| | After 11 years of populist, military rule under Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings and his Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), Ghana held elections for a transition to democracy in late 1992, and inaugurated its Fourth Republic on 7 January 1993. Ghana and Rawlings' PNDC regime are perhaps most famous today for the extended, comprehensive structural adjustment economic reform program that the country launched in 1983, generally lauded as adjustment's and the World Bank's premier 'success story' . Authoritarianism allowed the PNDC a relatively free reign in its management of politics and economics, but today the adjustment program continues under different, democratic circumstances. How has the need to press ahead with adjustment affected democratic politics in Ghana? How has democracy affected the adjustment program? As the new Republic nears its fourth year, these are appropriate questions. |
