Osiakwan, Eric

Internet, Democracy and Politics In Ghana

Abstract

The Internet has been an indispensable tool in every aspect of our lives and a critical driving force in this age. In a developing nation like Ghana, the Internet offers enormous opportunities and in our recent 2000 election and the 1st Ghana Web Awards, we saw the integration of the Internet into our democratic and political system with highly evident outputs that shows signs of a new paradigm in accordance with emerging global trends.

Ghana's 2000 Election and Internet (ICT); Impact Assessment With respect to the 2001 elections we could identify how government and private sector engineered the integration of ICT into the entire process. In the government sector, the Electoral Commission (EC) got assistance from the US government through USAID to purchase and deploy 33 computers units, a server, printers, networking materials and software in a Wide Area Network (WAN). The network linked the (EC) headquarters to all its 10 regional offices and was used extensively for information collective, processing, dissemination and storage before, during and after the elections. Local companies were contracted to do the job of networking, content integration and developing of software for collection of voter data and displaying it on the EC website located at www.ec.gov.gh. The network helped to collate data which was sent via e-mail to the headquarters and that helped avoid transcription errors and earlier assembling of information which were certified and placed in the database for display on the EC website for the general Internet community. Significant was the development of an information system by the National Media Commission to monitor the media during the election and this instigated a lot of electronic activity among the local media (Print, Audio and Audio Visual). The system also had a web interface (www.mediamonitornmc.com) where regular updates of findings were made available.

The private sector also played a critical role since most content developing sites like Joyonline, Ghanaclassifieds, NCS, Africaonline, Netafrique etc developed specific websites to highlight and build synergy before, during and after the elections. Some of the websites developed where located at www.myjoyonline.com , www.ghanaelections.com, www.politicsinghana.com , www.ghananewsroom.com/election2000 etc. Soft Ghana Ltd also developed a vote collection software called ŒABATO' (voting) which was used by most of the content house to post election results on their sites. Some of the content providers also developed their own software for collecting the voting data and all these made a single impact; regular and timely updating of the election results online. Some of the local ISPs also played a significant role by laying pipes with high bandwidth to terminate the web traffics. Though all the sites were picking the election results as provided by the EC, it was interesting to notice that most of the private web interfaces had more current updates of their sites than the EC`s.

The political parties and some parliamentary candidates were also aggressively using the virtual space to fuel their election message. The dominant parties namely National Democratic Congress (NDC) and National Patriotic Party (NPP) located their official websites at www.ndc.org.gh and www.nppghana.com respectively to catch the attention of the virtual world. Dr. Kwesi Ndoum also located a personal campaign website at www.ndoum.com indicating his parliamentary intentions in cyberspace. The above efforts of ICT integration before, during and after the election resulted in 1. Mass publicity of the 2000 election in Ghana to the real and virtual world. 2. Development of local IT expertise and capacity 3. Integration of a new IT culture into the local democratic system 4. Transparency and accountability in the exercise of franchise as well as avoidance of transcription error. 5. Faster and early collation of election data 6. Effective monitoring of the media during the elections resulting in its best output. 7. Generation of local interest in IT and especially the Internet. 8. Development of local content and applications 9. Promotion of Intercultural exchanges 10. The overall excellent change of power from one government to the other.

1st Ghana Web Awards An initiative of the Excellence Awards Company with Deloitte and Touché as the process adjudicators, one of the principal focus of the whole process was to empower and generate interest in the online community and also engineer an online voting system as a step in keeping up with the global phenomenon started by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers (ICANN). As a member of the National Planning Committee of the first Ghana Web Awards we resolved to get Rancard Solutions developed an online voting system called Secure Online Voting Engine (SOVE) for the public to use in the peoples` choice wards.

There were two types of awards for each category namely the ProWeb Awards and the Peoples` Choice Award. The first was determined by the Judges which where chosen for each category whiles that later was done through as online voting system.

Secure Online Voting Engine (SOVE) was the technology with the objective of making the online voting easy as well as avoiding multiple voting. The system was built on e-mail infrastructure and hence the limits revolved around that.