Sankofa Series: Here’s how Kwame Nkrumah caused his overthrow

Veteran Ghanaian journalist, Cameron Duodu has narrated the factors that triggered the overthrow of Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966 by a military coup.

According to his narration, just a year after independence, Kwame Nkrumah introduced an act of parliament that allowed the government to detain people without a trial.

He stated that after the injustice had continued for some time, the citizens were filled with anger which created an enmity between them and the then Nkrumah government.

“The feeling of repression was too much in the country. Ghanaians love their freedom, as you know. To be arrested and put in jail for five years without anybody asking you what you have done, whether you have any defence, and for an independent body to look at your case.

"This was against our natural justice. So I knew that if he [Kwame Nkrumah] continued along that path, the people would begin to dislike him and his policies. It was sad because when the industrialization programme was going on, things were improving and we were respected. I went to the Soviet Union in 1958 when I was only 21 years of age,” the veteran journalist told Partey Narh on GhanaWeb TV’s People & Places.

He indicated that the last straw that broke the camel’s back was the death of J.B. Danquah in detention.

“When Dr. J.B. Danquah who was one of the big six with Nkrumah, they had been arrested together and taken to the north of Ghana by the British without trial, and he was put in jail without trial, he died in prison. A major political figure for that type, when he died in prison, I knew that Nkrumah too was finished and in fact that was the time that people began to really seriously think of overthrowing him. So I’m sorry but he asked for it.”

The late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in 1966 by the National Liberation Council in a coup d’etat.

Watch the latest episode of People & Places with Cameron Duodu below;





SB/ADG