What Ghana Can Learn From Taiwan

In many countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, political candidates try to secure votes by offering the electorate money and gifts, and by making donations—a practice known as vote-buying.

In recent years, vote-buying has taken a more pernicious form in Ghana and is now predominantly observed during political party primaries for the election of parliamentary and presidential candidates. Although vote-buying continues with regular voters to some extent, it is more intense in the party primaries stage—meaning that voters stand little to no chance of getting deserving candidates to choose from.

It has become standard practice for many candidates to offer party delegates exorbitant sums of money and a wide range of gifts, including large-screen TVs, fridges, bags of fertilizer, and food items. In the past, modest offers would have been made discreetly, but now, the gifts are openly distributed without any sense of guilt or concern about getting arrested. Some delegates brazenly demand to be “paid” for their votes and threaten voting against candidates who do not grease their palms.

They defend the monies given to them as compensation for their transportation to the voting premises and their time spent, as well as their support for the party.

There are good reasons that vote-buying has polluted Ghana’s electoral process at the primaries stage. The delegates’ insistence on “cashing out” early is actually their vote of no confidence in the political candidates whom they have come to expect to underdeliver on campaign promises to grow the economy and provide public goods such as jobs and infrastructure. Indeed, the delegates have grown accustomed to seeing politicians rapidly accumulate wealth after taking office and therefore feel compelled to grab their share while they can.

Political candidates, meanwhile, feel that they have no other choice than to cave in to the demands of delegates. Winning political office in Ghana is an extremely high-stakes affair, due to the winner-takes-all system in place that rewards ruling party elites and their relations or associates with all the spoils, to the exclusion of the opposition and the general populace.

But by choosing to be gratified in the short-term, the delegates in effect squander or limit whatever chance there is of attracting capable and incorruptible Ghanaians into politics. Lots of brilliant Ghanaians who would otherwise want to serve the country avoid getting involved in domestic politics because they don’t want to get their hands dirty.

Running for political office has become the preserve of the rich and well-connected, who can fund their own campaigns, take out bank loans, and obtain additional financial support from friends and family members. Illegitimate sources of funding are also exploited; there have been reports of parties and candidates diverting state resources toward their campaigns and using funds from other questionable sources. A 2021 report by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development estimated the cost for a candidate contesting a parliamentary primary and a parliamentary general election to be a total amount of 4 million Ghana cedis ($693,000 at the time the report was compiled).

That amount included funds spent on voters in the constituency and on campaigns for the election of party executives and coordinators, over a period of about three years before the primary. According to the same report, a presidential candidate will need to raise $100 million to run for office—a hefty sum for a country classified by the World Bank as lower-middle income, with a GDP per capita of $2,422 in 2021.

The delegates’ expectation that elected candidates will serve their own interests consequently becomes self-fulfilling. When certain candidates are victorious, their first order of business is recouping and profiting off the huge investments that they and their benefactors made. Patronage becomes the order of the day, and juicy, inflated contracts are awarded to benefactors and supporters. It’s little wonder, then, that one of the gold smugglers in Al Jazeera’s “Gold Mafia” exposé (which revealed gold-smuggling operations and money-laundering schemes emanating from Southern Africa) admitted to winning contracts from the Ghanaian government and paying off portions of the contract sums to Ghanaian politicians.

The report from the Center for Democratic Development also confirmed suspicions and allegations about electoral campaigns being funded by dirty money from illicit activities such as illegal gold mining (known locally as galamsey). Despite the government’s promises to end galamsey, which continues to devastate Ghana’s forests and pollute rivers to the ire of many Ghanaians, the practice continues—ostensibly because the major beneficiaries are political players and financiers.

Under Ghana’s Political Parties Act, passed in 2000, political parties are required to report the sources of their funds but not the actual names of donors. Party income can thus fall under categories such as membership dues and donations from party sympathizers. The law also does not require candidates to disclose the amount of funding they receive. There is no limit to the amount of money that a single donor can contribute to a party or candidate, nor is there a limit to the amount that parties or candidates can spend on campaigns. In addition, the loose legislation is scarcely enforced by the Electoral Commission or the attorney-general, causing vote-buying to spiral out of control.

While the 1992 Representation of the People Law cites vote-buying as an electoral offense, there is some ambiguity over whether party primaries count as public elections, given that they are not open to the general public. This lack of clarity has raised doubts about whether vote-buyers and sellers in party primaries can be prosecuted under the law.

