Kofi Busia's Government Overthrown in Ghana's 1972 Coup

Kofi Abrefa Busia was one of the most academically distinguished politicians in Ghana’s early independence history, and also one of its shortest-serving elected leaders. Born in 1913, he became the first African admitted to University College, Oxford, and built a career as a sociology professor before turning to politics as one of the most consistent opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s government through the 1950s and early 1960s. After the military government that replaced Nkrumah in 1966 organized a return to civilian rule, Busia’s Progress Party won a decisive victory in the 1969 election, and he became prime minister of Ghana’s Second Republic, serving under a largely ceremonial president, former chief justice Edward Akufo-Addo.

Busia’s government pursued a program of economic liberalization intended to correct the debts and distortions left by Nkrumah’s state-led development model. His administration devalued the Ghanaian cedi, cut public spending, and tried to open the economy to private investment, and it also carried out a controversial mass deportation of foreign nationals, most of them Nigerian and other West African traders, under the Aliens Compliance Order of 1969. While some of these measures were framed as necessary corrections, the devaluation and accompanying austerity measures proved deeply unpopular, especially within the military, where officers objected to a 1971-72 budget that cut defense spending they considered essential.

On January 13, 1972, while Busia was in London for medical treatment, Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong led a bloodless coup that removed his government. Troops took over key installations in Accra overnight, and by morning the Progress Party administration had been swept aside without a shot fired in anger. Acheampong announced the formation of the National Redemption Council, with himself as chairman, ending Ghana’s Second Republic after just over two years. Busia, informed of events while abroad, chose not to return and instead settled into exile in Britain, where he continued writing and lecturing on African politics and society until his death in Oxford in 1978.

Acheampong’s own government would later fall in similarly abrupt fashion. His rule, renamed the Supreme Military Council in 1975, became associated with its own corruption and economic mismanagement, and he was eventually forced out in a palace coup in 1978 by his own colleagues, and executed the following year after Jerry Rawlings’ 1979 uprising put a firing squad in front of several former leaders, Acheampong among them.

Busia’s overthrow is often cited by historians as an illustration of how fragile Ghana’s early experiments in multiparty democracy proved to be, sandwiched as they were between periods of military rule. Despite his reputation as one of Ghana’s most capable scholars and one of the era’s more genuinely committed democrats, his government could not survive the same pattern of military intervention that had already ended Nkrumah’s presidency six years earlier, a pattern that would recur in Ghana repeatedly until the 1990s.