8. The Early Months of the National Liberation Council

At the Police Headquarters I was ushered into the office of the Inspector General, John Harlley. With him at his desk was the retired General Ankrah. It was obvious that the two of them were in charge of things. Officers kept coming in for instructions which were being issued with great authority by the two of them. They told me that they needed me to assist them. I was eventually taken to Harlley's conference room which was a hive of activity, with movements by policemen and soldiers in and out. In the midst of this turmoil sat Nee Noi Omaboe and Daniel Sackey (DS) Quarcoopome. Both of them were friends. Nee Noi was the Government Statistician. Later he became Nana Wereko Ampem, a Chief of Akwapim, to which office he brought great dignity. At the same time, he carried on his activities as a businessman, economist and a member, later Chairman of the United Nations Investments Committee. DS, I had known since childhood. At one time, we went to the same school. He became an administrative officer and spent some time in Northern Ghana, where Stella and I visited him in Navorongo. He had for some time been working on security matters, a field in which he was to rise to the top. On retirement, he became a large-scale farmer. I also knew the senior police officers around the conference room that day quite well: Harlley, who was the Commissioner of Police, and Deku, a Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department, I knew well as I had worked with them in the course of my duties as Crown Counsel, State Attorney and Director of Public Prosecutions. Deku was with me at an official meeting on crime prevention just the afternoon before the coup. I did not know John Nunoo, although he seemed to know me. Of the soldiers, my class-mate Coker Appiah came in, though not frequently. But I did not know the others except Ankrah, who had always regarded me with avuncular interest. We had in fact been to a diplomatic fancy dress party just five days before the coup. Nee Noi had been writing something and I was asked to join him in that effort. It turned out to be a justification for the coup. Nee Noi had been writing the economic justification and I was asked to write the non-economic justification. Our efforts were later merged and used by General Ankrah in his first broadcast to the nation. Soldiers like Brigadier Kotoka, Ocran and Colonel Afrifa kept coming and going in a state of high excitement. Afrifa had a terrible habit of leaving his machine gun on the floor in awkward places. Not being used to weapons, the possibility of tripping over a loaded gun and setting it off was highly disturbing. I pointed out to him the danger that he exposed people like me to. I asked what he thought would happen if I tripped over the gun and it went off, smiling he answered that then I would be a man. DS was turning his high-powered short-wave radio to international news reports, like BBC and letting everybody listen to how the world was taking the coup. Gradually, the picture of what was happening sank in.

It was clear that the important centres of the country had been secured by the coup-makers without resistance. There had been fighting between the main body of soldiers who were under the command of the coup-makers and the small crack Presidential Regiment led by Colonel David Zanlerigu based at Nkrumah's residence and office in Flagstaff House. Afrifa wanted some method of getting it across to Zanlerigu that if he did not give up, there was going to be a bloody fight and his people would be slaughtered because they were heavily outnumbered. I do not know whether this message got through but on one of the many return visits to the conference room I asked Afrifa what had happened and he told me that Zanlerigu had surrendered. The one body of soldiers whom the coup-makers wanted most to avoid fighting was the heavy mortar brigade based at Ho. The message was sent to them that General Ankrah was back and was in charge of the whole military establishment and so there was no need for them to fight between themselves. This worked. Many have tried to tell the story of the coup, who were involved and what part each played. In this, the tendency is often to dismiss Ankrah as having played no part at all and that he was brought in at a late stage to head the government. I do not know when Ankrah was made aware of the coup and what part he had to play in it. But obviously, whoever were the coup-leaders must have calculated that making Ankrah, the highly respected soldier whom many thought had been wrongly and unjustly retired, the head of the military would bring unity among the potentially divisive forces in the military. Harlley once told me that the choice was between calling in Ankrah or General Steve Otu, the two Generals who had been rivals for the position of undisputed head of the Military, both of whom were retired by Nkrumah when he returned from the Commonwealth Heads of State meeting in 1965, amid rumours of a planned military take over. Both were given some innocuous positions in civilian life. Otu was slightly senior in rank, but according to Harlley, they chose Ankrah because the soldiers regarded him as a brave and fearless leader. Harlley had had a very hard night and morning and he excused himself to go to his bungalow to rest later that morning when he thought things were stabilised enough. During his absence, Ankrah was in complete charge. By now, I had called in Lebrecht Chinery Hesse (my distant cousin, Nii Tete), who was the Chief Legal Draftsman to the Police Headquarters as I knew that some legislative drafting had to be done. The announcement of the coup had also disbanded the CPP and other political organisations connected with it. By now, the Ministers of the Nkrumah Government had been asked to report themselves to the Police. Other specified persons who were considered close to the political power centre were also asked to report. There were discussions of the freezing of assets of Nkrumah, members of his Government and prominent members of the Party. These and a host of other matters had to be supported by some legislation. Those who had been detained under the Preventive Detention Act; those who were detained without even the fig-leaf of the Act to cover their detention were released; and those, like Tawia Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Coffie Crabbe, who had been convicted of treason by courts during the Nkrumah regime, were released. But to my disappointment, the jails were not to be kept free of political detainees. Instead of the detainees under the Nkrumah regime, the Ministers and political officers of the CPP, who had been taken into custody as they reported to the Police after the announcement were substituted in custody. The leaders of the coup had a description and a justification for their detention. They were to be held in “protective custody” for their own safety as they would be in danger from the wrath of the people if left to go about free. Decrees had to be made listing the people held or to be taken into custody.

