-ethnic politics and become less likely to vote expressively for his own group. In the rural areas by contrast, local geography affects vote choice more so than in the urban settings because “ethnic cues from candidates and parties impart different information to voters depending on where they live. The appeal of the notion of belonging as opposed to ethnicity which can sometimes presume that someone’s category is relatively fixed in spite of the possibilities of change, stems from a discourse that is much more fluid and allows people to use all sort of language and practices to articulate their claim” (Mujere, 2010: 1). Such widespread claims, as we shall see, provide valuable insights into how ideologies of attachment and belonging intersect with issues such as land tenure, migration, and electoral politics in Ghana.
The swing region of Brong Ahafo
Lying between the arid savanna country to the north and the Akan forest in the south, this region is Ghana’s second largest administrative area in terms of landmass; its original inhabitants are the Bono (Brong), known to be the oldest Akan population to have settled in Ghana. In pre-colonial times, this area served as a crossroad for traders plying the gold and kola trade paths between the Akan forest and towns on the edge of the Sahara (Wilks, 1975). As cocoa farming expanded from southern Ghana from the early decades of the twentieth century into the middle belt, the need for farm land and wage labor in the new cocoa frontier attracted new people, including other Asante cocoa farmers as well as immigrants from neighboring states and the northern savanna region into what was western Ashanti. In the early independence era, the region’s growing stature, boosted by its cocoa wealth and timber, soon inspired political agitations by the Brong youth and chiefs to demand a separate region (Dunn and Robertson 1979). In 1959, these demands led to the creation of the region and we note that they also lined up perfectly with Nkrumah’s political calculations of diminishing the support of his main political rival at the time, Kofi Abrefa Busia, who hailed from Wenchi in the area.
In this area among the dominant Akan-speaking people live several minorities speaking non-Akan groups such as the Mo, Banda, and Nkoran and immigrants from northern Ghana and the neighboring Sahelian countries, the majority of whom are Mossi from present-day Burkina Faso. We also need to mention settlers in the Muslim urban quarters (zongos) who constitute the remnants of an early group of immigrants, many of whom were expelled from Ghana under the Alien compliance Order of 1969 during the Busia administration.
In the 1970s and 1990s, the escalation of inter-ethnic conflicts in the northern region between the Konkomba and other major ethnic groups such as the Ganja, Dagomba, and Nanumba drove several Konkomba farmers and other minority groups away from the conflict-prone zone to settle in the fertile middle-belt of Ghana. Their presence has helped turn the large rich savanna-forest transition zone into Ghana’s breadbasket, fueling a booming network of agricultural markets. The region has also attracted migrant laborers in search of agricultural wage labor to the remote villages, especially in the period following the 1980s economic crisis. Many public sector workers from the three northern regions have also voted with their feet to its towns or villages to take advantage of more favorable conditions than in their home regions. These urban-based salaried workers stay in close contact with their rural kinsmen who, in turn, rely on them either when they are in transit or visiting the markets or in need of assistance with a hospitalized relative in the city.
In the context of southern Ghana, northern identity is not therefore necessarily coterminous with the group of those who hail from the north; variables such as the Islamic religion, food habits, and clothing are also signifiers of northerness. In fact, as early as the 1920s, a pan-northern identity had already emerged from the Muslim settlements as scores of newly arrived immigrants settled in the zongos (Kobo, 2010). By the 1950s, the zongo had become a locus for political mobilization for most minorities who came to define themselves as northerners. As the following incident in the Ejura-Sekyidoumasi constituency illustrates, the zongo continues to be a beehive of northern identity politics.
During the 2004 election campaign, rumor spread among the immigrant population in the Ejura-Sekyidoumase constituency of the Ashanti region bordering Brong Ahafo that the paramount chief of the area (Ejurahene) had issued a warning to settler farmers to desist from their consistent pattern of voting for NDC or risk expulsion from his jurisdiction. Because the Ejura constituency is one of only three constituencies in the Ashanti Region (the stronghold of the NPP), which has consistently gone to the NDC since the 1990s, the rumor was taken seriously by the NDC and its supporters. Moreover, the NDC candidate for the 2004 election was a northern immigrant, and supporters maintained that the Kumasi Party headquarters must have exerted pressure on the chief to ensure a NPP victory in line with the rest of the Ashanti region. To many NDC campaign operatives, it came as no surprise that the paramount chief of Ejura should be blaming “strangers” for preventing his jurisdiction from voting like other constituencies under the traditional authority of Ashanti. 3
It is important to note that Article 287 of the Ghana Constitution recognizes traditional rulers as part of the local government system but it also technically bars them from active political engagement in electoral politics (Ghana Constitution, 1993). The NDC campaign strategists were quick to seize upon this local constitutional provision and interpreted the alleged threat as a violation of the local government policy of the non-interference of traditional rulers in electoral politics. Most of the teachers and other public sector workers who saw themselves as immigrants especially took umbrage at the alleged threat of expulsion of their rural brothers and vowed to coalesce around the so-called non-native candidate. Several meetings were subsequently held in the Ejura zongo to sensitize “fellow minorities” to stand firm behind the NDC northern candidate. At the time of my fieldwork, important figures in the district such as the director of the Ghana Education Service, manager of the Ejura Agricultural Development Bank substation, and other influential people who self-identified as northerners were unapologetic about their support for the NDC candidate.
