From Colony to Constitution: Ghana's Four Republics and the Long Road to Democratic Governance

On April 28, 1992, Ghanaians went to the polls in a referendum to approve a new constitution. The vote was 92.6% in favour. It was the fourth time in thirty-five years that the country had attempted to establish a durable framework for democratic governance. The previous three constitutions had lasted, respectively, three years, three years, and two years before being swept away by military coups. The generals, colonels, and flight lieutenants who seized power always promised to return the country to civilian rule, and they always eventually did, only for the cycle to repeat. The 1992 Constitution, inaugurating Ghana's Fourth Republic on January 7, 1993, broke this pattern. It has now survived longer than all its predecessors combined, and Ghana has conducted eight consecutive peaceful elections under its provisions. Understanding how Ghana arrived at this constitutional settlement requires tracing the full arc of its constitutional experiments since independence.

The 1957 Independence Constitution was, in essence, the Burns Constitution of 1950 and the Nkrumah Constitution of 1954 refined and extended to cover a sovereign state. It established a parliamentary system modelled on Westminster: a ceremonial head of state (initially the Queen, represented by a Governor-General), a Prime Minister who commanded a majority in the National Assembly, an independent judiciary, and a bill of rights. The architect of this constitution was the Coussey Committee, chaired by Justice Henley Coussey, which had been appointed in 1949 following the Accra riots of 1948. Its 40 members included J.B. Danquah, who pushed for stronger protections for regional autonomy and traditional authority.

But the 1957 Constitution contained the seeds of its own destruction. It gave the National Assembly the power to amend the constitution by a simple two-thirds majority, without a referendum. Nkrumah used this provision with devastating efficiency. The Constitution (Repeal of Restrictions) Act of 1958 removed the regional assemblies that had been created to protect Ashanti and Northern interests. The Preventive Detention Act of the same year, which allowed imprisonment without trial for up to five years (later extended to ten), effectively gutted the bill of rights. In 1960, Nkrumah held a plebiscite that simultaneously approved a new republican constitution and elected him as executive president. The 1960 Republican Constitution concentrated power in the presidency to an extraordinary degree: the President could legislate by decree, dismiss judges, and override any act of Parliament. By 1964, a constitutional amendment had made Ghana a one-party state, with the Convention People's Party as the sole legal political organisation. The 1957 Constitution had lasted barely three years in its original form.