Days 6, 7 & 8: I Have Named My Desk “The Fourth Republic”  

My office desk also has a chair, which is no small deal. It is the best office chair I have ever seen. It has recline capabilities, and it is dressed in faux-leather. The fake leather does not sweat in the heat.

The heat is not so bad because the office has air conditioning. It is the only air-conditioned building that I know in Accra except for the Golden Tulip Hotel (which also uses water for superfluous purposes like a swimming pool and toilet bowls that flush).

This is my office: The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD) – a, foreign-sponsored, domestically administered, political think tank located in the New Airport District of Accra. You can’t tell from the picture, but there is a second newly-built four-story building behind the white one. That’s where I work. I’m on the Election Watch Commission, working to ensure that the December 2012 Federal and Parliamentary election in Ghana happens peacefully. There is genuine fear here that the election results, whatever they might be, will meet civil unrest. The discovery of oil in the west and increased fighting between the Asante and Ewe tribes (who tend to vote for the NPP and NDC parties respectively) is cause for concern.

Observation #6: Ghana Has Not Heard of Sleeping In    

Accra is hot, populated, and clad in only narrow streetways. The average Ghanaian businessperson is awake by four in the morning and on the road by six, keeping just ahead of the traffic and the sun. I am not nearly so prompt. But I am up by 6 a.m. and on the road by 6:45. I make it into the office by 7 a.m. and I check out at 6 p.m. I beat the morning traffic with a five minute carpool cab ride. And for those who judge the 4 km cab ride, remember that Ghana has no sidewalks. And the streets have impromptu holes for sewage. They are unpaved and uneven. And that I work in heels.

The office has a betting pool on how long it will take one of the interns to trip into a sewage hole. It happened to two of the McGill interns last year.

Observation #7: Interning is Static

Not to mention comprehensive. Before I can do any polling, any work with the Afro barometer, any inspection of election sites, any policy recommendations, reports – before I can even edit the English of any CDD document – I have 1,200 pages of background reading on the history of Ghanaian democracy (or military dictatorship: it’s a fifty year binary, with the exception of the Jerry Rawlings regime who served 9 years as a dictator and 8 years as a democratically-elected president. And yes, they were consecutive.) I need a thorough background on the ethnic demographics of Ghana, the history of ethnic conflict, constitutional reform, civil-military relations, the chieftain system (because in addition to the federal and local branches of government, Ghana also has traditional chiefs), and a background on election violence as well as the issues at stake in the election. After that, polling data from the elections since 1992 is advisable. I think there is a romanticism to reviewing data from every year since which I was born.

But before that, on my first day, I got sent to a Round Table conference on the politics of becoming an Oil Producing Nation (worries about the ‘resource curse’ with unnecessarily long comparison of Ghana to Tunisia's contemporary political climate. Because oil is the problem there). Then, I sat in on a constitutional review meeting. The people in that room were building the Fifth Republic from the weathered articles of the 1992 (Fourth) Constitution.

My job is almost as cool as the West Wing. Only the 90s instrumentals and elaborate banter are lacking.