It was during that day that the constitution of the National Liberation Council (NLC) which was to rule the country in the interim before a constitutional government was reinstated, came up. It had been decided that the NLC would consist only of members of the military and policemen. So those round the table started throwing up the names. It must have been decided before Harlley left that the Chairman was to be Ankrah and the Vice-Chairman, Harlley. So those names were put forward without dissent. There were other names like Kotoka, Ocran and Afrifa which because of their recognised involvement with the military movements of that morning, selected themselves. So the next name approved was that of Kotoka. The next put forward was Deku. As I expected that the NLC would be small in number, I thought that having three people from the same small area, near Keta in the Volta Region, would send the wrong signal to the country. It would appear as if the coup was made in and for the people of that small area. I wanted the membership of the government to include persons from as wide a spread of the country as possible. That would give maximum support to it and avoid the obvious criticism that the coup had been organised only for a small tribal group. I argued for the inclusion of Deputy Police Commissioner Bawa Yakubu, who came from Gushiegu in the north of Ghana. Kotoka, was the person who had announced the coup. He was the first soldier after Ankrah who had been nominated as a member of the NLC. It may be that the fact that I did not know him before and that as between him and Deku, the latter would understand my argument better played some part in my action. I therefore protested at the inclusion of Deku. He was dropped. Yakubu was put in in his stead. Then Ocran, a Fanti; Nunoo, a Ga from Accra, and; Afrifa, an Ashanti, completed the list. I was happier with this composition as it reflected as near as possible a countrywide inclusion.

Someone then pointed out that we needed to announce the name of an Acting Attorney-General. I put forward the name of Johnny Abbensetts, then Solicitor General, who by date of appointment was the most senior of the officers in the Department. The announcements were made. The names of the members of the NLC, excluding Tony Deku, were announced in the early afternoon news. So was the name of Johnny Abbensetts as Acting Attorney-General.

I was summoned by John Harlley by phone to come and see him at his bungalow in the afternoon. Why did I suggest the substitution of Tony Deku by Yakubu? Yakubu had known nothing about the coup till 5 o'clock that morning when he, Harlley, called him into the office and told him what was happening. According to Harlley, he asked Yakubu then whether he, Yakubu, was going to co-operate with them. If he did not, Harlley told him that he was going to be arrested and kept in custody until everything was stabilised. Yakubu, according to Harlley, had agreed to co-operate. Deku, on the other hand had known about the coup from the beginning and had helped in the planning of it. Why should he be excluded from the Government. I explained to Harlley why I thought a person like Yakubu, though knowing little or nothing about the planning of the coup, should be included in the NLC. I told Harlley that instructions had already been given for the publication of a decree on the membership of the NLC. Eventually, we agreed that another decree ought to be issued enlarging the membership of the NLC to include Deku. Fortunately, the name of Yakubu was retained. Deku was obviously hurt by my action. I was a bit naive to expect that he would simply overlook any attempt, however well-intended, to exclude him from the highest office in the State which he had worked for. His feelings came out some time later when in a discussion at which I was present, he stated that he thought I was his friend and he had suggested on the morning of the coup that I should be invited to come and help them and the first thing I did when I joined them was to exclude him from the NLC. Harlley's second complaint was why I had suggested Johnny Abbensetts as the Acting Attorney-General. I explained that he was the most senior of us in the Attorney-General's Department. Harlley's reply was, “But we knew that he was there when we invited you to come and help us?” Harlley said I did not know what had been happening during the Nkrumah regime. He did not explain further but said he was going to have it announced on the radio that the name of Johnny Abbensetts earlier given was a mistake and that I was the person appointed Acting Attorney-General. I then recalled that soon after the news broadcast, Johnny Abbensetts had phoned me at the Police Headquarters and asked me whether I had suggested his name as the Acting Attorney-General. I answered yes. He had not explained the reason for his question but had then put down the telephone. At that time, I thought he knew that he was not popular with the coup-makers and was surprised that he had been put into that position. I learnt that his closeness to Nkrumah's financial adviser, Ayeh-Kumi, whom the coup-makers had always suspected, and his frequent travelling with him abroad on State business, had put Johnny Abbensetts himself under a cloud. My relationship with Johnny became somewhat formal after that. Unfortunately, he died not long after the change of Government.

