President Kwame Nkrumah was painfully overthrown from office through a military coup.

The National Liberation Council (NLC) launched this Coup with a coded name “Operation Cold Chop” on February 24th, 1966.

President Kwame Nkrumah left Ghana on February 21, 1966 to Hanoi, the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam through the invitation of President Ho Chi Minh to resolve the then Vietnam war.

Ghana was then left under the supervision and control of a three-man Presidential Commission.

He was surrounded by  his foreign affairs minister, Alex Quason Sackey, his Trade and Industry Minister Ambassador Kwesi Armah and among others.

The Coup De’tat

A group of men from the Ghana Army led by Lt. C B (later General) Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka and Major (later General) Akwasi Amankwa Afrifa, with a great support from the Police Service who moved in a coded name called “ Operation Cold Chop” overthrew President Kwame Nkrumah from power while he was on a peace mission to Hanoi at the invitation of premier Ho Chi Minh.

This happened in the early hours of February 24th, 1966.

At exactly six o’clock that morning, Colonel Kotoka made the biggest announcement on Radio Ghana saying;

“Fellow citizens of Ghana, I have come to inform you that the Military, in cooperation with the Ghana Police, have taken over the government of Ghana today. The myth surrounding Nkrumah has been broken. Parliament has been dissolved and Kwame Nkrumah has been dismissed from office. All ministers are also dismissed from office. The C.P.P. is disbanded with effect from now. It will be illegal for any person to belong to it.”

Painfully, Kwame Nkrumah heard the sad news through the Chinese Ambasaddor over there that he had been overthrown in a coup d'etat.

Kwame Nkrumah could not believe that he had been overthrown.

Kwame Nkrumah

After the coup d'etat code named “Operation Cold Chop” in Ghana, Former President of Guinea Sekou Toure came to the rescue of Kwame Nkrumah.

He invited him to Guinea where he arrived on March 2, 1966, together with his bodyguards and a few civil servants who had remained with him.

GHANA: Workers demonstrate with placards 06 March 1966 in Accra. In the center, on one of the placards, a caricature says Kwame Nkrumah is a "Sasabonsan", which means a "Great Devil". Following the arrival of Nkrumah to the government, Ghana gets his autonomy from Great Britain, and became independent in 1957. The military junta took power 24 February 1966 while Nkrumah was away. (Photo credit should read AFP via Getty Images)

After the coup d'etat

President Kwame Nkrumah was beautifully received by the Former President of Guinea and was given 21 gun salutes.

Toure declared that Kwame Nkrumah would be with him as “the head of state of the secretary-general of the Guinean Democratic Party at the Airport.

In Nkrumah’s book, ‘Dark Days in Ghana’, Nkrumah revealed that the coup d'etat was the handiwork of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A) of the United States of America.

The leaders who overthrew Nkrumah immediately opened the country’s border and its prison gates to allow the return from exile or release from preventive detention of all opponents of President Kwame Nkrumah.

The National Liberation Council (NLC), composed of four army officers and four police officers, assumed executive power.

It appointed a cabinet of civil servants and promised to restore democratic government as quickly as possible.

March 1966: Children around a fallen statue of the self appointed president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah during the coup that overthrew his dictatorship. (Photo by Harry Dempster/Express/Getty Images)

Source: The Independent Ghana