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Ghana The Growth of Opposition to Nkrumah
Nkrumah's complete domination of political power had served to
isolate lesser leaders, leaving each a real or imagined challenger
to the ruler. After opposition parties were crushed, opponents came
only from within the CPP hierarchy. Among its members was Tawia
Adamafio, an Accra politician. Nkrumah had made him general
secretary of the CPP for a brief time. Later, Adamafio was
appointed minister of state for presidential affairs, the most
important post in the president's staff at Flagstaff House, which
gradually became the center for all decision making and much of the
real administrative machinery for both the CPP and the government.
The other leader with an apparently autonomous base was John
Tettegah, leader of the Trade Union Congress. Neither, however,
proved to have any power other than that granted to them by the
president.
By 1961, however, the young and more radical members of the CPP
leadership, led by Adamafio, had gained ascendancy over the
original CPP leaders like Gbedemah. After a bomb attempt on
Nkrumah's life in August 1962, Adamafio, Ako Adjei (then minister
of foreign affairs), and Cofie Crabbe (all members of the CPP) were
jailed under the Preventive Detention Act. The CPP newspapers
charged them with complicity in the assassination attempt, offering
as evidence only the fact that they had all chosen to ride in cars
far behind the president's when the bomb was thrown.
For more than a year, the trial of the alleged plotters of the
1962 assassination attempt occupied center stage. The accused were
brought to trial before the three-judge court for state security,
headed by the chief justice, Sir Arku Korsah. When the court
acquitted the accused, Nkrumah used his constitutional prerogative
to dismiss Korsah. Nkrumah then obtained a vote from the parliament
that allowed retrial of Adamafio and his associates. A new court,
with a jury chosen by Nkrumah, found all the accused guilty and
sentenced them to death. These sentences, however, were commuted to
twenty years' imprisonment.
In early 1964, in order to prevent future challenges from the
judiciary, Nkrumah obtained a constitutional amendment allowing him
to dismiss any judge. At the same time, Ghana officially became a
single-party state, and an act of parliament ensured that there
would be only one candidate for president. Other parties having
already been outlawed, no non-CPP candidates came forward to
challenge the party slate in the general elections announced for
June 1965. Nkrumah had been re-elected president of the country for
less than a year when members of the National Liberation Council
(NLC) overthrew the CPP government in a military coup on February
24, 1966. At the time, Nkrumah was in China. He took up asylum in
Guinea, where he remained until he died in 1972.
Data as of November 1994
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