On Election Day in 2004, the parliamentary candidate, Alhaji Issufu Pangabu Mohamad – a resident of the Ejura zongo who originally hailed from Bawku in the Upper-East region – easily won the seat. In the 2008 elections, as well, he easily retained his parliamentary seat for the NDC. In the 2012 elections, however, he lost the seat to Mohammed Salisu Bamba of the NPP. The Ejura constituency case confirms local concerns that generate the so-called immigrant factor shaping election outcome as it took another immigrant to narrowly defeat the incumbent. It also demonstrates the ability of immigrants to mobilize themselves into a political constituency while simultaneously revealing how election results or voter alignment may be informed by local disputes and help decide elections (Gymah, 2001),
Why the immigrants voted the way they did
In the 1990s, Nugent singled out ethnicity as the major effective political campaign strategy with which the NDC scored consistent electoral victories over its archrivals, the NPP, and other smaller parties (Nugent 1995, 1999). According to him, the opposition also underestimated the incumbency factor and the eclectic ideological posture that the ruling Rawlings-led party assumed in order to appeal to poorer regions and voters as the party for the grassroots. In peripheral regions such as Brong Ahafo, the ethnic factor was especially crucial because “In most cases, the ethnic dynamic worked against the NPP: on the national level, it alienated non-Akan, while among the Akan, it often set non-Ashanti (such as the Brong) against their former overlords” (Nugent, 1999: 308). To date, it would appear that the NDC has continued to build its campaign strategy around the past relations between the Brong citizens and their Ashanti overlords, whose leader is widely perceived to be interfering in chieftaincy affairs. That the NDC continues to represent itself as the party of the downtrodden and deliverer of rural development still provides the broader context for understanding the way immigrants voted during both the 2004 and the 2008 elections in Brong Ahafo.
During the 2004 electoral campaign, for example, it was not uncommon for NDC operatives to also remind zongo residents of the expulsion of their relatives during the Busia administration under the Alien Compliance Order, implying a possible repeat of their expulsion. This permanent campaign strategy by the NDC toward the zongo communities is exemplified by the formation of Hardin Kan (“unity”), 4 an association of members of NDC in Hausa-Line, Zabon-Zongo, Tankofiano, New-Krobo, Dagomba-Line, and Wangara-Line, all in the Techiman Municipality in 2009. The Brong Ahafo NDC Regional Youth Organizer, Mr Baba Awudu Gauso, explained the objective of the association as: “to ensure that NDC party retains power for a very long time.” During the inaugurations of an 11-member executive for the association, Mr Gauso lauded the contributions of Zongo communities toward the party’s victory in the 2008 elections, and no other person than the then Techiman municipal chief executive and former MP of the Techiman North Constituency, Alex Kereymeh, was there to inaugurate the newly formed organization (Ghana News Agency, March 15, 2009).
