President J. E. A. Mills - He is rated the 24th best leader in Africa. Majority of Ghanaians approve of the way President John Evans Atta Mills is running the affairs of the country, a poll conducted by Gallup Incorporated has revealed.

According to the poll released on Wednesday, 57 per cent of the residents of Ghana approve of the job the President is doing, while 42 per cent disapprove.

The rating makes President Mills’s leadership style the 24th among the 34 sub-Saharan African countries on the rankings.

According to Gallup, the results of the poll, which was conducted in 2011, were based on face-to-face interviews.

Similar polls were held in Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, The Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Guinea and Kenya.

Others are Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The interviewees were asked: “Do you approve or disapprove of job performance of the President?”

For results based on the total sample of national adults of 15 years and older, one can say with 95 per cent confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error ranged from ±3.3 percentage points to ±4.3 percentage points.

The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Gallup Incorporated is primarily a research-based performance-management consulting company in the United States of America (USA).

Meanwhile, residents of most of the 34 sub-Saharan African countries Gallup surveyed in 2011 gave high marks to their chief political executives, including residents of Mali where the president was ousted in a military coup late last month.

As points of comparison, most African leaders earned higher approval from their public in 2011 than US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron did from theirs.

Approval ratings were strongly associated with institutional confidence and local economy.

The leaders of Burundi, Benin and Mali received the highest ratings from their constituents, earning approval from nearly nine in 10 residents.

Approval ratings for the Burundi President, Pierre Nkurunziza, were ranked first in the region with 89 per cent, while Angola’s Jose Eduardo dos Santos’s ratings were last with 16 per cent approvals from his countrymen and women.