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I would emphasize the need for a re-interpretation . . . of the factors which make up our past . . . African studies . . . in the West have been influenced by concepts of old style colonial studies . . . the study of the history, culture and institutions, languages and the arts of Africa in new African centred waysin entire freedom from the propositions and presuppositions of the colonial epoch . . . -Kwame Nkrumah 1European enlightenment culture and therefore unique to European experience take precedence over the experience of African Anthropologists who were expressing their scholarship from within African cultural realities?"Nowhere was this point made more imperative than the Inaugural speech delivered at the opening of the Institute of African Studies (see Note 1), he declared that this institute must surely . . . study the history, culture and institutions, languages and arts of Africa in new African centred ways-in entire freedom from the propositions and presuppositions of the colonial epoch . . . we must re-assess and assert the glories and achievements of our African past and inspire our generation, and succeeding generations, with a vision of a better future.

This paper explores the contentions surrounding the legal reasoning in the judicial review of Ghana’s 2012 presidential election petition and its electoral and legal implications. Due to the political nature of the electoral petition, the judiciary is dragged into the ‘live wire’ of electoral politics, which brings their credibility and legitimacy into question. This study argues that the adversarial nature of judicial review makes it more likely for defeated political actors to impugn political bias in the administration of electoral justice, instead of adhering to the higher constitutional principles of popular sovereignty and natural justice. Based on content analyses of the different principles and interpretive methods underpinning the adjudication of the election petition, it distils some implications for the direction of judicial reforms and the emerging electoral jurisprudence. The paper demonstrates that the excessive executive powers in the appointment of procedures of judges’ revealed major cracks in the practice of judicial review. In sum, this study makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution to the current debates on the role of constitutional courts in the consolidation of democratic governance in African states.

According to scholars of electoral governance, the compilation of an accurate, reliable, and transparent voters’ register constitutes a fundamental task for the conduct of peaceful, fair, and fair democratic elections. However, the generation of the final voter roll for the Ghanaian presidential election on December 7, 2020, was clouded with many controversies under the uncertain and restrictive health environment. Especially, considering the existing restrictive health regulations and requirements of the wearing of protective facemasks and the observation of social distance as dictated by the COVID-19 pandemic due to the absence of protective vaccines at that time. Based on the available primary and secondary evidence, this paper contends that the outright disregard for the observation (1 metre) social distance and the practice of other health precautions at the polling stations during this biometric voter registration exercise affected health security in terms of the containment of this global health pandemic in Ghana and the West African sub-region.

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