To be sure, the NDC, like other parties since early post-independence, has also courted constituencies from the urban underclass but under the Rawlings-led, provisional (P)NDC, more attention, it seems, was paid to the rural constituency through improvements to the local infrastructure. As Kelly and Bening (2007: 199) note Rawlings’ “very treatment of incumbent chiefs built a very high level of political support for the regime” a strategy that underlines his popularity in regions such as Brong Ahafo, western regions and northern Ghana. Indeed, a common thread that emerged from my interviews with a majority of northern immigrants in rural Brong Ahafo was that they did not hide their support for the NDC. The reasons they gave were that under the PNDC (1979–1991) and NDC administrations (1992–2000) the three northern regions benefited immensely from key development projects, namely the extension of the national electricity grid, the construction and rehabilitation of major road networks such as the Kintampo-Paaga road, and the creation of an additional new region out of the Upper-Region. A bridge over the Black Volta River at Bamboi, which had long been an obstacle to travelers going south from the new Upper-West region, was also completed during PNDC Administration. 5
Little wonder that immigrants from the Upper-West region overwhelmingly indicated their support for the NDC. As Mr Anzuin rationalizes his support for the NDC: “It was J.J. [Rawlings] who gave us our region and brought electricity to Wa. Before that, any time we returned home and reached Wa, thieves took advantage of the darkness and robbed us of our belongings. With the electricity now at Wa lorry station, we are saved from armed robbery.” 6 At Paniminsa in the Kintampo South constituency, another farmer blamed the worsening security on roads on market days and indicated that he voted against the NPP for not doing much to secure roads.
But a constant factor most immigrant farmers commonly cited for not voting for the ruling NPP government in the 2004 elections concerned a campaign message that was sold to them by the NDC about their perceived exclusion from a rural development project that was designed to promote the production of cassava-starch for export while creating jobs for the targeted communities (Andoh 2010; Tonah 2009). Under what became known as the Presidential Special Initiative (PSI), the Kufuor government had launched the project in 2001 to be implemented in two major cassava-producing districts in Awutu–Effutu Senya and Atebubu-Amantin in the central and Brong Ahafo regions respectively. Under the initiative, generous special loans were to be given out to small-scale farmers for the purpose of farming cassava to be processed into cassava starch for the export market (Andoh 2010: 29). Although the project had not fully taken off in the targeted district in Brong Ahafo region by the time of the elections, its anticipated benefits had become a campaign issue between the two major parties.
It would appear that supporters of the NPP initially sought to attract votes by selling the benefits farmers were going to gain from the special loans under the PSI scheme, but opponents of the Kufuor Administration on their part seized upon the apparent exclusion of financial support to farmers of yam and sorghum and accused the NPP of deliberating excluding crops that were commonly produced by northern immigrants. At the core of the NDC electoral campaign during the 2004 and 2008 elections in the remote parts of the Brong Ahafo was an overarching campaign message that was framed around the discourse of the state’s exclusion of an already deprived group from some material benefits that were designed to empower rural people. By successfully creating the perception that the NPP had no interest and concern for northerners, the NDC was able to add another factor to the existing political fault lines that underpin the close elections in Brong Ahafo. As results of Techiman and Atebubu-Amantin (see Table 2) constituencies show, this campaign strategy appeared to have worked against the NPP, especially in the contests over parliamentary seats.
The 2004 parliamentary election: Techiman North Constituency
In the Techiman North constituency referenced earlier, the 2004 electoral victory of the NDC opposition parliamentary candidate, Alex Kyeremeh, was an upset in the eyes of many because the defeated parliamentary candidate, Ameyaw Akumfi, is one of the famous sons of the constituency who was serving in the ruling government. An accomplished academic described by many as humble, Prof, as his admirers prefer to call him, was appointed director general of the Ghana Education Service during the first term of the Kufuor administration. Some thought that his appointment was a strategic move on the part of the ruling NPP government to enhance his future electoral fortunes in the constituency. Assuming that was the case, the strategy did not appear to have worked by the time of the elections in 2004.
Several informants in the Techiman North constituency linked Professor Ameyaw’s defeat in the 2004 election to his tenure as director of education, during which he was said to have incurred the wrath of two major groups within the constituency: polytechnic students and northern immigrants. 7 Polytechnic students were apparently upset with him over his failure to use his position to help the government upgrade the High National Diploma (HND) from the country’s polytechnics on par with Bachelor’s degrees in the country’s universities. Many students of the Sunyani polytechnic, therefore, resolved to punish him at the polls by campaigning during the 2004 elections to ensure he was not elected. To be fair, agitations by polytechnic students for the upgrade of the HND dated to the Rawlings’ administration, and did not start with the Kufuor’s government. Hence the accusation of Professor Ameyaw for failing to support the upgrade of the polytechnic diploma and the allegation that he suffered in the polls for this reason may have been misplaced or exploited by his political opponents.
