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

INTRODUCTION

The demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the later disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990 brought about remarkable democratic reforms across the globe. In the Asian-Pacific region, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, it looks that the impact of democratization has been greatest in quantity glaring. At the same time African countries have made unostentatious but significant gains in their search for democratic governance. According to Freedom House President Adrian Karatnycky, the Americas and the Caribbean had 13 countries classified as at liberty in 1972, but as a rise of democratic changes in the last 30 years, 23 countries are now classified as free1 In subSaharan Africa, while single 2 countries were considered at liberty in 1972, currently 11 are now classified as free2

This proliferation of democratic reforms across the globe was what Samuel Huntington bounded the "third wave of democratization."3 In his taxonomy, the first wave began with the revolutions in the Americas around the nineteenth hundred and ended with the emerging see the verb of new democracies at the extreme point of World War I. The next to the first 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 upon the struggle for independence from European colonial direction The struggle eventually led to the collapse of colonialism and the beginning of the proces of decolonization in the 1960 Regrettably, the of recent origin African leaders who inherited state power from colonial government perpetuated some of the same oppressive and exploitative policies of colonial kings Disappointed with the administration of the postcolonial state, the African clans embarked on the second wave of democratization. Unfortunately, the next to the first wave was short-lived and began to let slip steam by the mid-1970s. This was precipitated by dint of the violent response of various authoritarian regimes to this do one's best for democracy, such as harassment, arrest, imprisonment, death, banishment into exile, and economic strangulation of pro-democracy activists and their supporters.

The extreme point of the Cold War in the late 1980 l to the third wave of the democratic labor It, among other things, made the authoritarian regimes in Africa expendable in terminuss of their strategic importance to the major powers. It therefore made it difficult for these powers to justify their continued support for corrupt and ruthles regimes. As a accrue of these post-Cold War unravellings pro-democracy movements in Africa have embarked upon the third wave of the democratic struggle

The aim of this paper is to assess the relationship between democracy and economic development in Africa, focusing on the cases of Ghana and southerly Africa over the period 1960-1998 In other words, the paper will examine the expansion to which progressive democratic reforms in these countries are associated with economic expansion These two countries are the focus of this paper because of their histories and novel experiences in adopting political and economic reforms. Besides Liberia and Ethiopia, the sum of two units oldest independent states in Africa, Ghana was the next to the first country to attain political independence in sub-Saharan African from British colonial empire in 1957 following the independence of Sudan in 1956 not long ago Ghana has received notoriety from the international donor community for prosperous political and economic reforms. Moreover, since the 1980 the geographical division has been perceived by unfolding agencies and scholars to be in the forefront of African socioeconomic unravelling issues.5 Similarly, South Africa is individual of the most recent countries to experience major political reforms towards democracy in Africa especially after years of oppressive governance by the agency of the white apartheid regime.

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC REFORMS IN southerly AFRICA AND GHANA

The Case of southern Africa

At the end of the nineteenth hundred most African states were beneath colonial rule. The European countries had self-appointed themselves from one side 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 southern Africa and eventually established various independent republics (the Cape of profitable Hope, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River Colony) The Transvaal and the Orange River Colony which were dominated through the peoples of Dutch-German-French ancestry (or Boers) were called Boer Republics. The other colonies were dominated through English settlers. By the mid-1800s a try had ensued between the English and the Boer (who were later to be called Afrikaners) above control of the region's enormous resources. The labor led to the Anglo-Boer war, which began around 1899 and lasted until 1902 It also l to the los of the independence of the Boer republics, culminating with the integration of southern Africa into the Commonwealth in 1910