Ghana: An Island Of Stability

Ghana, an Island of Stability, Is Thriving But Wary of Encroaching Chaos GHANA Ghana In Adenta, a growing town near Accra, the capital of Ghana, the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora is heralded as a beacon of knowledge and culture. Library founder Sylvia Arthur said she started the library after becoming frustrated with the selection available in Ghana’s bookstores. Even the works of the country’s literary giants – Ayi Kwei Armah and Ama Ata Aidoo, for example – were nowhere to be found. “The bookstores were very vanilla,” she told Essence magazine. “It was all commercial fiction – Danielle Steel, Dan Brown, or business and religious books. None of it was relevant to the culture or the people of Ghana.” While Arthur has expanded the library to include poetry and children’s sections to accommodate demand, its core remains political, with the space hosting film screenings, discussions and debates. That openness reflects the spirit of Ghana, where a robust intellectual climate and vibrant artistic scene have flourished, even as military regimes have curtailed civic freedoms in other parts of the Sahel, the region south of the Sahara in West Africa. Ghana’s relative stability and prosperity, geography and location, as well as vigilance, have helped shield the country from insurgencies and military coups seen elsewhere in West Africa. Yet this sense of calm cannot be taken for granted, analysts say, warning that major challenges such as “entrenched” youth unemployment nationwide and stark inequality in northern Ghana must be addressed to prevent the unrest gripping its neighbors. The southward spread of Sahel-based militant groups has also raised concerns about spillover in the north of the country. For now, though, Ghana ranks among Africa’s most stable countries in the 2025 Africa Country Risk Instability Index (ACIRI) ranking. That stability is reflected in the country’s electoral record. Ghanaians regularly cast ballots in competitive elections and experience peaceful power transfers, unlike voters in Togo, Burkina Faso and other West African countries. Ghana has also avoided the security breakdown seen elsewhere in the region. It is not struggling to exercise control over vast swathes of the country that have been taken over by militants like Mali. It’s not requesting help battling insurgents from Moscow like Niger and other countries in the region have. Jihadist rebels have in recent years swept through Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger and are menacing their coastal neighbors, wrote the Economist. “But Ghana remains unscathed…(because of)…a mix of luck, competence and indifference.” Militants have been close to Ghana’s northern borders for years, occasionally crossing over, only to be repelled as was the case three years ago. Still, it’s been the aim of Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, a jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda and the most powerful in the Sahel, to expand southward into Ghana, Togo and Benin. So far, it has been restrained in Ghana. As a result, it has been localized ethnic conflicts over land and illegal mining that are usually the most serious security challenges that the country faces, for now, say analysts. Ghana is also moving in the right direction in its recovery from a severe macroeconomic and debt crisis, analysts say. The country’s economic recovery is “steadily gaining momentum, marked by a significant decline in inflation, an increase in international reserves, and a more resilient financial system,” according to the International Monetary Fund. President John Mahama also appears dedicated to managing the public funds responsibly, with his government recently clearing a crippling $1.47 billion in energy sector debt. Mahama is lucky, say observers – Ghana is the world’s sixth-largest ‌gold producer and the price of the metal is high and rising, according to Time magazine. Meanwhile, Mahama’s administration “has benefited from considerable public goodwill” because it acknowledged that the country was in severe economic distress instead of sweeping the issue under the carpet, said the Ghanaian Times in an editorial. Still, “rising utility tariffs and stubbornly high youth unemployment now stand as (its) glaring failures,” the editorial added, warning that “goodwill is not a blank cheque, and patience is not infinite.” And while corruption remains a serious problem, the administration has won some praise for pursuing graft cases through initiatives such as Operation Recover All Loot. Now, Ghana’s leaders must listen closely to its people, and avoid the buildup of economic and other grievances, or the country risks going the way of its neighbors, security analyst Emmanuel Sowatey warned after an attempted military coup in neighboring Benin last month, adding that “The strongest form of democratic stability is when the majority have a sense of future.”