A far more important factor for the defeat of Professor Akumfi-Ameyaw in the 2004 elections had to do with a statement he was alleged to have made during an interview he granted to an FM radio station, and this is central to the theme of the present paper. In this interview, he was said to have urged his fellow Techiman natives to take over the management of educational institutions away from non-natives to ensure their better management. This allegation struck a chord of the politics of belonging and angered immigrants, who felt the director general of education had singled them out for discrimination for positions they had earned by the dint of hard work. Like the polytechnic students, northern immigrant teachers who were fearful of losing their jobs over the remark took it upon themselves to mobilize relatives and friends in the Techiman and surrounding villages to vote against Mr Ameyaw and his party. Indeed, at Aworowa near Techiman, many residents I interviewed pointed to this allegation and the good advice they received from their educated brothers in Techiman as deciding factors in how to cast their votes.
The 2008 election aftermath: nomination of Atebubu District Chief Executive
In March 2009, a well-known Konkomba resident of the Atebubu-Amantin district of the Brong Ahafo by the name of Sanja Nanja was nominated by the newly elected president John Atta Mills to serve as District Chief Executive (DCE). Under Ghana’s 1993 local Government Act 462, it is the prerogative of the president to nominate officials of local government, although there is always considerable lobbying by traditional rulers and other interest groups for the candidates to fill such an appointment. Once nominated, the prospective mayor or DCE needs the approval at least two-thirds of the members of the District Assembly present and voting consistent with the requirements of the Local Government Act 462. According to many residents of the district, the teacher-turned politician nominee who has never hidden his membership of the NDC party had served formerly as a government appointee of the District Assembly, and rose through the party ranks of the NDC to a regional party official. When I interviewed Mr Nanja, he justified why he was the best to represent his party and also occupy the highest political office of the district. Recounting his family settlement history, he noted that his grandfather had migrated from northern Ghana to settle in Atebubu in the early 1970s. It was in the early days of this period that he was born in Atebubu. Like many other children of immigrants, he developed emotional ties with Atebubu, having started elementary school in the district. Only when he enrolled in teacher training college in the northern region did he reside outside Atebubu. Even so, after completing his teacher training he had returned to the district to launch his 11 years plus teaching career at the local secondary school.
Mr Nanja’s claims to national citizenship, long family settlement in Atebubu, and hard work on behalf of his party ran contrary to the implacable opposition that greeted his nomination and the subsequent violent confrontations that ensued during his confirmation process. In late April 2009, Mr Nanja’s impending confirmation made national news, not least because some citizens of Atebubu led by the paramount chief of Atebubu, Nana Owusu Acheaw Brempong II, were reported to openly voice their objections to the president’s nominee on the grounds that he was not a native of the area. They warned that any attempt to impose an “immigrant” on the people as DCE was going to be resisted (Ghanaian Chronicle, April 29, 2009, May 28, 2009). It appeared that after severe lobbying and several appeals by the Omanhene and his people to the president to drop Mr Nanja for a native son failed, they decided to carry their objections to the media backed by concrete threats. As a result, on the day of his confirmation, Mr Nanja obtained only 23 out of the 32 votes, short of the needed two-thirds majority. The Atebubu traditional council may have sensed initial victory in its effort to block the presidents’ nominee; it issued further threats to cause mayhem and bloodshed if other attempts were made to confirm Mr Nanja by the assembly members (Ghanaian Chronicle, April 29, 2009).
Such ominous threats were clearly in anticipation of any attempt to reconvene the assembly to try to confirm the president’s nominee in line with the Local Government Act, which provides for another round of voting should a candidate fail to garner the needed majority votes in the first round of voting. Yet on May 28, a second vote in the assembly was organized albeit amidst tight security. The Assembly narrowly confirmed Mr Nanja, but it did not occur without problems. A correspondent of the Ghanaian Chronicle, Michael Boateng, who filed a report on the outcome of the second round of voting reported that: The president nominee for the District Chief Executive (DCE) for Atebubu/Amantin, Mr. Nanja Sanja (SIC) has finally been endorsed by the Assembly, despite persistent protests by the Atebubu Traditional Council led by the paramount Chief, Nana Owusu Akyeaw Brempong. He polled 26 votes out of the total 32 votes cast. However, the endorsement did not go without any skirmish, as supporters of Nanja Sanja attacked the perceived anti-Sanja Nanja assembly members, and assaulted the Assembly Member for the Mim Electoral Area of Atebubu/Amantin, Mr. Yaw Asamoah Mensah, till he fell unconscious, and was rushed to the Atebubu District hospital for treatment.
