Fred M. Hayward

Political Legitimacy, Political Symbols and National Leadership in West Africa

This study focuses on the relationship between political symbols and the legitimation of national leadership in Ghana, Guinea, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. We are particularly interested in ways in which their leaders have used myths and symbols in an attempt to foster or enhance the legitimacy of their regimes in the face of severe economic and political crises.

A Reassessment of Conventional Wisdom About the Informed Public: National Political Information in Ghana.

This study examines the extent, impact and implications of political information in Ghana using survey data. A major interest is to identify and examine variables which influence level of information and to look at the consequences for the political process of different levels of political information. I examine conventional wisdom concerning the ignorance of the masses about national politics and call into question some common assumptions. Many of the differences usually assumed between developed and underdeveloped nations are found either not to exist or to be smaller than hypothesized. The data suggest that in some areas of national political information the masses in non-modernized societies are more politically aware than their counterparts in modernized societies. It is also suggested that there is no necessary link between education (literacy) and political information and that there are a number of functional equivalents to formal education. In the last section of the study several propositions about the informed citizenry are discussed.

POLITICAL LEADERSHIP, POWER, AND THE STATE: GENERALIZATIONS FROM THE CASE OF SIERRA LEONE

The early scholarship on post-independence Africa contained a decided focus on and preoccupation with political leadership. This emphasis was due in part to the fact that political leaders were particularly visible embodiments of the state and that the institutions of the state were much more amorphous and elusive of analysis than the leadership. Even political parties, which were the focus of a great deal of research in the late fifties and early sixties, were examined much more in the context of political leadership than of institutional structures or their relationship to the state. This focus on political leaders was based on the expectation by both writers and political leaders themselves that the new political elites of Africa were going to transform the political, economic, and social life of these states in the very near future. These views were not just functions of the romanticism of the sixties, but were expectations grounded in beliefs about selfgovernment, freedom, participation, self-determination, and development. Political leaders were seen as the key to mobilization of the masses (Apter, 1963: xv, 303-5; Pye, 1962: 27-28), the driving force for development (Apter, 1967: 378-79), the architects of institution building (Huntington and Moore, 1970: esp. 32; Huntington, 1968), and the focus of national integration (Coleman and Rosberg, 1964). They were to provide a new moral leadership, a short-cut to political and economic development, and the drive and charisma to move the post-colonial state from its period of suspended animation into the twentieth century. These were days of heady optimism and high expectations and, while not all political leaders were said to possess such characteristics, those like the Nkrumahs, the Senghors, the Nyereres, the Nassers, and the Houphouet-Boignys were endowed with remarkable power and charged with Herculean tasks. Looking back at the record of political leadership some fifteen to twenty years later, we find the results disappointing. The discrepancies between expectations and reality are striking. Where mobilization occurred it was largely for election to office rather than inclusior in the political process, or for brief development efforts which either failed or benefited few. Institutions changed, yet often not for the general good. The expected economic miracles seemed never to materialize. Even those who seemed to offer moral leadership, progressive ideas, and heroic personal efforts appear to have failed to make substantial progress in either nation-building or development. While there were a few exceptions, the general pattern is clear.

Perceptions of Well-being in Ghana: 1970 and 1975

A sense of well-being has been associated in the literature with a wide variety of political phenomena, attitudes, and behavior including stability (Gurr, 1970: 14854), optimism about future development (Gallup, 1976), satisfaction with government (Hayward, 1974: 184-85), political power (Owusu, 1970: 325-31), and participation (Ross, 1975: 119). Low levels of well-being have been associated with conflict and instability (Gurr, 1970: ch. 2), hostility toward government (Templeton, 1966), and cynicism (Schatzberg, 1977: ch. 4). This paper explores the relationship between sense of well-being and a number of such political phenomena in Ghana in 1970 and 1975. Although there is a sizeable literature on well-being in western nations, there has been very little research on this subject elsewhere. Most of what we know or think is known about well-being and politics in Africa is based on extrapolations from studies of western political systems or on conventional wisdom about the role of well-being in African politics. This study is designed to investigate well-being as perceived by the individual in Ghana. The distribution of perceptions of well-being within the sample population will be looked at, views about the relationship of national government to well-being will be explored, and its relationship to political attitudes, attachments, behavior, and evaluation of government will be examined. The study is based on two systematic surveys carried out by the author in 1970 and 1975 in six Ghanaian communities (see Appendix for description of the sample). The two surveys are based on random samples carried out in the same sample areas. Although this was not a national survey, a number of characteristics of the sample populations approximate that shown in the national census allowing cautious speculation about the Ghanaian populace. The major focus of this paper is on change over time and in this sense the data are comparable, randomly selected, and based on identical interview schedules (with a few exceptions which are noted). This is, sadly, one of the few cases of replication and of longitudinal analysis in Africa.

Changing Electoral Patterns in Sierra Leone: The 1982 Single-Party Elections

The electoral process in Sierra Leone has changed substantially over the last twenty years from one operating in the context of a competitive multi-party system to one defined by the formal establishment of a one-party state in 1978 with elections under those rules in 1982. The former was often cited as a model of democratic competition; the latter was established to overcome problems the political elite felt resided in multi-party competition. In this sense, Sierra Leone was not unlike many other African states (including Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Ivory Coast) which had moved to de facto or de jure single-party systems. The earlier effectiveness of the multi-party system in Sierra Leone, which saw the opposition party defeat the party in power, makes this a particularly interesting case for examining the electoral process in a singleparty context in general. This study focuses on the 1982 election in Sierra Leone and its implications for the political process. Of particular importance are the changes which occurred as the country moved from a political system which fostered competition between parties to one in which electoral competition was to be within the framework of the single-party system. The move to a one-party state had obvious consequences for the electoral process. Less obvious are the implications for electoral competition, campaign strategy, the legitimacy of the government, and the nature of participation in elections. The creation of a one-party state is often seen as an exercise in elite control of the masses (Hermet et al., 1978: vii) with elections functioning as part of the process of manipulation and control (Edelman, 1971; Collier, 1982).