I made the changes desired by John Harlley. In the case of Deku, I had another decree published showing the members of the NLC. It contained all the names already published together with that of Deku. In the case of the Acting Attorney General, another announcement was made that the person appointed to the position was not John Abbensetts but myself. There was quite a lot of movement at the conference room of the Police Headquarters that afternoon. T. K. Impraim, the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet in the Nkrumah regime, was brought in. He was the second Gold Coast soldier who had been made an officer in the Royal West African Frontier Force during the Second World War. While Seth Anthony had become a major, Impraim became a lieutenant. He, like Anthony, joined the administrative service of the Gold Coast after the war. Having regard to his position under Nkrumah, he must have entered the inner sanctum of the coup-makers on that day with considerable apprehension. But he soon became relaxed when he realised that he had been brought in to help. Walking round the conference table with some of us engaged in writing on various matters with others chatting, he suddenly shouted, “We must have a proclamation! We do not even have a proclamation legitimising the government of the NLC. We must have a proclamation!” I thought to myself, what a terrible omission. And I instructed Chinery-Hesse to draft the necessary proclamation. He was part of the administrative organisation of the NLC from then on. I was to be reminded years later of the fact that for most legal advisers, the first coup puts them in totally strange territory, as they had never had any such experience. I was on a Commonwealth Secretariat Committee of Enquiry chaired by Sir Roy Marshall, whom contemporary law students of my time would recall as the editor of the second edition of Nathan's Equity Through the Cases, and who later became Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, that looked into forms of cooperation in legal matters between Commonwealth countries. One of the institutions we had to examine was the Commonwealth Legal Assistance Section of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law which seemed, to us, to duplicate the functions of the Legal Division of the Commonwealth Secretariat. We questioned the Director of CLAS about the services it provided. To my astonishment, one of the things he said they advised on was on questions with regard to the legal steps to take when there was a coup. Perhaps, we misunderstood him and that what he really wanted to refer to were legal steps to counter a coup. But he conjured to our mind a situation where a coup-plotter would approach CLAS to enquire about the legal steps to take, which were not familiar to me in 1966, to underpin a successful coup and that CLAS would feel obliged to give an answer.

Colonel Afrifa was worried by the fact that David Zanlerigu was still at liberty. As he said, Zanlerigu's soldiers had “peppered” the heads of his boys when they went to take over Flagstaff House and he did not see why Zanlerigu should go free. In any case, Zanlerigu moving freely around would expose him to being shot by some soldier. Ankrah, however, quite liked Zanlerigu, a younger man, whom he must have known and admired while he, Ankrah, was with the military. Ankrah said that he was going to keep Zanlerigu with him and be personally responsible for Zanlerigu's safety. That ruling was accepted, but I do not think it was popular with Afrifa.