Within local NDC party circles, it is widely recognized that Mr Nanja was qualified to be DCE, and that President Mills rightfully rewarded him for his hard work on behalf the NDC party. 8 The opposition to his nomination, many claim, lay largely in the fact that the son of the Atebubu chief who lived in a major city was also vying for the position. Because the son of the chief, a native, failed to win the nomination, his father and many citizens of Atebubu felt betrayed that the local son was passed over by the president despite their massive support of the NDC in both the parliamentary and the presidential elections. Be that as it may, the fact that the chief and citizens expressed their opposition to Mr Nanja in exclusivist terms and without reference to his long emotional attachment to the Atebubu or credentials as a party loyalist bespeaks of the growing perception of the influence of immigrants who have long settled in the Brong Ahafo.
More importantly, the reaction of Atebubu in resisting Mr Nanja nomination needs to be put in context: it stemmed from a growing concern over the influence of northerners in local politics in Brong Ahafo. This concern is due to the fact that many immigrants have begun to successfully position themselves in the local political arenas, often rising through the echelons of the party at the constituency, regional, or even national levels. Moreover, several satellite villages or settlements bearing the names of towns and villages of the north such as Nadowli (Nkoransa North), Pala Kura (Tain), and Dagomba (Pru) constituencies have emerged, as polling stations whose voting patterns can have significant impact on election results as was the case with Tain in the 2008 elections. Most of these immigrant enclaves experienced growth at the time that most educated Brong citizens “had abandoned” their rural home towns in search of greener pastures, decades before the onset of multi-party democracy (see Mikel, 1984).
Northern Ghanaians have been settling in the middle belt since the onset of colonial occupation, but their numbers increased dramatically since the 1980s (Ghana Statistical Service 2000) in response to the prolonged drought and bushfires that decimated the forest transition zone. The resulting food shortages in the region led many southerners to welcome northerners into their communities with generous land tenure terms (Berry, 2001). With the return to multi-party democracy and an improved political economy, many northern immigrants who feel welcome to the host community and wish to assume national office or run for elected offices are now viewed with concern by the so-called local citizens. In the remote villages, where both strangers and hosts co-existed, aspiring local politicians are quietly fearful of the gradual political “northernization” of the transition zone and one way to exclude immigrants from regional or constituency politics is to question their belonging.
Overlain the politics of belonging, however, are material factors and contests and struggles over resources that may be cast over representation. However, representation is an instrumentali zed means to public office and decision-making power and the spoils that come with it. The native or stranger identities are thus often summoned in the process as a political strategy within the intense contestation not just between two major parties (NDC and NPP) but also among different factions of supporters within the various parties when it comes to political offices. In areas of Ghana with sizeable immigrant populations such as Brong Ahafo, the inability of migrants to own land even as local traditional rulers and chiefs expect them to recognize their authority by meeting certain demands is often fraught with tensions. Such tensions have been exacerbated by political decentralization (Boone and Kwame Duku, 2012), which calls for local governments to deal with the realities of integrating outsiders into the local communities. Local citizens doubt the allegiance and commitment of long-term migrants for the reason that they are invariably more concerned with issues about their original home regions rather than conditions affecting their current settled villages.
As we have seen in the case of Sanja Nanja, the concerns over outsiders in local politics seems to transcend party allegiances and loyalties. In the 2012 elections, Sanja Nanja won the parliamentary seat despite resistance but his tenure as MP has continued to be characterized by tensions and open conflict with large sections of the Atebubu youth and the chiefly family. As this manuscript was being revised for publication in April 2016, the bitter relationship between the MP and his host community and constituency came to a head in violent and bloody conflict that resulted in the burning down of the NDC constituency office. The reaction was initially attributed to the dissatisfaction of the youth over the sacking of the DCE, but the MP was drawn quickly into what became another intra-party conflict involving the traditional authorities: no sooner had the youth accused the MP of engineering the removal of the DCE, than the Atebubu chief palace issued a statement banning him from the palace and attending public occasions within the constituency. To be sure, the punishment was reported as the traditional authorities’ reaction to MP alleged insult of the Queen mother of the Atebubu traditional area on a radio program, but we also ignore the link between the recent conflict and the earlier opposition to his candidacy especially that he remains the MP and the candidate that has again been put forward by the NDC party for the 2016 (See BA Regional News, April 2016a, April 2016b).
