Nkrumah’s overthrow was a good thing – Casely-Hayford

Financial Analyst Sydney Casely-Hayford says the overthrow of Ghana’s first President Dr Kwame Nkrumah was a good thing.

“I will say it. The Nkrumah overthrow was a good thing because we had a constitutional dictatorship,” Mr Casely-Hayford said at an economic forum on Thursday when he sought to demonstrate how various coups in the past destroyed Ghana’s economy.

“…He had amended the Constitution in such a way that he was the only person who could ever become president. We can’t have that. Something had to give and he had to go some way. One way or the other,” he said.

According to Mr Casely-Hayford, “it would have been nice if we could have voted him out but we couldn’t even vote. So it wasn’t happening.”

“You only voted when Nkrumah said there was going to be a vote so that one [overthrow], I don’t have a problem with it.”

Nkrumah was the Gold Coast’s first Prime Minister and also became the first President of Ghana after the Gold Coast gained independence in 1957.

On February 24, 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to Hanoi, Vietnam, his government was overthrown in a military coup led by General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka and the National Liberation Council. Declassified intelligence showed the CIA had a hand in his overthrow.