Parallelism in democracy: A special historic relationship between Ghana and USA

The tortious parallelism of the contemporary taste of democracy between Ghana and the United States is reaching a crescendo by the end of this year, 2020 AD.

Consequently, the Americans are singing a song that most Ghanaians are just humming in their heads. Nonetheless, there are myriads of a milieu of parallelism between these two countries: (1) The USA, touting herself as a global authority in, and police-teacher of democracy, and (2) Ghana claiming an undisputed continent-wide premiership in democracy and as the first Sub-Saharan country to gain independence, or as we say, the first country, South of the Sahara to kick the Brits out.

Anyway, the following are a few of the said similarities or parallelisms between the United States of America and the Republic of Ghana.

Firstly, Ghana and the United States go to the polls to elect their respective Presidents in the same intercalary year or a leap year. Secondly, both countries’ political space have been dominated by two parties: the DNC or the US Democratic Party, The Donkey, is paralleled by NDC, Ghana’s National Democratic Congress, The Umbrella.The US Republican Party, the Elephant (the Grand Old Party, or The GOP) is paralleled by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the Elephant, (note the Elephant which further signifies à symbolic parallelism). But please note this, DNC in the US, and then NDC in Ghana what an anagram?

Thirdly, since 1992 when Ghana successfully ushered in her 4th Republic and chose to be consciously democratic, whenever the Democrats were in power in the US, the Democrats (NDC) were also in power in Ghana, and the same applied to the Republicans and the NPP.

To wit:

° First democratic pair, Clinton-Rawlings (1992-2000)

- First Republican pair, Bush-Kufuor (2001-2008)

- Second Democratic pair, Obama-Atta-Mills/Mahama (2009-2016), and

- Second Republican pair, Trump-Akufo-Addo (2017 – to date).

Apart from the nuances associated with the handling of the pandemic by the current Presidents of both countries, what is even more intriguing in this year of COVID-19 is that both the DNC and the NDC made history by fielding in a running mate who is a woman, thereby creating the grounds and the unique opportunity and possibility for the first female Vice President in either country: Sen. Kamala Harris for the United States and Prof.

Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang for Ghana. If this happens for both countries, their histories will have been aligned once again, and that would make the Republican and NPP Governments a one-term story respectively in both countries. Anyway, politics has always proven to be a funny animal and wishes have never been horses.

While November 3, 2020, will decide that for the US, December 7, 2020, will decide it for Ghana. With Joe Biden leading by double-digit points, will whatever happen in the US have any influence on Ghana and thus be replicated?

Or is it time to disrupt the sequence of Parallelism associated with the political history of both countries? Relax, time will tell.