George M. Bob-Milliar

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• B.A. (Hons) Ph.D.
• Associate Professor at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

This note seeks to bring awareness to the wide variety of archival documents available for research in urban history in Kumase, Ghana’s second city and capital of the historic Asante Kingdom. We draw mainly on our experiences researching the history of Jackson Park, one of colonial Kumase’s earliest public parks.

This paper constructs the intellectual histories of learned societies in Ghana to illuminate African agency in pursuing knowledge production and dissemination. Academics and politicians founded some of Africa’s first scientific societies in Ghana. Previous scholarship on scientific research and higher education in Africa has overlooked the role of...

Students’ relations with postindependence Ghanaian military regimes have generally been portrayed as positive, yet comparative analysis of the relational dynamics across regime types—military and civilian—is inadequate. This article addresses this knowledge gap using a historical content analytic approach based on original archival and interview da...

Transforming Africa's urban environment became the preoccupation of colonial administrators from the 1920s onwards. Ceremonial grounds, sports parks, and town halls emerged within the context of modernizing postconquest Asante society. Kumase's public spaces and buildings enabled the colonial regime and traditional authorities to ritualize power an...

Campaign rallies serve as arenas of political communication where candidates present their campaign messages face-to-face in order to gain votes. This article suggests that rallies are one of several forms of campaign visits along with official business stops, courtesy calls to local notables, and personal interactions with constituents. Drawing on...

British imperialism bequeathed sports to former colonies. In the immediate postwar period, colonial bureaucrats intensified the modernization agenda in many of their colonial territories. The institution of horse racing was associated with the upper echelons of society in many colonies. In colonial Asante, the royals and capitalists of Kumase estab...

Why do young Muslim students who live in a relatively peaceful and pluralistic society like Ghana embrace extremist ideologies? This paper examines the radicalisation of young Muslims in Ghanaian universities. It analyses the different structural and managerial models adopted by three of the oldest public universities to govern students’ religious...

British imperialism bequeathed sports to former colonies. In the immediate postwar period, colonial bureaucrats intensified the modernization agenda in many of their colonial territories. The institution of horse racing was associated with the upper echelons of society in many colonies. In colonial Asante, the royals and capitalists of Kumase estab...

It is widely acknowledged that geographic data in Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa is patchy, and lack geographic coverage and detail. This has implications for mobility and access to socioeconomic, and cultural opportunities which require address and location data typically provided through geocoding. A critical component of geocoding is a refe...

The level of political trust in a country is an important factor for the survival of its political system. Many democratic states have experienced declines in political trust. In Ghana, lack of trust in opposition parties and many public institutions is widespread. Ghanaians trust religious organizations and traditional authorities more than politi...

This chapter aims to provide snapshots of Africa’s contributions to world civilization. Africans have contributed significantly to global history, however, much of it has been denied or suppressed by western gatekeepers. Africa’s precolonial history showed the existence of several civilizations. Western achievements in the fields of science and tec...

This study analysed the harnessing of ritual observances of death as part of livelihood strategies among the Asante of modern Ghana. It employed qualitative unstructured open-ended interviews supplemented by observation and interpretation of textual materials. Among other things, the findings of the study revealed that funeral celebrations over the...

What role does a commission of inquiry (COI) play in delivering accountability? In theory, when the public delegates power to political leaders to formulate and implement policies, they seek political accountability in return. Using Ghana as a case study, this study examines how the operations of COIs may deliver accountability. Principal–agent the...

This article ties the main issues raised in research notes that have been published by African Affairs. Research notes are dedicated to discussions of issues that arise in producing knowledge on Africa. These notes, drawn from rich experiences, tackle the above and other questions from various angles. The arguments and proposals presented are cruci...

This chapter analyzes transnational political activism since the formation of the modern state of Ghana. The dynamics of globalization and other transnational practices influences the political behaviour of Ghanaian migrants. From the mid-1970s many dissidents, political opponents or political activists flee across Ghana’s international borders. As...

The staying power of the Nkrumahist minor parties in an institutionalised two-party system is the specific puzzle that underlies this paper. It argues that post-election opportunities for party patronage remain important despite the persistently unsuccessful electoral strategies of the Nkrumahist minor. In national elections minor parties’ salience...

and Keywords Since the early 1990s, African states have been democratizing. Political parties now dominate the public spaces in many African democracies. The past 26 years have witnessed the growth and consolidation of "party democracy" in Africa. This is the longest period of uninterrupted growth of electoral politics in many countries on the cont...

The colonial history of neglect frames the development narrative of northern Ghana. Postcolonial critics emphasized the conscious neglect by the British imperial power and to some extent the post-colonial state. This paper seeks to deconstruct the narratives of the “blame-game,” by highlighting the economic potentials of the region, the contradicto...

Socio-environmental conditions influence party organizations and political behaviour in the different ecological zones of Africa. Party-branded sheds serve as a lens for understanding electoral politics in Ghana. Sheds are local spaces of political contestation and forums of political representation. They connect party and community symbolically by...

Repetitive elections are important benchmarks for assessing the maturity of Africa’s electoral democracies. Yet the processes through which elections entrench a democratic culture remain understudied. We introduce an important mechanism called a democratic rupture: an infraction in the democratisation process during competitive elections that has t...

In theory, plurality electoral systems do not favour the development of minor parties. Scholarly analysis of minor political parties has focused on their electoral performance in national elections, and very little is known about their candidate nomination behaviour at grassroots level. Why minor parties should compete in national elections within...

In this paper, we argue that democratic decentralization defined as the transfer of power and resources from central government to lower units of government to deliver downwardly accountable and responsive local representation does not entirely produce stronger local institutions for mass participation, good local governance and community developme...