From the politics belonging perspective, as more immigrants arrive in search of opportunities, later arrivals are increasingly being greeted warily, a reaction that has also made immigrants turn to one another rather than to members of their host communities for political and social supports (Berry, 2009: 27-28; Boone, 2009). The increasing relevance of the discourse of belonging has been intensified by the local government reforms such as the creation of the District Assemblies and new electoral constituencies as these have increased the stakes over who should represent one’s home region or constituency. To those aspiring for national political office, this is the most opportune time to represent their place of birth if they are to be heard in the national arena (Lentz, 2006a). Democratization and the devolution of power has allowed traditional rulers such as the paramount chief of Atebubu (Atebubuhene) to be more involved in local community resource mobilization for development projects, and taxes from which they stand to also draw their royalties. To many Brong educated sons and daughters who had had to leave hometowns and villages for the major cities in search of opportunities, the benefits associated with the decentralized lucrative political offices such district chief executive that controls the distribution of resources are compelling reasons to increase their commitment to their villages. These days, attendance of funerals and local festivals are common sites for city dwellers to show their commitment and attachment to the homeland. Once home for electoral politics, however, they are often confronted with the fact of having to deal with the local party officials whom they see as “strangers,” but who in the eyes of the national political leaders have been key in building the local party structures and deserve to be rewarded.
With the growing number of immigrants in remote villages, local citizens of constituencies and districts have become wary about people perceived as non-citizens in constituting themselves in powerful political forces, or exercising control over the distribution of resources. The result is that children of immigrants who were once considered members of such host communities tend to be vetted more closely for higher office than the so-called sons and daughters of their adopted home. As the experiences or continuing troubles of Sanja Nanja illustrate, it is only at the point of running for high office or assuming a position of power in one’s adopted place of residence that one’s citizenship and belonging are called into question by the so-called locals of the area. In the local politics of belonging tensions and sharp differences between the so-called non-natives and natives communities are expressed in exclusivist terms, regardless of whether people belong to the same political party or not.
Conclusion
This paper has examined the intersection between migration and electoral politics in Brong Ahafo- one of Ghana’s divided electoral regions. It analyzes the unintended consequence of multi-party democracy by showing that among Africa’s consolidating democracies such as Ghana, there is raging debate over who is more qualified to represent a given local community or constituency. This discourse has intensified as local community members establish exclusive claims that define themselves and thereby disqualify immigrants from holding office. In Brong Ahafo, this politics of belonging has given rise to new tensions between the host communities and the so-called strangers over the latter’s perceived or actual role in determining election results. Unfortunately, rather than enhance democratic ideals and peaceful co-existence, multi-party elections and decentralization have intensified social and political tensions or conflict due to shifting demographics in the local constituencies. This development challenges the conventional analysis that places too much emphasis on the center to determine political alignments in Ghana, while downplaying the ability of the local groups to also use governments and parties to maintain their authority and control (Kelly and Bening, 2007: 197).
Underlying these recent developments, the historic disagreements between the Brong and Ashanti partly account for the bitterly contested elections (Nugent, 1999: 308). The evidence suggests that the areas predominantly inhabited by Brong mostly continue to back the NDC, perhaps for the historic fall out with the previous set-up, and the perceived continuous interference in Brong chieftaincy affairs by the Ashantihene. In 2009 and 2010, for instance, tensions, characterized by outburst of violence flared up following accusations and counter-accusation of kidnapping of a sub-chief of Tuobodam that pledges his alliance to the Ashantihene much to resistance of Techiman. These bitter relations between Techiman and Tuobodom point to the historical fault-lines of the greater Ashanti, marking off Ashanti from other Akan – notably the Brong and non-Akan people; these lines have some bearings on the divided electoral patterns of the region but the success of the NPP in constituencies south of Techiman in the Ahafo and Berekum areas over several electoral cycles suggest that the party is overcoming the perception that it is an Ashanti–Akyem party (Gyimah, 2001). Such victories are, however, marginal, and can easily be upset by other local factors and the presence of several minorities groups, including immigrants who for historic reasons have also been wary about the NPP. In closely fought elections such as the 2008 one, the large number of immigrants from northern Ghana and the pockets of zongo communities that dot the region remain a critical factor in determining electoral outcomes in Brong Ahafo.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The Graduate College at the University of Illinois supported the initial field research between 2004 and 2005. A research fellowship support from the dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and faculty development grant at Western Oregon University made it possible for me to undetake follow-up research trips in 2008 and 2011 for which I am grateful. The seed for this paper was sown in a talk I presented at the Model United Nations students’ annual meetings at Western Oregon University in early 2009. I thank Mary Pattenger for inviting me to reflect on the 2008 Ghanaian general elections and for encouraging me to develop the paper into an article. I am especially indebted to very useful comments I received from John Rector and three anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Asian and African studies. For all all omissions and errors contained in the analysis, I am soley responsible.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.