Former Executive Vice President of Unilever, Yaw Nsarkoh, says Ghana’s Fourth Republic risks a coup d'état if the country does not work to fix the cracks showing up as a result of bad governance.

Speaking on PM Express on JoyNews, he stated that should bad governance persist, it creates a space for populists to take over the country and do as they see fit.

He stated that as some countries witness coups, many Ghanaians are of the view that the country is exempt from such a practice, however, Mr Nsarkoh believes that the cracks that caused military takeovers in Ghana in the past are showing in the Fourth Republic.

“So when the people of Ghana say, 'no, we are not like that, as for us, it will always be okay’, It's just a collective amnesia of things that have gone wrong in this society before. And let us remember that I was alive at that time. 

"In 1979, I was 11. So I still remember these things that happened and we saw them. There are causative factors that created these disruptions. We have been through the First Republic, which the soldiers kicked out, a Second Republic, which again, the soldiers kicked out and a Third Republic, which the soldiers kicked out,” he stated.

Mr Nsarkoh expressed his dislike for coups stating that it is not the role of the armed forces to steer the affairs of the country.

But, he believes that for the Fourth Republic to not suffer the same fate as its predecessors there needs to be a conversation to address issues that could cause its fall.

"We must remember James Baldwin famously said 'The most dangerous creation of any society is the man with nothing to lose'. And we in our society today have many who have nothing to lose. So, if we think that we can leave so many people out of the fruits of development and national building and somehow keep it stable, we deceive ourselves."

“We are beginning to see the features of some of the things that went wrong (in earlier republics) and we must start to have the conversation now. We don't want to go back to those days. If the Fourth Republic will endure and become the last, then we need to change some of the things that we did in the past that created those sorts of disruptions.”

Mr Nsarkoh noted that Ghana has a chance to make things right and learn from the mistakes of the past.

He stated that “I know that if you allow misgovernance, you create spaces for a populist. It is not necessarily even a military populist. You create spaces for a populist to emerge. So we must be as concerned about good governance as we are about condemning military coups and so on and so forth.”