Tensions Rise for Ghana’s 2024 Elections
America isn’t the only one with a tense 2024 election year. Ghana has a constitutionally mandated election date of December 7 every four years, which falls on Saturday this year. The issue might be inconvenient for some but with the limitations of in-person voting, Adventists remember 1997, when the last election day fell on a Sabbath, preventing them from voting. The relevance of this issue goes beyond a conflict of interest but poses serious political drawbacks since 800,000 citizens of Ghana are Seventh-day Adventists, which according to the Ghana Web make up 70% of the youth population. To have the majority of your citizens not make it to the polling booth on election day would cause ethical and political gridlock.
This time, the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Ghana submitted a memorandum to the Parliament of Ghana, calling for an amendment to the date of general elections in Ghana. Since the majority of the population are Sabbath keepers, they argue that not providing an accessible election day violates their religious liberty.
In a December 2021 submission to the Constitutional Review Committee, Southern Ghana Union Conference president Thomas Techie Ocran wrote that an amendment should rectify the current inflexibility regarding choosing and fixing general elections.
“An amendment as proposed above would make it possible for all Ghanaians to exercise their franchise and discharge their civic responsibility without being made to choose between their faith and civic responsibility,” Ocran wrote.
In the Adventist Review breakdown on the topic back in January 2022,
“The Constitution of Ghana vests the power to amend the constitution in Parliament. For an entrenched provision, like one on election dates, Parliament is required to submit the bill calling for a vote in a referendum of the amendment. At least three-fourths, or 75 percent of Parliament, needs to vote in support.”
In June 2021, Ghana President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo pledged to address religious liberty issues affecting Adventists in Ghana. However, three years later and on the threshold of election day, the pledge has turned out to be empty. In January 2024, the church members sent separate petitions to the Election Commission demanding reform. Other political parties in Ghana have ramped up their efforts to implore and in some cases threaten Adventist voters to show up on election day, claiming their civic duty outranks their spiritual duty. Many political leaders in the months leading up to this have stated that though they understand, they are unwilling to create an amendment since Ghana is a secular state.
Odeneho Kwaku Appiah, chairman of the New Patriotic Party, shared his thoughts on Facebook, sharing the importance of voting, and wrote that we must “cajole” the Adventist voters to show up on December 7, closing with
“Yes, the Sabbath Day holds deep spiritual significance for Adventists, but they know it was made to meet the needs of people, not the other way around.”
