DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN AFRICA: THE CASES OF GHANA AND SOUTH AFRICA

INTRODUCTION

The demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s brought about remarkable democratic reforms across the globe. In the Asian-Pacific region, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, it seems that the impact of democratization has been most glaring. At the same time African countries have made modest but significant gains in their quest for democratic governance. According to Freedom House President Adrian Karatnycky, the Americas and the Caribbean had 13 countries classified as free in 1972, but as a result of democratic changes in the last 30 years, 23 countries are now classified as free.1 In subSaharan Africa, while only 2 countries were considered free in 1972, currently 11 are now classified as free.2

This proliferation of democratic reforms across the globe was what Samuel Huntington termed the "third wave of democratization."3 In his taxonomy, the first wave began with the revolutions in the Americas around the nineteenth century and ended with the emergence of new democracies at the end of World War I. The second wave emerged with the Allied victory in 1945 along with the ensuing decolonization of Third World countries. The third wave began with the demise of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal between 1975 and 1976 and continues to the present.

Africa has also experienced three waves of democratization.4 The first wave began when Africans embarked on the struggle for independence from European colonial rule. The struggle eventually led to the collapse of colonialism and the beginning of the process of decolonization in the 1960s. Regrettably, the new African leaders who inherited state power from colonial rule perpetuated some of the same oppressive and exploitative policies of colonial rulers. Disappointed with the administration of the postcolonial state, the African peoples embarked on the second wave of democratization. Unfortunately, the second wave was short-lived and began to lose steam by the mid-1970s. This was precipitated by the violent response of various authoritarian regimes to this struggle for democracy, such as harassment, arrest, imprisonment, death, banishment into exile, and economic strangulation of pro-democracy activists and their supporters.

The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s led to the third wave of the democratic struggle. It, among other things, made the authoritarian regimes in Africa expendable in terms of their strategic importance to the major powers. It therefore made it difficult for these powers to justify their continued support for corrupt and ruthless regimes. As a result of these post-Cold War developments, pro-democracy movements in Africa have embarked on the third wave of the democratic struggle.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship between democracy and economic growth in Africa, focusing on the cases of Ghana and South Africa over the period 1960-1998. In other words, the paper will examine the extent to which progressive democratic reforms in these countries are associated with economic growth. These two countries are the focus of this paper because of their histories and recent experiences in adopting political and economic reforms. Besides Liberia and Ethiopia, the two oldest independent states in Africa, Ghana was the second country to attain political independence in sub-Saharan African from British colonial rule in 1957 following the independence of Sudan in 1956. Recently, Ghana has received notoriety from the international donor community for successful political and economic reforms. Moreover, since the 1980s, the country has been perceived by development agencies and scholars to be in the forefront of African socioeconomic development issues.5 Similarly, South Africa is one of the most recent countries to experience major political reforms towards democracy in Africa especially after years of oppressive governance by the white apartheid regime.

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REFORMS IN SOUTH AFRICA AND GHANA

The Case of South Africa

At the end of the nineteenth century most African states were under colonial rule. The European countries had self-appointed themselves through military aggression as rulers of the African continent whose natural and human resources they exploited to the fullest. However, the Europeans as far back as 1652 arrived in South Africa and eventually established various independent republics (the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony). The Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, which were dominated by the peoples of Dutch-German-French ancestry (or Boers), were called Boer Republics. The other colonies were dominated by English settlers. By the mid-1800s a struggle had ensued between the English and the Boers (who were later to be called Afrikaners) over control of the region's enormous resources. The struggle led to the Anglo-Boer war, which began around 1899 and lasted until 1902. It also led to the loss of the independence of the Boer republics, culminating with the integration of South Africa into the Commonwealth in 1910.