A poll conducted by US-based polling agency Gallup, indicates a 57% approval rating and a 42% disapproval rating for Ghana?s President, Prof. John Evans Atta Mills.

President Mills? approval rating was exactly the same as that of South African President Jacob Zumah, and similar to Mauritanian President Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz, who had a 58% approval rating and a 41% disapproval rating.

Mills? 57% approval rating while higher than that of US President Barak Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, both of whom had a 50% approval rating at the time of survey in 2011, is however lower than the 79% he scored in a separate survey by the Policy and Strategy Associates Inc in March 2009.

The Gallup poll results which place President Mills 24th in the list of 34 Presidents surveyed, also paints a different picture from a recent East African Magazine rating which selected him as one of the four leading presidents on the African continent.

In that release, the Ghanaian president scored high marks for good governance as well as support and respect for human rights and freedom of the media.

This latest release from Gallup, however, show a lower approval rating for the president than a number of his colleague presidents including Nigeria?s Goodluck Jonathan, Togo?s Faure Gnassingbe and Sierra Leone?s Ernest Bai Koroma who scored 81%, 66% and 71% approval respectively.

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

Leaders in Burundi, Benin and Mali received the highest ratings from their constituents, earning approval from nearly nine in 10 residents. Angola?s president received the lowest rating, garnering approval from one in six residents, with Zimbabwe?s Robert Mugabe and Senegal?s Abdoulaye Wade scoring low ratings of 36% and 30% respectively.

The data make clear that leadership approval and tenure in the region are unrelated.

The report also found that Africans tend to rate their Head of State?s performance more highly than they rate that of the country?s leadership. This suggests that in most cases, Africans differentiate between the top leader?s actions and those of the broader leadership.

However, in Angola, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and South Africa, approval ratings of the Head of Government are virtually identical to those of the country leadership.