Ghanaians woke up to the shocking radio announcement in the early hours of the morning on February 24th 1966, that the government of the President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, had been overthrown. The CPP had suddenly become a proscribed party and that Parliament had been dissolved, the Constitution was suspended and substituted by military decrees.
All Ministers, District Commissioners, CPP party functionaries and apparatchiks were dismissed and haunted. There came the order: ‘For your own safety and without fail, Report to the nearest police station’.
The above is a narrative by Nana Akosua Frimpomaa Sarpong Kumankuma, Chair and Leader of the Convention Peoples Party whose father and some other family members were casualties of the 1966 CIA orchestrated coup led by Lt Colonel Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka, IGP J.W.K. Harley, Police Commissioner A.K. Deku, Lt Col. Ocran, Major Akwasi Amankwa Afrifa, the coup that deposed Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and the Ruling Party CPP.
‘I was a very young girl at that time, I saw movements here and there at my home and wondered what was happening. My big Uncles were in talks with my father, Honourable Sarpong Kumankumah who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Juaben and the National Organizer for the Young Farmers League. My father boldly decided to follow the orders of the nation wreckers under General Afrifa and reported at the police station in cloth.
The rest of the family including my siblings had to quickly move for fear of military attacks. I found myself in a small house at Adabraka with my Uncle.
It took two (2) years before I set my eyes on my father Sarpong Kumankuma. Many Members of Parliament and CPP members were incarcerated, tortured and killed’.
Nana Akosua Frimpomaa used the occasion to reach out to all who lost family members as a result of the 1966 coup. She asked the living who still bleed with sorrow to join with her spirits to ignite the Osagyefo in them and keep CPP alive.
GH PRESS CENTRE 