Business executive and former Unilever Executive Vice President Yaw Nsarkoh says Ghana’s democratic journey has failed to translate into real development.

He is warning that the country may have misunderstood the true purpose of its political transition.

Speaking on Joy News’ PM Express on Tuesday after an academic engagement at the Noguchi Memorial Centre of the University of Ghana, he reflected on Ghana’s trajectory over the past four decades.

He questioned how the country moved from a united push for freedom to what he described as a distorted form of democracy.

“When it started? I will not pronounce myself the final authority in Germany, but anybody who was at the front bench of the conversation about demilitarising the politics in Ghana and introducing what we today call a democracy, which I describe as a Santa Claus democracy, because it is not a true democracy, will tell you that there was a period of time where the single idea of the pro democracy forces was to create political space in order that people could be free, in order that the media could operate, in order that our civic responsibilities could be discharged in an environment free of fear.”

He said the initial struggle had a clear and unifying goal.

“And at that time, there was a significant amount of solidarity around that big idea.”

According to him, the focus was straightforward.

“We wanted the military out of politics. We wanted more freedom, etc. And you saw real coalition.”

However, he believes the country may have been overly optimistic about what democracy would automatically deliver.

“There is an extent to which we have to admit to a certain degree of naivety in believing that when we did get to this era of constitutional democracy, the big idea of development was going to take its place.”

His remarks come against the backdrop of concerns about a growing “winner-take-all” political culture, which he suggests has crept into Ghana’s governance structure.

Reflecting on his return to the University of Ghana and assessing the country’s business development trajectory over 40 years, Nsarkoh implied that political freedom alone has not been enough to drive sustained economic transformation.

While acknowledging the gains in civic space and media freedom, his central argument was that democracy must be anchored in development outcomes.

Without that shift, he suggests, the promise of the democratic era risks being reduced to form rather than substance.

For Nsarkoh, the challenge now is not merely preserving political freedoms but redefining democracy so that development becomes its core organising principle.