Two Governments, One Country: Ghana's Unresolved Standoff Between Chiefs and Assemblies

In August 2026, a sub traditional council in Kumasi took an unusual step. It performed spiritual rites against three senior public officials: the Kumasi mayor, a regional police commander and the Interior Minister. The council said the action was connected to a land dispute that had remained unresolved for too long.

A year earlier, in Ghana's Savannah Region, a chief's decision to sell land to a private developer without broader community consent reportedly triggered violence that killed at least 31 people and displaced nearly 50,000 others. The chief's own palace was eventually burned down. Neither incident happened because Ghana's formal government had collapsed.

They happened because Ghana has never completely settled one basic question: who really has authority at the local level, particularly when land is involved?

The answer is complicated because, in Ghana, two systems of authority operate alongside each other. There is the formal system of elected local government, and there is the traditional system of chiefs, stools and skins.

Most of the time, the two systems coexist. The problem begins when they collide.

Two Systems of Authority, By Design

This arrangement is not simply the result of weak enforcement or poor administration. Ghana's legal framework itself recognises both systems.

The 1992 Constitution protects chieftaincy. Article 270 guarantees the institution, while the Chieftaincy Act of 2008 provides a framework for the recognition of chiefs and the resolution of disputes involving traditional leadership.

At the same time, Article 267 of the Constitution deals specifically with stool and skin lands. These lands are held in trust for communities through traditional authorities, while revenue from them is shared through arrangements involving the state and District Assemblies. The practical consequence is significant.

An estimated 80 percent of Ghana's land is under customary ownership. This means that when investors want land for housing, mining, commercial projects or other developments, they may have to engage with traditional authorities before dealing with the formal state institutions responsible for land administration. This creates a peculiar situation.

An assembly member is elected and operates within a formal system of public accountability. There are defined institutions above the assembly member, and ultimately the elected government is answerable to voters.

A chief, however, does not occupy an elected political office. Yet that chief may exercise considerable influence over the land on which the assembly member's constituents live, farm and conduct business. Both can have legitimate authority within the same community. Neither necessarily reports to the other. That is where the tension begins.

Where the Two Systems Collide

Land is where this dual structure becomes more than a constitutional curiosity.

Land disputes make up a significant portion of civil cases in Ghana, and the country's customary land system can create situations in which traditional authorities and statutory institutions have competing claims over the same piece of land. The Savannah Region case shows just how serious the consequences can become.

According to reports on the conflict, a local chief sold land to a developer without obtaining the broader community's consent. From the perspective of customary authority, the chief had a recognised role in dealing with stool land.

But for members of the community, the decision involved land they believed should not have been transferred without their participation. That difference in expectations eventually became violent.

Residents resisted the development, lives were lost, thousands of people were displaced and the chief's palace was burned. A dispute over land had become a dispute over legitimacy. Who had the right to make the decision?

The chief?

The community?

The state?

Or some combination of all three?

The Kumasi incident illustrates another side of the same problem. There, a traditional council used spiritual rites as a way of expressing its frustration with state officials over a disputed land matter involving alleged police expansion and a lease to a private developer. Whatever one thinks of the method, the incident demonstrated something important.

Traditional authorities have forms of influence that do not fit neatly into the language or procedures of modern public administration. When formal channels appear to move too slowly, traditional institutions can resort to their own mechanisms of authority. The state has no simple equivalent.

Why Has Nobody Solved This?

It would be tempting to look at these conflicts and conclude that Ghana simply needs to change the law. But the situation is more complicated than that. Chieftaincy survived colonial rule. It survived independence. It survived the creation of modern political institutions and the introduction of District Assemblies. More importantly, it retained legitimacy in many communities.

In some parts of Ghana, people may be more willing to accept the decision of a chief on a family or land matter than the decision of an elected local official.

That does not necessarily mean people reject the formal state. It means that legitimacy in Ghana does not come from only one source. The Constitution recognised this reality rather than trying to eliminate it. Ghana has therefore generally pursued coexistence rather than choosing one system over the other.

The Alternative Dispute Resolution Act of 2010 recognizes customary arbitration. The Lands Act of 2020 also places emphasis on alternative dispute resolution in land matters before certain disputes proceed through the formal courts. The state has also supported institutions involved in resolving chieftaincy disputes. All of this amounts to an attempt to make the two systems work alongside each other.

For ordinary disputes, that arrangement can work.

A family disagreement can be taken to a traditional council. A land dispute can sometimes be mediated through customary structures or alternative dispute resolution. People can reach an agreement without ever entering a courtroom. But coexistence becomes much harder when the dispute is not simply about the outcome. It is about who had the right to make the decision in the first place.

The Limits of Compromise

Consider the Savannah Region example again. If the disagreement had simply been about the price of land or the terms of a lease, mediation might have been enough. But the deeper issue was authority.

The chief may have considered the transaction part of his customary responsibilities. Community members, however, believed that a decision of such importance required broader consultation. That is not merely a disagreement that mediation can easily settle. It is a disagreement about which rules should apply. And this is the difficult question Ghana's dual system continues to face. When traditional authority and formal government disagree, who has the final word?

The Constitution provides important boundaries, but real life is rarely as neat as the legal framework suggests.

A chief may have no seat in Parliament, but may have considerable influence over land. An assembly may have formal governmental authority, but may lack the same level of community trust.

A government agency may have statutory responsibility for a development project, while the traditional authority controls access to the land required for that project. Each institution can therefore believe that it has legitimate grounds for acting. That is how relatively ordinary disputes can escalate.

What This Means for Ghana

Ghana's dual system of authority is not simply an outdated institution waiting to disappear. It reflects something much deeper about how power and legitimacy have developed in the country. The elected state provides elections, formal laws, public institutions and a recognised chain of accountability.

Chieftaincy provides traditional legitimacy, community identity and, critically, influence over customary land. Both systems are real. The mistake is pretending that one of them can simply be ignored. At the same time, coexistence cannot mean allowing the rules to remain unclear whenever the two systems overlap.

Ghana needs clearer procedures for situations where traditional authority and formal government are likely to come into conflict.

Large scale land transactions should be one such area. Projects involving public infrastructure should be another. So should situations where a chief's customary authority comes into tension with the community's expectation of consultation and consent. The goal should not necessarily be to eliminate chieftaincy or weaken traditional institutions. It should be to make the boundaries between the two systems clearer.

People should know who has the authority to make a decision, who must be consulted, what happens when there is disagreement and which institution ultimately has the power to resolve the dispute. Because when those rules are unclear, the conflict does not simply disappear.

It moves somewhere else. It can end up in a courtroom. It can become a political confrontation. It can produce protests and violence. In the most serious cases, it can lead to displacement and loss of life. Ghana does not have two separate countries operating within its borders.

But it does have two powerful systems of authority operating within the same country. For decades, they have managed to coexist. The real challenge is making sure that coexistence does not depend on everyone knowing where the invisible boundaries are until someone crosses one.