CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF STUDY

The end of the Cold War gave a major boost to the democratic movement in Africa. Multi- party democracy with its dominant feature of conducting periodic elections thus became prominent on the continent. This was the period when international financial support especially from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), became conditional in order to deny autocratic governments easy access to financial support unless they adopted and adapted to democracy. This wave of democratisation in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the pace of autocratic regimes that were pro-communist in various parts of Africa to embrace political reforms and Ghana was not an exception. The motivation for most African autocratic leaders was to succumb to this international pressure for continued Western funding.

Multi-party elections became more pronounced in Africa during the 1990s than ever before. According to Hyde and Marinove (2012), a total of 151 multi-party elections were organised in Africa between 1945 and 1990. By the end of 2000, the number of countries holding regular multi-party elections had quadrupled compared to the Cold War era (Van de Walle, 2002). Almost eighty percent (80%) of the elections conducted were won by incumbent parties and nearly two-thirds of these were considered not to have been free and fair. It brought to light that majority of the multi-party elections conducted flouted democratic standards.

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