Eric Kwamena Otoo also came into the conference room. He was clearly worried. I had not seen him since the strange telephone call terminated the discussion between himself, Robert Hayfron-Benjamin and myself in his office on the other side of the wall around Flagstaff House on the problems and consequences of preventive detention. As he had unconsciously suggested the meaning of that call might be that things would get worse instead of getting better as we had both hoped. Ametewee, the police guard at Flagstaff House, had thereafter been arrested for attempting to assassinate Nkrumah and succeeding in killing the security officer, Salifu Dagarti. He was given a trial and convicted of murder. But a number of top police officers, inluding the IGP, Madjitey, one of his Deputies, S. D. Amaning, and Adjirakor were merely detained without trial for a long time as a result of Ametewee's failure in marksmanship. Eric now came and sat by me at the table and asked quietly whether I could tell the soldiers and policemen in charge of the affairs of the country that he was not really a bad man but that he had been followed around all day by soldiers brandishing guns who threatened to shoot him. When I got the opportunity, I passed Eric's concern on to Ankrah and Harlley. I did not have to explain what I thought of him. They knew. Indeed, Harlley had an assessment of all public servants who had been holding high office in the Nkrumah regime. They asked me to assure Eric that he would be all right from then on. It was Harlley then who told me that, in his position as the co-ordinator of security for Nkrumah, Eric had done a lot of good.~[* might prefer: “Eric had done a lot of good in his position as the co-ordinator of security”]~ According to Harlley, after the Second Treason Trial judgment had been given, Nkrumah, in his anger, ordered Eric that Chief Justice Korsah be detained. Eric merely accepted the order but did nothing about it. Apparently Nkrumah sometimes gave orders when upset by a person or situation. If one knew him well and thought that the order was ill-considered, one could risk not executing the order in the hope that after reflection, Nkrumah would countermand that order. Eric took that risk on that occasion and disappeared from Nkrumah's sight for a couple of days. When they next met, Nkrumah asked Eric what he had done about the order. Eric replied that he thought Nkrumah was not really serious about the order. Nkrumah did not pursue the matter any more. From Harlley's account, this was not an isolated occasion. Eric was given protection from unruly soldiers after that and he gave many years of invaluable service to Ghana at various times as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to Bonn and Washington and a member of the Council of State under the Constitution of 1992.

Others who worked closely with Nkrumah were not so well treated by the NLC. As stated before, it came as a shock to me that Kwaw Swanzy was regarded as one of the most hated persons in Ghana and, as a result, was detained in protective custody for a long time. I understood the animosity towards Geoffrey Bing better because, rightly or wrongly, he was taken to have been the principal engineer of the human rights record of the Nkrumah Government. As already pointed out, T. K. Impraim was welcomed on the first day of the coup to the Police Headquarters Conference Room. But the poet, litterateur and adviser on African Affairs, Michael Dei-Annang, was considered to be one of the evil geniuses of the regime. He was detained. When he came out, he secured a professorship in City University of New York. I have mentioned how generous he and Robert Baffour had been in allocating a bungalow to us when we arrived in 1956. I did not, however, follow closely his activities as head of the powerful African Affairs Secretariat, which was substantially the most important instrument of foreign policy used by Nkrumah. In 1973, when Dei-Annang heard that I was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., he wrote an unprompted letter inviting me to visit him at the their campus in Bridgeport (?) so that he could introduce his colleagues to me. The NLC adopted an ambivalent attitude towards Ayeh Kumi. I think because the Government thought it could get valuable information from him regarding Nkrumah's wealth, if treated gently. Thus, he kept being oscillated between detention and release. His periods of release were questioned by many but could always be explained on the ground of his ill-health.

But this digresses from the narrative of the early days of the coup. Those of us chosen to work in the conference room did so with enthusiasm. We missed most of the celebrations and the route march of the soldiers round Accra. We were quite satisfied with the second-hand reports we had of happenings in town. We heard stories that several Chinese brought in by Nkrumah for his security had been killed but we never had any concrete proof of this nor was there any official confirmation of it. By and large, the coup appeared to have been bloodless, although there were one or two reported incidents of killing near Flagstaff House. General Barwah, the Commander of the Army, was also reported to have been killed while resisting arrest. With news coming in that the coup was stabilised, we became more relaxed and the atmosphere was decidedly friendly. I remember Albert Adomakoh, then the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, being invited to the place on the day of the coup. He entered the room in a state of apprehension. He told me, some years afterwards, that it did him a power of good when I said that he looked worried that he had nothing to worry about but should relax. He had been invited to discuss money matters and the question of freezing of assets. Subsequently, the assets of the CPP, party officials, Ministers and Deputy Ministers and persons connected with the party, were frozen.

