The death of president John Evans Atta Mills shocked the nation a few weeks ago. With the late leader's funeral now behind us, a sense of normalcy is slowly starting to return to Ghana. As the smoke clears, an altered but still hotly contested presidential race begins to come into focus. Before Atta Mills's passing, neither he nor his NPP opponent Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was a clear favorite. They had gone head to head in the 2008 election, and though Akufo-Addo won a plurality of the vote in the first round of elections, he lost the run-off election to Atta Mills by a margin of less than one percent. Coming up on this election season, the late president still enjoyed a considerable amount of popular support, but he had his fair share of problems too. Many voters were growing tired of inflation and the cedi's weakness relative to the dollar, not to mention the sometimes dramatic increases in the prices of commodities like staple foods. On top of this, the people of Ghana and the Atta Mills's presidency had to come to terms with the grim reality that the Jubilee oil field, productive as of 2010, would not be a cure-all for the nation's economic woes. In fact, the problems mentioned above have only intensified while the oil has been flowing. Should the NDC lose the presidency this election season, it will not be the first time that a party loses their grip on power with the economy looking sluggish. And earlier this election season, at a time when Atta Mills desperately needed intra-party unity, the wife of ex-president and NDC founder John Jerry Rawlings tried to take the party's nomination from the sitting president. Although Atta Mills crushed her in the primary, taking 96% of the vote, her attempt to seize power exposed rifts in the upper levels of the NDC. Clearly, this was poised to be a contentious election from the very beginning. The final major hurdle that Atta Mills faced was the perception that he was a relatively weak figure within his own administration. His failure to exert more influence over the turn of events that would become the Woyomegate scandal was a prime example of a leadership style that critics characterized as too-hands off and permissive. This last issue was generally considered to be a function of the late president's personality, and as a campaign issue, it died along with him. It will be of no concern to the new president and NDC candidate John Mahama. For his part, Mahama has remained aligned with Atta Mills's agenda. He passed up an opportunity to re-staff any of the many positions under his authority, a move that would have allowed him to stamp his own personality onto his administration but that could have also cost him votes by alienating him from influential party members. In a speech to the nation on Wednesday, his first since the late president's passing, Mahama urged the Ghanaian people to join him in his commitment to pursue one of Atta Mills's most widely known goals, that of peaceful elections. He also expressed his intention to continue on the path of development, one that he pointed out was trod by Atta Mills and all administrations since the democratization of Ghana. Speaking in more concrete terms in a Joy FM interview earlier the same day, NDC propaganda secretary Richard Quashigah said that the NDC under Mahama plans to push ahead with Atta Mills-era development strategies because they are getting a favorable response from the Ghanaian people. He shrugged off the suggestion that the NDC's methods of funding this development have contributed to the cedi's current weakness. For all intents and purposes, then, Mahama has chosen to attach himself to the late president's legacy. While he stands to inherit the support of Atta Mills's base, the former leader's economic vulnerabilities also fall squarely onto his plate. The NPP has made the economy their primary point of attack against the NDC. In a recent interview, again on Joy FM, NPP vice presidential candidate Mahaumdu Bawumia alleged that the cedi's value has dropped by 17% in the last six months, partly because of the current regime's strategy of borrowing money from the Bank of Ghana in order to finance development projects that boost its own popularity. During a speech the same day in Kumasi, he accused the Bank of Ghana of deliberately trying to make the dollar a less convenient currency with which to conduct business. The effect, he said, was to encourage people dealing in foreign exchange to do so in the black market, leading to the further devaluation of the cedi. These criticisms hit both members of the NDC ticket. They question the wisdom of Atta Mills's economic strategies, strategies which Mahama has stood behind and seems poised to adopt. By characterizing the central bank's policies as backwards, the NPP implicitly attacks Mahama's recently sworn in vice president and presumably soon-to-be running mate Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur. Before being called up to his current office, Amissah-Arthur was the governor of the Bank of Ghana. The attack is all the more biting coming from Bawumia, a former Bank of Ghana insider who understands the Bank well. This kind of criticism should hold special appeal to ideological supporters of the NPP, a party that favors development through strict capitalism while the NDC purports to be guided by socialist principles. For the NPP, Akufo-Addo is a popular politician with a loyal base like Atta Mills was, and he has spent more years in politics than the late president. Thomas Tieku, an