In Ghana, the peace is so profound it can feel ordinary. It’s in the vibrant, unchecked debates on morning radio shows. It’s in the bustling markets where the day’s biggest worry is the price of tomatoes. It’s in the quiet acceptance when a government is voted out, and the seamless, unremarkable transfer of power that follows.
This peace is not an absence of sound, but the presence of a profound order, a hard-won normal that much of the world, and especially its neighbors, can only dream of.
To understand the value of this peace, one must first listen to the ghosts of Ghana’s past. The democracy we enjoy today was not a gift; it was a prize wrested from the jaws of decades of instability. The nation paid for it in a currency of sacrifice, years lost under military rule, voices silenced by censorship, and the lives of those who stood for the simple, radical idea that a citizen’s vote should count.
The journey to becoming Africa’s “bastion of democracy” was paved with coups and counter-coups, economic despair, and the long, dark night of political oppression. The peace Ghanaians enjoy today is not a starting point, but a destination reached after a long and painful pilgrimage.
This hard-earned stability shines all the brighter when you look beyond our borders. Just two days ago, in Guinea-Bissau, the fragile calm was shattered by a violent military uprising, a stark reminder that the threat of the gun is never far away. This follows the unsettling trend across the region.
In the Sahel, from Mali to Burkina Faso and Niger, the familiar, grim script of the coup is back. Soldiers in fatigues appear on state television, citing “insecurity” and “governance failure” as they dissolve constitutions. Further south, Madagascar is still grappling with the political and economic aftershocks of the coup that ousted its government just this past October.
The social contract between citizen and state, already frayed, is being severed by force across the continent.
Into this vacuum, a new actor has confidently stepped: Russia. Through its Wagner Group and similar entities, it offers a potent, cynical bargain.
In exchange for access to resources and strategic influence, it provides regimes with a toolkit of coercion, security forces and disinformation campaigns. It peddles a simple, seductive narrative: that the messy, slow work of democracy is a Western imposition, and that a strong, authoritarian hand is the only true path to sovereignty and order. It is a narrative that preys on legitimate frustration with corruption and poverty, offering a false shortcut that leads only to deeper dependency and violence.
Against this backdrop of regional fire, Ghana’s democracy is not just a political system; it is a national treasure. It is the collective answer to the siren song of the strongman. It is the living memory of past sacrifices ensuring we do not romanticise the “efficiency” of military rule.
It is the understanding that true sovereignty is not found in surrendering freedoms to a foreign power for security, but in building a nation where the people’s will be the ultimate authority.
The debates in Ghana are fierce, the political frustrations real, and the challenges immense. But these are the sounds of a society that is alive, arguing, and striving, not one silenced by gunfire in Guinea-Bissau or subjugated by foreign mercenaries in the Sahel.
The peace we enjoy is not passive; it is an active, daily achievement. It is the quiet miracle, paid for in full by the struggles of the past that allows a nation to face its future on its own terms.
Source: Kwadwo Nettey