The Acheampong Years: Union Government and Economic Crisis

On the cold morning of January 13, 1972, Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, commanding officer of the First Brigade based in Accra, led a column of soldiers from Burma Camp toward Christiansborg Castle and the key installations of the Ghanaian capital. By midday, Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia's Progress Party government, the civilian administration of the Second Republic, had been overthrown without a single shot fired. Busia himself was in London receiving medical treatment. He would never return to power. Acheampong, a 40-year-old officer from Kumasi who had trained at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, announced the formation of the National Redemption Council (NRC) and declared: "The old order has changed. A new Ghana is born."

The immediate trigger for the coup was Busia's economic austerity program, particularly the devastating 44 percent devaluation of the cedi on December 27, 1971, carried out on the advice of the International Monetary Fund. The devaluation wiped out the savings of the Ghanaian middle class overnight. Soldiers saw their purchasing power collapse. The price of imported goods, including the spare parts and equipment the military depended on, soared. When Busia simultaneously announced budget cuts that reduced military allowances and benefits, the officer corps reached its breaking point. As Acheampong told the nation in his first broadcast, the Busia government had "callously reduced the standard of living of every Ghanaian."

Acheampong's early months were genuinely popular. He reversed the cedi devaluation, repudiated $94 million in debts owed to British firms that Ghanaians considered exploitative colonial-era obligations, and launched what would become his signature initiative: Operation Feed Yourself (OFY). Announced in 1972, OFY was an ambitious agricultural self-sufficiency program that encouraged every Ghanaian, from civil servants to schoolchildren, to grow food. Backyard gardens sprang up across Accra and Kumasi. Government land was allocated for farming cooperatives. Rice production at the Dawhenya and Afife irrigation projects expanded significantly. In its first two years, OFY was a genuine success, reducing food imports and instilling a sense of national pride. Even Acheampong's critics acknowledged that the program, at least initially, addressed a real problem: Ghana's dangerous dependence on imported food.