Paper long abstract:

By 1990, IMF-World Bank-inspired programme of reforms in Africa had widened from their initially very economistic nature to include, among other things, democratisation. Democracy had been promoted on the grounds that it would check arbitrary power and facilitate market reforms. This argument would seem at first sight to be appropriate to the case of Ghana: the PNDC’s assault on private property had owed much to its authoritarian and unaccountable character. To what extent, however, was this expectation actually borne out? The evidence suggests that, at least in the short term, democratisation did not have an unambiguously beneficial effect on government-business relations in Ghana. In fact, it added another dimension to the antagonism in government-business relations, and this antagonsim intensified in the run-up to the 1992 elections through into 1993.

This paper sheds light on this issue by considering the nature of the relations between the PNDC, the quasi-military government headed by Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings and Ghana’s business community. Rawlings had taken punitive actions against leading Ghanaian businesspeople under both his AFRC and PNDC governments and was, as a result, deeply hated by them. This crop of entrepreneurs had a clear stake, therefore, in Rawlings’ defeat and many backed the leading opposition party that emerged in the 1990s. Several of the key entrepreneurs also had demonstrable presidential ambitions. The onset of the democratisation process therefore entailed countervailing tendencies towards the harassment of suspected opposition supporters in the business community.