Samia Nkrumah, the daughter of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, has disclosed that her father made a sombre admission about his lifespan after surviving a deadly bombing in Kulungugu in the Upper East Region in 1962.

Speaking to Sandra Babu Boateng in an interview uploaded on YouTube on September 6, 2025, Samia said her father, could have possibly suffered lead poisoning from the bombing.

She recounted how the late former president confessed to his wife, Fathia Nkrumah, upon returning from the hospital, expressing fears that he might not live long.

“I vividly remember a story our mother told me, a real-life account, after the Kulungugu bombing in 1962. It’s well-documented, that assassination attempt on his life. It happened in the Upper East, Northern Ghana, after he met the then-president of Burkina Faso. The entourage stopped at a school, and these young children were giving him a bouquet when it exploded. Two children died on the spot, along with others, but our father’s bodyguards pushed him to the ground, the safest position during explosions,” she stated while narrating events surrounding the death of Ghana’s first president.

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“But the shrapnel, the lead, went all over his back, and he was hospitalised for almost a week or more as they tried to remove it. This is what our mother said: when he came out of the hospital, he told her, ‘I don’t think I’m going to live long because too much lead has gone into my body, and it’s possible it will eventually poison me,’” she added.

The Kulungugu bombing was a failed assassination attempt on Kwame Nkrumah on August 1, 1962, in the small border town of Kulungugu (Pusiga District, Upper East Region), near the Burkina Faso frontier.

Dr Kwame Nkrumah was returning from a diplomatic meeting with Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) President Maurice Yaméogo when his convoy halted amid heavy rain. As a child approached President Nkrumah with a bouquet of flowers, his bodyguard, Captain Samuel Buckman, heard a ticking timer and pushed the president to the ground just before the hidden explosive detonated.

Dr Nkrumah and Buckman sustained minor shrapnel injuries but survived, while 55 others were injured.

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Suspects of the bombing included members of the anti-Nkrumah United Party from northern Ghana, possibly trained abroad, though no definitive perpetrators were identified.

In the aftermath, three high-ranking Nkrumah allies—Foreign Minister Ako Adjei, Information Minister Tawia Adamafio, and CPP Executive Secretary Hugh Horatio Cofie Crabbe—were arrested on conspiracy charges, accused of trailing far behind the convoy suspiciously.

After a year-long trial, they were initially acquitted in 1963, but Dr Nkrumah replaced the chief justice and secured their conviction on retrial, using the incident to consolidate power and justify the preventive detention act.

Watch the full interview below:



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