Chapter 5 analyzes Ghana’s Electoral Commission (EC) across the country’s four republics, exploring how political competition, constitutional reforms, and patterns of informal partisan inclusion shaped the EC’s reputation as one of Africa’s most respected electoral management bodies. The chapter traces the evolution of party representation in electoral administration, showing how informal consultative forums, inter-party committees, and transparency mechanisms strengthened legitimacy and helped resolve disputes. It examines key moments, such as electoral transitions, administrative expansions, and conflict-laden reforms, that tested the EC’s autonomy. Using interviews and historical documents, the chapter highlights how Ghana’s consociational tendencies and stable political settlement contributed to robust election management, while also identifying vulnerabilities related to appointment powers and regional representation. The chapter situates Ghana as an example of how inclusion and administrative practice interact to produce durable de facto autonomy.

This chapter examines the mounting unease regarding the project of public education. By the mid-1960s, technocratic, Afrocentric, and Marxist critiques articulated a growing sense of worldwide educational crisis. These critiques presented differently in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, but in both countries popular frustrations were palpable. In response, both states attempted to reform public schooling: by introducing manual training in Ghanaian middle schools and television sets in Ivorian primary schools. Both reforms failed spectacularly, ultimately confirming the state’s abdication of its promise that education would lead to a better future for all. Public education systems crumbled along with public faith in the state, creating space for the privatization of education. The erosion of the anticolonial development ideology helped pave the way for neoliberalism to take root.

No act better distilled the two faces of independence – its aspirations and disappointments – than the act of going to school. This chapter examines the expansion of schooling, and its inherent precarity, in the first decades after independence. Relying heavily on local sources and oral histories, this chapter focuses on the lived and affective experiences of students. It argues that repeated assurances by the state that schooling held the key to a better future consistently jarred with the experience of most school-goers. So palpable were these schooling pressures, that in the early 1960s, Western psychiatrists identified a new, regionally specific mental disorder, Brain Fag [fatigue] Syndrome, to account for the stress students experienced. The rapid, but uneven, expansion of schooling indicated who was excluded from the larger development project of the nation.

The Conclusion first reiterates the three main arguments of the book. It then surveys changes and continuities in global education and development policies since the 1960s, while also touching on the present state of public education in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. It closes by reflecting on education’s double-edged nature as it relates to the problem of freedom: Does education emancipate, or oppress?

This chapter examines the foreign teacher recruitment strategies mobilized by Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. Economists and politicians agreed that secondary schools were crucial for producing the skilled workers essential to development. But new nations faced an intractable roadblock as they sought to expand secondary schools: a deficit of local teachers. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire found different solutions to the crisis of teacher scarcity, although both relied on foreigners. Ghana turned to plural sources of generally inexperienced educators. Côte d’Ivoire, instead, leaned on French teachers available through technical assistance (or coopération). Both strategies responded to the maddening paradox of the postcolonial teacher: a role that West Africans agreed was essential, but which few opted to pursue. Ultimately, the reliance on foreign teachers contributed to the corrosion of the emancipatory project of public education.

This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English in Ghana. The absence of a sizable number of settlers, different language and education policies and sociodemographic developments have shaped the variety considerably. Real-time analyses of sociolinguistic and structural developments in the nativisation phase have become possible with the Historical Corpus of English in Ghana (HiCE Ghana), a 600,000-word corpus of Ghanaian English from the early stages of the nativisation phase. The Ghanaian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE) represents the late stages. Many lexical innovations were already deeply entrenched in the older data and Ghanaian English noun phrases have become more complex in line with predictions made by the Dynamic Model. The paper is rounded off with an outline of new diachronic approaches to Ghanaian English based on a corpus of material from the archives of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and an idea for a diachronic corpus of African newspapers.

The concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s core findings and situates them within debates on foreign aid and economic development, the political economy of development in Africa, and China’s global economic strategy. Overall, the allocation of finance in all three country case studies, Ethiopia, Zambia, and Ghana, serves to secure political support and sustain incumbents in power. However, the strategies employed to achieve these goals differ based on each country’s unique political history and ethnic dynamics. In Ethiopia’s authoritarian context, the central challenge is maintaining loyalty and support from non-coethnics within the state. The EPRDF established ethnic federalism and justified centralized control through economic growth. In Zambia, the focus is on allocating finance to maintain the support of coethnics, prioritizing loyalty within the ethnic group. In Ghana, on the other hand, preserving power involves attracting swing voters through nonethnic coalitions, resulting in the distribution of finance aimed at broad-based support. The chapter concludes by drawing policy implications for financiers and governments, emphasizing designs that account for political incentives and strengthen transparency and oversight.

Chapter 5 focuses on Ghana, one of Africa’s most institutionalized democracies, and contrasts its relatively balanced allocation of development finance with the regional favoritism observed in Zambia. Ghana’s stable two-party system – dominated by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) – is characterized by cross-ethnic coalitions. While the NDC has traditionally drawn support from the Volta region and the Muslim North, and the NPP from the Akan-dominated Ashanti region, ethnic fragmentation has encouraged both parties to target swing regions through strategic resource allocation. Ghana’s political landscape is shaped by a commitment to ethno-regional balance in leadership and efforts to institutionalize regional equity, which curtail ethnic favoritism. Decentralization and broad-based representation further incentivize parties to compete in swing constituencies. Despite ongoing challenges such as rent-seeking and rising debt, Ghana’s independent institutions and vibrant civil society help constrain ethnic favoritism – offering a stark contrast to Zambia’s declining accountability during its democratic transition.

Chapter 8 extends the analysis beyond South Africa to explore the activities of protest brokers in other contexts. While previous chapters focused exclusively on South Africa to develop and test the theory in depth, this chapter argues that protest brokers are not unique to that setting. Drawing on original data from Ghana and Malawi, as well as secondary evidence from Argentina, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Uganda, it demonstrates that intermediaries who organize protest on behalf of elites can be found globally. The chapter presents three main findings. First, individuals who function as protest brokers – connecting elites to communities – exist in a variety of countries. Second, these brokers differ in their relationships with elites and communities in ways consistent with the typology developed earlier in the book. Third, variation in broker characteristics correlates with predictable differences in protest across these different contexts. While not offering a comprehensive cross-national study, this chapter provides initial comparative evidence that protest brokers are a widespread phenomenon, suggesting that the theoretical framework developed here has broad relevance for understanding global patterns of protest mobilization.