Adverse winds harangued the soul of electoral democracy penultimate week in the United States, widely touted as the world’s leading democracy, and in Ghana, rated a stable democracy in West Africa. In both cases, circumstances showed that it takes noble character on the part of power actors and keeping faith with existing laws to safeguard the political health of society.

Chaotic scenes erupted in the Ghanaian parliament late Wednesday, January 6, after a member of the legislature and minister of state from the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) tried to seize the ballot box during a vote to choose the parliament speaker. The backdrop to that encounter was the December 7, 2020 general election in Ghana that left the country with a hung parliament: the 275-member legislature split at 137 seats apiece between the NPP and opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), while the remaining single seat was picked by an Independent. NPP flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo, was returned in that election for a second term as the country’s president with a narrow margin of 51.59 percent of the votes over NDC candidate and former president, John Mahama, who polled 47.37 percent.

In the bedlam witnessed in the Ghanaian parliament and broadcast live on national television, soldiers entered the legislative chambers to break up a scuffle between rival lawmakers during the vote to choose their speaker, few hours before Akufo-Addo was scheduled to take his oath on Thursday. Television footage showed the parliamentarians in partisan square-off, some with clenched fists in the air after the NPP topshot tried to seize the ballot box while votes were being counted during the balloting held overnight Wednesday, from which Alban Bagbin of opposition NDC emerged parliament speaker. The ensuing clash in which the parliamentarians pushed and shoved one another lasted until the army stepped in, reportedly at the invitation of partisans. The incident was widely condemned as shameful across Ghanaian political spectrum and beyond.

Few hours earlier that same Wednesday, supporters of outgoing American President Donald Trump had stormed U.S. Capitol in Washington to obstruct the constitutional process of Congress certifying the results of the country’s November 3, 2020 general election that threw up President-elect Joe Biden as winner. Following the November poll, the Electoral College had formally voted on December 14 to confirm projections of Biden’s victory with 306 electoral votes to Trump’s  232 (270 are needed to win the presidency). In line with American law, members of Congress had met January 6 to tally and certify the electoral votes. Historically, both the voting by the Electoral College and Congress certification of those votes were largely ceremonial steps that hardly attracted public attention. But with Trump having refused to concede the election despite losing multiple lawsuits across U.S. states by which he alleged poll fraud, besides other failed manoeuvres to overturn the poll results, those ceremonial layers of the electoral process assumed unusual significance in ascertaining the final score line of the 2020 poll.

The unruly mob of Trump supporters invaded Congress sitting, presided over by Vice President Mike Pence who under American law is also the Senate president, and momentarily scuttled its vote tallying and certification proceedings after a standoff with security agents in which five persons were reported killed. Prior to that session, Trump had pressured Pence in private and openly to leverage his position and abort the results certification, but Pence declined to play ball, prompting the mob’s recourse to obstructing the whole process at suspected instigation of Trump. Although Congress reconvened later same day to finish collating the electoral votes and eventually certified Biden’s win, the celebrated credential of America as the world’s beacon of democracy got so badly defaced.

The experiences in Ghana and the U.S. proved the point that the behaviour of power actors ultimately determine a country’s political character, and that political systems are only as good as the people operating them. Ghana, for instance, is widely regarded a stable democracy in volatile West Africa because the country has conducted eight general elections since its return to democracy some 30 years ago, and power has smoothly alternated between centre-right NPP and centre-left NDC. The recent scuffle in parliament that incurred momentary intervention by the military marked “history wrongly being made,” as an incoming member put it, adding: “We need to bow our heads in shame.”

The case of the U.S. is even more illustrative. The Trump effect on its political culture showed that where a typically decent system falls under the hand of a roguish actor, that system itself would likely become roguish – if only for the duration the rogue actor holds fort. Some people would argue that Trump is only the face of the racist underbelly of America, backlashing against demographic shifts that have become the reality of that historically liberal society. Even then, he is nonetheless at odds with established norms of his country.

For us in Nigeria, lessons to pick include: (i) Voters have the onus to make well-reasoned choices as would prevent their country falling into the hands of errant leaders who could set back rather than advance the journey of nationhood, and (ii) We must build up our institutions to have capacity to checkmate rogue power actors, just the way U.S. institutions were able to contain Trump’s deviance.

(iii) it is good people who help institutions rather than the other way. But for good men, democracy could have taken a different turn.