All through that day, and in the following days, we closely followed the world news to hear what the world's reaction to the coup was. We also wanted to have news about Nkrumah's reaction and his movements. We heard that the news of the coup had been broken to him by his hosts in Peking on the break there in his journey to Vietnam. His first reaction apparently was dismissive of the seriousness of the coup and the alleged leaders. Who was Kotoka? He was supposed to have asked. Remarkably, he is supposed to have asked, where were people like Harlley. He had until the end of his regime believed that Harlley, his most dangerous enemy, was one of his most trusted lieutenants. When he was told that Harlley was behind the coup, his observation was in Fanti, “Afei na agoro ni be sor”. A very graphic statement which translates roughly into English as the mild “Now the game is going to become very interesting”. We followed the break-up of his entourage, first by the detachment of the public servants, like Henry Van Hein Sekyi, the charmingly accomplished diplomat with an eccentric sense of humour, who, when he got to the safety of Europe made a phone call to his wife, Maria and the first question which he asked her after what must have no doubt been a traumatic experience, was whether the piano tuner had been as he promised. Many years later when I was teasing him with this story, he asked plaintively what else he could have said over the open telephone when he had been told that he should not say anything of substance? Later, we heard of the defection of Alex Quaison-Sackey, the first black President of the United Nations General Assembly and Nkrumah's last Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was sent by Nkrumah to go to Addis Ababa to make a stand and ensure support for Nkrumah, but when he got to Germany, he made an announcement breaking with Nkrumah and giving his support to the NLC.

On the day of the coup, a Commission of Enquiry was set up into Nkrumah's properties. There had been a great deal of rumour about the extent of his wealth and about moneys stashed away in Swiss banks and other places. His old lieutenants, W. Q. M. Halm, first Ghanaian Governor of the Bank of Ghana and former Ambassador to the United States, and E. Ayeh-Kumi, a businessman who was a friend and economic adviser to Nkrumah, were rumoured as the agents who had dealt with the money. Obviously, if the allegation was true that Nkrumah had vast wealth stored abroad, this would destroy his reputation for honesty and betray the socialist principles which he avowed. It was an important commission and I made sure that it was presided over by one of the best judges that Ghana had ever produced, Fred Apaloo. Another Commission with S. Azu-Crabbe as Chairman on ***~[* ? ]~ was constituted. At this rate, if further commissions were to be appointed with judges as chairmen, they would soon exhaust the best talent on the bench. I was naive enough to think that the NLC would appoint only a few such commissions because random commissions, appointed into every aspect of life under Nkrumah's regime, would soon diminish the importance of the system of commissions and reduce the quality of the tribunal. But the setting up of these commissions could acquire a life of their own. As I later learnt, at such times of political change, especially by a sudden coup d'etat, all kinds of advisers spring up with suggestions to their new friends in government. So more suggestions were made as time wore on for more commissions of enquiry to be appointed and more were appointed. There came the time when some of the lawyer chairmen selected were so unqualified for the work that some of them did not realise that adverse findings should not be made against persons who had not been given an opportunity of being heard. But by then many months had passed and I no more had any advisory relationship with the NLC.

I left the Police Headquarters for my bungalow very late on the night of February 24. If Stella had been concerned about my safety, she did not show it. She always presented a brave face when things were difficult. She had had an anxious call from our friend, Bill De Pree of the American Embassy, asking what had happened to me because he had heard that the police came in early that morning to collect me. She asked Bill not to worry because I went with Tony Deku, a friend. It was not unusual that Bill should ring to enquire. As pointed out in an earlier chapter, during the period that they were in Accra, we had become very good friends.

When the Chairman of the National Liberation Council, General J. A. Ankrah, made his speech to the nation the next day, he gave a justification of the coup in terms of the economic mismanagement and decline and deprivation of human rights, especially through detention without trial. He promised to return the country to democratic civilian rule once the fundamentals for achieving this had been established.

A number of countries, especially those African countries which felt that Nkrumah had been interfering with their internal affairs recognised the NLC. Others played the game of wait and see. There were some who stated that they recognised States and not governments and, therefore, as far as they were concerned, business continued as usual. Some, like Tanzania under President Nyerere, never forgave the NLC for overthrowing Nkrumah. The rate of recognitions and the need to explain more effectively the reasons for the coup to other African States and, in any case, sheer courtesy to the Governments of those States, made the NLC decide to send out high-powered delegations headed by distinguished Ghanaians to various African countries. One such delegation, led by Chief Justice Korsah, brought some flak upon the NLC from the political opponents of Nkrumah who thought their time had come. Chief Justice Korsah, in their view, had supported Nkrumah for too long to be a credible advocate of Nkrumah's shortcomings. Harry Amonoo, the Foreign Service officer, was included in the delegation to Nigeria and suffered the embarrassment of being denied entry into Nigeria, because the Nigerian Government objected to his activities in the African Affairs Secretariat. Otherwise, the delegations gave no problems and, by and large, served their purpose.

