Civil Society and Constitutional Reform in Africa: A Case of Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines, especially at such a momentous time when the country anticipates a significant constitutional overhaul, the role, both subtle and otherwise, that Civil Society groups have played in the drive towards the consolidation of democracy and constitutionalism in Ghana. It highlights the particular configuration of social and political forces mobilized to stake a claim in the current attempt at the titivation of constitutional/democratic rule in Ghana. Under scrutiny equally, is how the afore-determined configuration could prove to be intertwined with the nation’s international fate as it struggles to create a niche as Africa’s one true democracy. Ghana’s constitutional jurisprudence has long laboured under the perky shadow of the oft-repeated epiphanic assertion by its Supreme Court that “a written Constitution such as ours is not an ordinary Act of Parliament. It embodies the will of a people. It also mirrors their history. Account, therefore, needs to be taken of it as a landmark in a people’s search for progress. It contains within it their aspirations and their hopes for a better and fuller life. The Constitution has its letter of the law. Equally, the Constitution has its spirit. It is the fountain-head for the authority which each of the three arms of government possesses and exercises. It is a source of strength. It is a source of power. The executive, the legislature and the judiciary are created by the Constitution. Their authority is derived from the Constitution. Their sustenance is derived from the Constitution. Its methods of alteration are specified. In our peculiar circumstances, these methods require the involvement of the whole body politic of Ghana. Its language, therefore, must be considered as if it were a living organism capable of growth and development Indeed, it is a living organism capable of growth and development, as the body politic of Ghana itself is capable of growth and development.”Within the last decade, the need for a novel, reinforced and legitimate approach to tackling developmental issues has led to an awakening to the need to better free up national access trajectories to decision-making and civil society participation. Indeed recourse to rhetoric such as “constitutionalism’ and “good governance” now taking hold, reflects increasing recognition that developmental issues ought to receive cross-partisan, cross sectorial input; as well as the consolidation of public participation rights in constitutional decision-making towards measuring, analysing, and promoting more open and transparent governance. Yet civil society participation in the growth of constitutionalism in Ghana has been a tale of reconciled inconsistencies. Lacking a clear mandate, originality and often at wits end to assert that it is unsullied by existing partisan fault-lines and distribution of power, the post-colonial civil society machinery in Ghana has been condemned to reaction rather than proaction. On the other hand, civil society groups have since independence been navigating the torturous crevices between legitimacy and pragmatism and have ensured that the connection between constitutional governance and society has not being constructed in terms of a self-interested and atomistic consumption of legal rights but rather in an integrated social account of legitimation through active identification with, and support for, the structures which produce legal norms. Be that as it may, there is a tacit national consciousness to the effect that civil society activism remains yet the best alternative to bridging the gap between society and the structures of governance and to providing an intermediating civic sphere vital to a renewed national democratic dialogue and processes erected on collective will-formation.