Growing Pains of Budding Democracy by Kwasi Adu
Submitted by fosda on Thu, 09/10/2009 - 23:00.
INTRODUCTION
The history of elections in Ghana since 1992 has been about the contests between the main political parties: the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
The NPP has its roots in the United Party (UP), formed in 1958 from a group of ethnic-based parties in the Ashanti, Volta and Northern Regions of the country. The party believes in individual freedom, liberal democracy and a free enterprise system where the state and its resources are used to vigorously pursue private economic interests and properties.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC), on the other hand, arose out of the military regime of the Provisional National Defence Council (PDNC) that ruled Ghana from 1982 to 1992. 
Owing to the fact that the PNDC government, at the inception appeared to have a pro-working class orientation, many of the lower working classes and rural communities had been initially attracted to it until the regime abandoned this policy in favour of a course of action that embraced a dominant role for the local elite and the middle classes. In spite of that, rural communities and some urban working class individuals continued to support it. As a result of its initial “pro-ordinary people” claims, many people, who would normally have been supporters of the welfarist philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah's Convention People's Party (CPP) continued to associate with the NDC. In 2004, the NDC declared “social democracy” as its guiding principle.