Still, the country’s special prosecutor recently effected the arrest of the chief executive of the National Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme on allegations that he dug into funds from the program’s coffers to bribe delegates into voting for him during his constituency’s parliamentary primaries. The special prosecutor also issued a notice in December declaring some delegates wanted for suspected vote-buying; those delegates had been filmed flaunting the cash they received for their votes. The outcome of these cases will indicate how prepared Ghana is to clamp down on vote-buying and whether more robust laws need to be passed against the practice.

Ghana can draw inspiration from Taiwan, another young democracy, which began aggressively cracking down on vote-buying in 1994—leading to convictions and jail terms for many ruling party members. Increasing numbers of politicians were indicted and convicted in subsequent years as the public threw its support behind the campaign and made anti-corruption a major election issue, forcing political parties to show their commitment to tackling vote-buying. Taiwan’s electoral law also banned persons convicted of electoral bribery from running in subsequent elections.

From the start of the crackdown, the Taiwanese Justice Ministry recognized the role of the country’s culture in the vote-buying menace, and it thereby embarked on a simultaneous campaign to promote civic pride and educate citizens on the dangers of vote-buying. Cash rewards were also presented to citizens who reported vote-buying cases.

But the most impactful measure to root out vote-buying was Taiwan’s parallel fight against corruption as a whole. As Justice Minister Ma Ying-jeou remarked in 1996, “… corruption and election bribery are actually twins. Once people get elected by bribery, they always want to get the money back while still in office.”

Taiwan’s strategy appears to have paid off. While vote-buying still persists in some rural areas, the practice has been largely extinguished. Meanwhile, Taiwan has maintained a consistently strong showing on the annual Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International, notching the 28th position out of 180 countries and territories rated in the 2023 ranking. The Taiwanese government attributed this feat to its efforts to crack down on corruption, notably its success in cleaning up corruption in public procurement and the enforcement of the act requiring civil servants and elected officials to declare their assets.

Brazil also offers relevant lessons for Ghana. The Brazilian laws against vote-buying were rarely enforced for decades. But in the late 1990s, with the guidance of civil society organizations, more than 1 million Brazilians signed a petition against the practice, leading to the passage of Law 9840 in 1999. The new law—which was the first to be passed by popular initiative in Brazil—categorized vote-buying as an electoral infraction and ramped up prosecutions against violators. Vote-buying became the principal reason that politicians were ousted from office, with more than 1,000 expulsions recorded from 2000 to 2011.

Law 135, known as the Clean Slate Law, was also passed by popular initiative in 2010 to ban persons convicted of criminal offenses from contesting elections for eight years. It was this law that precluded now-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from running in the country’s 2018 presidential election following his conviction for corruption and money laundering. Lula was able to contest the presidency in 2022 because his corruption convictions were annulled in 2021 after Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that the case against him was tried in a court that lacked jurisdiction. The Supreme Court also later ruled that the judge who convicted him was biased, in effect throwing out the evidence that could have been used against Lula in a new trial.

But unlike in Taiwan, vote-buying remains rampant in Brazil. Corruption continued to flourish in Brazil, so the incentives to continue the practice remained high for politicians, many of whom adapted their modus operandi by paying voters after elections and maintaining clientelist relationships. Brazil has continuously dipped in the Corruption Perception Index as major corruption scandals have come to light; the country made a poor showing at the 104th position in the 2023 ranking. Had Brazil tackled corruption together with vote-buying, it likely would have made significant inroads against both vices, just as Taiwan has.

Ghana should also heed the increasing calls for political parties to conduct open primaries among party members. Although party members are supposed to pay dues, most members no longer pay at all. The Center for Democratic Development study found that both of the leading political parties obtain less than 1 percent of their funding from membership dues. Several party executives and governance experts believe that expanding the voter pool to include all registered party members will end vote-buying during party primaries by eliminating the need to bribe delegates. Moreover, it will be difficult and exceedingly costly—if not impossible—for corrupt politicians who favor buying votes to bribe the large numbers of voters required to win in an open primary system.

Cleaning up the electoral processes of Ghana’s political parties is imperative in order to attract the best-caliber Ghanaians into politics and redirect politicians’ loyalties and service toward the Ghanaian people.

However, winning the fight against vote-buying will ultimately require a full-scale Taiwanese-style battle against corruption that makes electoral bribery unprofitable for politicians.