ABSTRACT
The first coup d'état in Ghana took place in February 1966 when the army and police destroyed the Convention People's Party which had been in Office under Nkrumah since February 1951. Fifteen years of party rule had come to an end, and the soldiers began to govern by decree through a ‘National Liberation Council’. Army rule was not in itself surprising: Nigeria had been brought under military control in January that year, and there was the long history of military-civilian alternation in that other post-colonial continent of Latin America. The first Ghana coup, however, was of very limited duration. For almost as soon as the members of the N.L.C. had established themselves in control, they began to talk of handing power back to a civilian government. And in August 1969, some three and a half years’ later, they virtually made good their promise. A general election was held, impartially protected by the army and police. That too was hardly a unique event; but it was unusual. Freely contested and fairly conducted elections had become sufficiently rare in Africa to make the occasion worth noting, while for Ghanaians especially it was a memorable revival of earlier contests when the ballot box had put an end to colonial rule. 1 There were other precedents from the 1950s, for when the soldiers retired from politics, they did so by moving along a familiar path of retreat. They appointed Committees of Inquiry, established a Constitutional Commission, summoned a Constituent Assembly, introduced an Electoral Ordinance, and agreed to the formation of parties; then, at the end of August 1969, they held an election. The outcome was a decisive victory for the newly formed Progress Party which took office under Dr. Busia as prime minister upon the inauguration of the second Republic on 1 October. The following year, the Presidential Commission—a triumvirate of one police, and two army, officers—was dissolved and a civilian Head of State was chosen. The ballot box having thus replaced the gun, it seemed appropriate at the time, in the disturbed world of new state politics, to take comfort from the fact, and to mark the occasion with an account of the 1969 Election and of what had happened during the brief period of ‘demilitarisation’.