Why did the Ghanaian state go to such extraordinary lengths to facilitate the reliable broadcast of the World Cup in 2014? During a period of frequent power outages, Ghana swapped power with regional neighbours and directed major domestic industries to reduce production in order to allow Ghanaians to watch their national soccer team compete in the...

Why did the Ghanaian state go to such extraordinary lengths to facilitate the reliable broadcast of the World Cup in ? During a period of frequent power outages, Ghana swapped power with regional neighbours and directed major domestic industries to reduce production in order to allow Ghanaians to watch their national soccer team compete in the...

The purpose of this paper is to question whether liberal democracy as practiced in Africa has any bearing on the growing number of the nouveau riche. Using Ghana as a case study, this paper explores a number of questions: what is the link between party politics and capital accumulation, and how is capital accumulated in non-capitalist environment?...

What political factors facilitate the provision of social protection programmes in recently democratized countries in Africa? This paper analyzes the politicization of social protection programmes in Ghana and Uganda by the ruling regimes. Whiles in Ghana the two main political parties – the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party...

Within the literature, there is growing concern about how competitive politics are contributing to electoral violence in Africa. The focus of scholars has been on large-scale organized political violence, referred to here as high-intensity electoral violence. This article fills a gap in the literature and introduces a “new” concept I call low-inten...

Citizens grant powers to rulers to design and implement policies. Political accountability is what citizens demand in return. As a result, political accountability has occupied a pride of place on the agenda of all political administrations that have governed Ghana. Political accountability has been narrowly conceptualized in terms of uses and appl...

This article is about pre-independence elections and the culture of party activism during the 1950s. It focuses on intra/inter-party competition, party activists, and the parties’ campaign strategies in Ghana in the latter years of the colonial era. Three multi-party elections were conducted between 1951 and 1956. Two categories of activists – vera...

In the early post-independence era, modernization theorists predicted the demise of the chieftaincy institution in Africa. The assumption was that the ‘traditional’ character of chieftaincy would make it unsuitable for the needs of the modern era. It was claimed that the outmoded institution would be replaced by westernized institutions of governan...

Ghana’s experience with political party development has diverged from the African norm. Since the early days of decolonization and right through the upheavals of the post-colonial period when the country alternated between civilian rule and military dictatorship, Ghana maintained a limited number of political parties but more importantly since the...

Migrants who return involuntarily and empty handed from violent conflict or through deportation often face huge challenges in re-establishing their lives in their countries of origin. The local reception of returnees and their personal resources are pertinent aspects of reintegration processes.

The euphoria of political independence in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was not accompanied by economic independence. Africa’s economic decline peaked in the mid-1970s. So grave was Africa’s economic decline during the 1980s that the period has generally been referred to as the “lost decade.” Standards of living plummeted in country after country,...

This paper analyzes the factors underpinning party youth activists’ involvement in aggressive politics in Ghana. The rank and file party youths, known as party foot-soldiers play various roles in the partisan process. Formal power allows incumbent parties to monopolize state resources, control appointments and dispense patronage. And in an environm...

Competition for the executive leadership of a political party and the distribution of state patronage in Ghana is influenced by factional alignments and group interests. In December 2008 the National Democratic Congress (NDC) regained political power, and within months rifts appeared over the allocation of ministerial portfolios. The intra-party mu...

This paper has two main aims. First, it explores the return of young Ghanaian migrants from Libya following the uprising in 2011. Secondly, the paper is interested in the role state agencies played in the repatriation and resettlement of returnees. Migrants from some 120 countries living in Libya were directly affected by the conflict. The breakdow...

Many sub-Saharan African countries have experienced their fourth and fifth rounds of elections; with each round, the participation of political parties and the competition between them have increased significantly. Despite these several rounds of competitive elections, however, Sub-Saharan Africa is still in a difficult process of transition where...

This article analyses the factors that influence some Ghanaians to join a political party and become active in the party. It seeks to illuminate the multi-dimensionality of the motivational basis of party activism in Ghana by exploring the following problematics: Why join the National Democratic Congress (NDC)/New Patriotic Party (NPP)? and Why be...

With the increasing consolidation of her democracy, Ghana has, once again, become a cause for celebration and a source of pride in Africa. This newfound status as the bellwether state of African democracy makes Ghana ripe for a critical analysis of her democratic institutions. This article places the handling of parliamentary primaries by the two l...

An analysis of multiple sources of evidence, including field interviews and non-participant observation, shows that the informal economy in Accra, Ghana has a complex relationship with the state, not only as a nuisance or employer, but also as an avenue to reward and punish political supporters and opponents. Although informal people are regularly...

This article analyses the reasons why, since the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1992, the Upper West Region (UWR) has become one of the strongholds of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in northern Ghana. In all five general elections to date, the NDC has won more than half of the presidential vote and over 70 per cent of the parliamentary...

Ghana’s December 2008 elections witnessed an atmosphere that was extremely tensed. What is the relationship between the time of exit of a government and rising tensions in the electioneering period? I will argue that political polarisation in contemporary Ghana is a bipolar hegemonic phenomenon between the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New...

On 22 December 2007, Delegates’ of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) elected Nana Akufo-Addo as the party’s presidential candidate for the 2008 general elections. This article examines the candidate selection process of the NPP in the context of a broader examination of the management of the macro-economy under the Kufuor’s presidency. Did the selectio...

This article is about the institution of the Nk suohene/hemaa and how it relates to African Americans. The Nk suo stool was created in 1985 by the late Asantehene, Otumfuo OpokuWare II, as a catalyst for development in Kumase and beyond. Since the 1990s, hundreds of African Americans and some white Westerners have been honoured with various royal t...