A few of the officials summoned to help the NLC on the day of the coup spent their time at the Police Headquarters the next few days. The NLC Govenment and its advisers shortly thereafter moved to Osu Castle. I started sharing my time between the Police Headquarters and, subsequently, the Castle, and my Director of Public Prosecutions office at the Attorney General's Office. Soon after the coup, I was given a quiet assurance by the British Government representative of Britain's support of the coup. It will be recalled that at the time of the coup, Ghana had broken diplomatic relations with Britain over Southern Rhodesia. The British High Commissioner, Harold Smedley, had left and the affairs of the High Commission were being handled by the Australian High Commission, with Solly Gross, the British Trade Commissioner before the breach, as head of the British interest section. Solly Gross walked into my office early after the coup and handed me a handwritten note on nondescript paper, which said that the British Government welcomed the coup but would like to see recognition given to the new Government by a few African countries before it gave recognition. If the Government made the contents of the note public, the British Government would be obliged to deny it. I passed on this note to the NLC. One of the early decisions taken by the NLC was to restore diplomatic relations with the British Government and to ask specifically for the return of the High Commissioner Smedley, which duly happened later.

I soon got to know that my former Attorney General, Geoffrey Bing, had taken refuge in the Australian High Commission. Of course, he would go there as the Australians were handling British interests before the restoration of relations. I guessed that I knew that my informant, apart from sharing a secret, wanted my assistance to relieve the Mission of an embarrassment. The longer he stayed, the more of an embarrassment he was. Bing was wanted by the NLC but I thought it was not my duty to report his whereabouts. So I did not pass on the information to the members of the NLC. This may have been wrong for a person in my position but nobody had told me officially what he was wanted for. In any case, I thought that the Government had enough Special Branch talent to be able to find out where he was, if he, indeed, was wanted that much. He eventually surrendered himself to the NLC. Several people told me of Bing having hid in the Australian Mission but I did not let on that I had known that for some time. He was sent, I understand, to Ussher Fort Prison, where he stayed for some days. He was so hated by the new Government that although they had no plans to detain him for any length of time, they wanted to give him a taste of a Ghanaian prison, where many people had been detained without trial under the Preventive Detention Act which he was, rightly or wrongly, perceived to have fathered and whose use he was taken to have encouraged. He was eventually deported. The decision was taken by the NLC and I, as the Acting Attorney General, was instructed to make the order, which I did.

The making of this deportation order, coupled by an event which occurred a couple of months later, combined to ground the colourful description of me by Bing in his book, Reap the Whirlwind, as his protégé who signed his deportation order and took his house. Factually, the statement was correct. But the sinister implication it carried that I deported him because I wanted his house was far from the truth. The position regarding the house was that I avoided moving into it for as long as I could. From the time I joined the Attorney General's Office, bungalow No. 1 Third Circular Road had been known as the Attorney General's bungalow. When Bing ceased to be Attorney General, he was allowed to continue in occupation of the bungalow, apart from everything else because his successor, Kwaw Swanzy, had his own house from which he did not want to move. In 1960, when we returned from leave, we found that our bungalow, which we occupied, had been given to one of the senior Civil Servants recruited as a result of the changes brought about by the Republic and we were put in a bungalow behind the State House. I was then a Senior State Attorney. We did not like the house very much and our unhappiness with it was not diminished when we learnt in due course that the house lay right in the path of the earthquake fault in Accra. We had always wanted to move from there and I had been asking for a better bungalow. Tony Deku, who knew of my desire to move, asked me to move into Bing's bungalow after he had been deported. I declined. I did not want to because the house seemed too big for us and, in any case, not having been appointed Attorney General, there was a distinct possibility of being pushed out when a substantive Attorney General was appointed. But I kept talking about a new bungalow with friends in the new Government. Once when the allocation of bungalows was under discussion in the NLC Cabinet, I made the statement that I had wanted better accommodation for some time but had been unsuccessful in my quest. I think some of the members of the NLC were sympathetic and would have allocated to me one of the bungalows then under discussion, but Tony Deku immediately intervened to say that his colleagues should pay no attention to me, because he had been telling me, ever since Bing vacated his bungalow some two months before, to move into No. 1 Third Circular Road, but I had ignored him. How could I say to the NLC now that I was in need of a bungalow when one had been waiting for my occupation for weeks. Yes, chorused the others, why had I not moved there before? That is how I came to take Bing's house. We moved in reluctantly after this Cabinet meeting about Easter of 1966. Until June 1972 when we moved from there to our own house at Ablenkpe, it remained and still remains in our identification of our various abodes in conversation, “the Bing house” to us. On the second Sunday after the coup, all members of the NLC and their advisers and assistants, as well as those who had unofficially contributed to the success of the coup, were invited to a lunch by John Harlley at his bungalow. It was a day for reminiscences by those who had been involved in the preparation and execution of the coup. Brigadier Ocran, who had been in charge of the troops in Burma Camp, Accra and who, according to the coup plan, was to rendezvous with the troops led by Kotoka from Kumasi before they made a putsch on Flagstaff House told of the reason why he had not moved that day. In the early hours of the coup day, a short while before the critical time for movement, he had been visited by Air Vice Marshall Michael Otu, General Steve Otu's younger brother, who had come to find out what was happening. Apparently, the Air Vice Marshall, who did not know about the coup, felt that something funny was in the air and he wanted to find out from Ocran what the latter knew. Ocran prevaricated. Otu remained, although Ocran made it clear to him that his presence was not welcome. Ocran became restless but, for some time, he thought there was nothing he could do except wait out Mike Otu's stay. Just about the time that he thought he should lock up Otu in the toilet and leave for his rendezvous, Otu decided to leave. But by then, Ocran was too late for his meeting with Kotoka.