assistant professor and political analyst, has credited Akufo-Addo with having a much stronger rural base than Mahama, who is more popular among urban elites. Tieku acknowledges, however, that Mahama does have some reputation in rural communities. Although Mahama comes from the Northern Region and will probably capture many of those votes, Bawumia is from the same region and might be able to help the NPP grab some of Mahama's votes there. While the NDC has historically drawn the majority of votes in the Northern Region, it is not unheard of for the NPP to make a strong showing there as well. The selection of Amissah-Arthur, who originally hails from the Central Region, should help bring the NDC some votes from that vitally important constituency that tends to favor the NPP. And in what looks like more geographical politicking, the NDC has selected Kumasi, capital of the Ashanti Region and major NPP stronghold, as the location for their special delegates' congress at the end of this month, although they deny a political motive in that maneuver. Political commentators seem divided on whether the NDC can hope to win any sympathy votes following their original candidate's death. In casting himself as an extension of Atta Mills's legacy, Mahama hopes to pick up as many of these votes as he can. On the other hand, political science lecturer Dr. Seido Alidu has said that this effect will be negligible because it will be limited to the small number of undecided voters. Of course, with such a miniscule margin deciding the previous election, even a small segment of the electorate is nothing to scoff at. From where I'm sitting, this election is way too close to call. As far as I can tell, most commentators who definitively project a winner seem to be speaking from a position of optimism or hope. But what of the two parties' shared goals of peaceful elections and nationwide development? There is no doubt that they are slowly but surely coming along. However, an interesting article by professors E. Gyimah-Boadi and K. Kwasi Prempeh leaves me with little hope that Atta Mills's death will help Ghana turn a page on either of these vital issues. According to these authors, "nearly all constitutional and statutory offices… are filled by presidential appointees." "A multitude of [these] public-sector opportunities… are reallocated almost entirely on the basis of party loyalty after a party turnover in government." In other words, the stakes of presidential elections are extremely high because the party controlling the presidency automatically becomes so much more powerful than the opposition. If it looks like the NDC is spending a lot of energy congratulating itself while the NPP is primarily busy attacking the party in power, it is because according to this system, the NDC is not in a position to blame the NPP for the current state of Ghana and the NPP, from its subordinate position, cannot really do anything other than criticize and offer alternative policies. One effect of this political system is to direct public funds towards, "public spending with short-term electoral payoffs… rather than long-term investment in qualitative public goods," like carefully orchestrated and sustained development projects. The ultimate result is that "Ghana… lacks a politically binding national development plan. Instead… each new administration has followed its own short-to-medium-term development agenda… based on its party's election platform," so that these development projects rarely fit into a larger, long-term plan. Another unfortunate effect of the high stakes of Ghanaian presidential elections is politically motivated violence among voters. Here the professors find fault in the ranks of both parties: "The NPP presidential candidate has infamously urged his party's supporters not to be intimidated by the NDC's muscular tactics, but to be prepared to fight to the death if need be. The ruling NDC has announced the creation of a 'Heroes Fund' for compensation payments to party supporters (or their families) who are injured or die." Both parties openly denounce election violence, but according to the "do-or-die" nature of these campaigns, they tacitly and sometimes openly acknowledge the role of violence in Ghanaian elections. In his recent address, Mahama urged politicians, "to use the unprecedented event of Atta Mills's passing… to effectively refocus Ghanaian politics and alter its tone forever." To the people, he said that they should work to limit, "the voices of pessimism and negativity that seek to break us down as a society rather than build us up; the voices that try to sway us away from a conversation of constructive efforts and involvement and turn us toward a pattern of petty name-calling and baseless personal attacks." If the professors' general assessment of the political system under the Ghanaian constitution is correct, as I believe it is, then this petty name calling is not a sign of the downfall of the political system, it is that system's product. We should all hope for a better day and a better Ghana, and there is no question that the people must be interested and involved in politics to ensure such a result. However, simply voting for one party or the other is probably not going to be enough to get the country to where the citizens want it to be. It is only through a combination of attuned politicians, an informed electorate, and constitutional reform that the economy, development and peaceful politics, the big themes of this (and probably every) election, can be effectively addressed.