In the late 1970s, Ghana was said to be in crisis. General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong’s Supreme Military Council (SMC I), which had governed since ousting Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia in 1972, was accused of presiding over spiralling inflation, commodity shortages, and rampant graft. In 1978, Acheampong was forced out by his own generals and replaced by Lt. General Fred Akuffo, but that did not end the misery.

Junior soldiers went unpaid, markets were empty and resentment between the lower ranks and the officer class had reached a breaking point.

On May 15, 1979, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings led a group of junior army officers in an attempted overthrow of the military government of General Fred Akuffo, but they failed. Rawlings was arrested, court-martialled, and sentenced to death.

The public trial, however, backfired spectacularly on the establishment. Rawlings used the courtroom as a platform, accusing the government of corruption and demanding accountability. His trial only served to make him popular among the junior ranks of the armed forces and the general public. He became a hero before the revolution had even succeeded.

The night that changed everything: June 3–4

On the night of June 3, 1979, a group of junior officers, including Major Boakye Djan and enlisted personnel of the Fifth Battalion and the Reconnaissance Regiment in Burma Camp, staged a bloody coup and freed Rawlings.

Rawlings was sent to the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation studios. On June 4, 1979, Ghana was ushered into its morning life with an announcement on the radio by Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings of a change in government by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council.

Over the course of thirty-six hours, they overthrew an authoritarian military regime and installed the AFRC, a populist collective led by Rawlings.

There wasn’t a major resistance to the takeover, but it was bloody. According to accounts, Major-General Odartey Wellington who was then the Chief of Army Staff of the Ghana Army mounted a lone stand inside an armoured car, firing for three continuous hours before dashing to the Nima Police Station to surrender. He was killed by military officers the moment he stepped out.

The AFRC was deliberately cross-rank, a conscious statement that this was not another elite coup. The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council included a cross-section of ranks from private and lance corporal to staff sergeant, airman, lieutenant, and naval commander.

Rawlings became Chairman with Major Boakye Gyan as the Spokesman. Other members were Major Mensah Poku, Major Mensah Gbedemah, Warrant Officer Class II Obeng, Private Owusu Adu, Corporal Owusu Boateng, Staff Sergeant Alex Adjei, Leading Aircraftman Gatsiko, Lance Corporal Sarkodee Addo, Lance-Corporal Peter Tasiri, Lance-Corporal Ansah-Atiemo and Corporal Sheikh Tetteh. General Hamidu was named as the Liaison Officer between the AFRC and the government bureaucracy.

The house-cleaning: executions at Teshie

The AFRC immediately launched what it called a “house-cleaning exercise”, people’s courts targeting those accused of corruption and economic crimes. The results were swift and severe.

As a first step in the house-cleaning exercise, Acheampong and Major General E.K. Utuka were executed at the Teshie military range on June 16, 1979, after a hastily assembled revolutionary court. Ten days later, on June 26, the death sentence on General F.W.K. Akuffo, Lt. General A.A. Afrifa, Major-General R.E.A. Kotei, Air Vice-Marshal George Yaw Boakye, Rear Admiral J.K. Amedume, and Colonel R.J.A. Felli was pronounced and implemented.

Eight officers in total were shot by firing squad. Three of them had been heads of state.

In a radio broadcast on June 30, 1979, Rawlings said, “The action represented a revolt of the ordinary Ghanaian against social injustice, against economic hardship and against the cancer of corruption that had eaten deep into the fabric of our society.”

111 days, then the handover

The AFRC declared that the coup d’état was not to stop the return to civilian rule but to clear up the mess created by the previous regimes. True to that promise, the council allowed scheduled elections to proceed and power was handed to Dr. Hilla Limann in September 1979.

But Rawlings again overthrew Limann on 31st December 1981, establishing the PNDC. He would go on to become Ghana’s first democratically elected president in 1992, and serve until 2001.

In 2001, President John Agyekum Kufuor ordered the exhumation of the executed generals’ remains and their return to their families.

Today, June 4th remains one of the most contested dates in Ghanaian history, celebrated by some as a moment of radical accountability and mourned by others as the beginning of a culture of impunity.

The men who planned it are nearly all gone now. Major Boakye-Djan died in August 2023 and Rawlings himself passed in November 2020.

The revolution lasted 111 days, but its consequences lasted decades.