Ghana not ready for female president – Professor Mensah-Bonsu

The world is celebrating women on International Women’s Day (IWD), but Ghana is not ready to celebrate a woman as the country’s President.

This was the verdict of a law professor, Henrietta Mensah-Bonsu, during a Joy News interaction on the possibility of a woman leading the country soon.

“As for [a] female president, yes. It will be nice [but] I don’t think Ghana is ready,” she stressed.

The closest a woman has come to contesting for the keys to the Jubilee House was in 2016 when the former first lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, ran for president  on the ticket of the National Democratic Party (NDP). Her ambitions drew a comparison to others in developed democracies with the UK’s Telegraph newspaper describing her as ‘The Hillary Clinton of Africa’.

Her performance was abysmal as she tried to make strides with a paltry 0.16% of the total votes cast. She had earlier broken ranks with the NDC to establish her own party.

Described by political pundits as the iron lady of Ghana politics, she had before exiting the NDC embarked on a daring mission to unseat President J.E.A. Mills as the NDC’s presidential candidate for the 2012 presidential election. Mills who will later die in office, before the 2012 general election, garnered  96.9% of the vote cast.

Madam Akua Donkor of the Ghana Freedom Party (GFP) and Samia Yaba Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana’s first president, are the other women who have exhibited the desire for a presidential bid.

In Ghana, women are usually left on the fringes of decision making and find it tough to break through the male-dominated arena of bullish partisan politics.

Political parties have taken measures such as reducing filing fees and lower financial commitments compared to their male counterparts, but these have not had a major impact due to cultural bottlenecks.

According to Professor Mensah-Bonsu, women “could do better, but on a whole, there is a lot more awareness on female capabilities.”

She is “convinced that with persistence and with time we will have the parity that we are talking about it”.