President Obama Goes to Africa

When President Obama arrives in Ghana Friday night he will be the third consecutive American president to visit this small West African country. The political optics from a White House perspective are straightforward: Ghana is a stable, English-speaking democracy relatively close to the President's other stops in Europe, and its relative prosperity facilitates the promotion of positive images in contrast to the negativity that marks much Western reporting on Africa.

But beyond the photo-ops there are policy issues at stake. The White House has billed the President's speech before the Ghanaian parliament, in which he will emphasize the theme of governance and development, as part of his series of four "big speeches" beginning in Prague, and running through Cairo and Moscow. Apart from the big-picture development theme however, there are more specifically local concerns in play as well.

The United States is increasingly dependent on West African oil, and there have been two large off-shore discoveries in Ghanaian waters. There are concerns about the penetration of al Qaeda and associated groups into West Africa; the region is also increasingly a locus for narco-trafficking; and the scourge of conflict diamonds—currently in abeyance—shows signs of returning. Add it all up and the United States faces the prospect of weak states beset by challenges from criminal and terrorist groups cooperating in alliances of convenience in a region of growing geopolitical importance.

For the moment Ghana is an island of stability in this unsettled environment. It was rewarded with a $547 million Millennium Challenge Account grant under the administration of President George W. Bush, who now has a street named after him in the capital city of Accra. Economic growth has averaged nearly 5 percent annually over the past two decades, but because of the high rate of population growth this has translated into per capita income growth of just over 2 percent a year (figure 1).

Figure 1 Ghana's GDP growth

Perhaps most troubling, nearly half of the educated people emigrate, at least temporarily, an outflow of talent that has impeded the development of robust political institutions (table 1). Since a period of rule by a series of incompetent military governments ended, the country has had five democratic elections and two alternations of power. The most recent election in December 2008 resulted in the removal from power of the incumbent party on the basis of a razor-thin margin, yet the country avoided the violence that has marked recent experiences in Kenya and Zimbabwe.

Despite these accomplishments, of which the country can be justly proud, the executive dominates the legislature and a series of corruption scandals involving both past and current administrations depict a political elite that has difficulty distinguishing public from personal budgets.

Yet the corruption scandals also reveal the sort of vigorous civil society that President Obama will praise in his speech before the parliament. The Ghanaian press runs from the sedate to scandal sheets that would make even the most ardent tabloid reader blush. The airwaves are filled with political call-in shows, in English and all major indigenous languages, which range from policy discussions similar in sophistication to what one can hear on NPR or the BBC to populist ranting reminiscent of sports talk radio. The country has that as well.

The issue for Ghana is whether its fragile democratic institutions are capable of handling both the external threats to order that the country faces as well as the influx of petrodollars that is expected. The last thing the world needs is another Nigeria.

It's hard to argue against good governance, yet some countries—China is the example du jour—have prospered without Nordic levels of public probity; governance improvements alone are no panacea. Yet the challenge faced by Ghana—and by extension US interests in this increasingly geopolitically significant region—is how to construct those institutions to enable the country to make the maximum out of its human and resource endowments.