Various people, some known, others unknown recounted their experiences. The question which is often asked is who organised the coup? In answering this question, many confuse the organisation of the coup with its execution. Those who were seen as acting openly on February 24 to overthrow Nkrumah are taken as the masterminds behind the coup. So Kotoka and, later on, Afrifa, have been taken, whether individually or jointly, as masterminding the coup. The claim that Afrifa masterminded the coup can be dismissed more easily. On the day of the coup, and for some time thereafter, there was no question to all of us present at the Police Headquarters Conference Room about Afrifa being the leader of the coup. Indeed, Afrifa behaved all through the day of the coup and until Kotoka died as if Kotoka was his lord and master. On that day, Afrifa came to the Police Hadquarters Conference Room from time to time for instructions, which he went away to execute. To me, he always spoke of the leadership of Kotoka. I was surprised to hear that in his book, published after Kotoka's death, he claimed to have been the originator of the coup. I always remember the comment made by Dr. Boi-Doku about him when he described Afrifa as the man who organised the coup after Kotoka died. Nothing could be more apt. Kotoka, on the other hand, did not behave as if he was the originator or leader of the coup on the day. He more and more assumed that role, when it became obvious to him that the public regarded him as the hero. The public adulation became irresistible. One could see this development in him at meetings as time progressed; he found dissent difficult to tolerate. I often wonder what would have been the course of Ghana's history if he had not been, unfortunately, killed during the abortive coup of Lieutenants Arthur and Yeboah. But it is quite clear that he could not have organised any joint military action involving the movement of troops commanded by Ocran. He did not know Ocran before the day of the coup and could not have entrusted his life to him. He met Ocran for the first time on the day of the coup. The man who knew them both and who co-ordinated the whole putsch was Harlley, the quiet and enigmatic police chief, who was obviously the man in authority on the day, sharing his position by choice with Ankrah.

Harlley had led a self-effacing life. He did not have a high education. He had risen through the ranks in the Police. Most of his life in the senior service until he was made the IGP a year or two before the coup, was in Special Branch. He could have made himself the Head of State in Ghana on the day of the coup. Perhaps he calculated that he would not have had the undivided support of the Military. I think he would have had the support of Kotoka, anyway. But this possible reservation apart, it was his natural shyness which suggested him that they should go for Ankrah. The opportunity arose again when Ankrah was later relieved of the leadership for trying to find out, with the assistance of the notorious Nigerian, Nzeribe, about his chances of becoming President of Ghana. But Harlley declined the Chairmanship of the NLC which, because of the previous death of Kotoka, then went to Afrifa. I often pressed him to write about his life. I did not realise that his lack of writing skills was such a handicap. He submitted a twenty page manuscript to me once as his life story. I told him that it was not adequate as it lacked detail. Unfortunately, that was the last conversation we had about his autobiography. Many years later, I heard from Fred Apaloo that he had written a more extensive and, indeed, an excellent, biography. At the time of writing, I had not managed to see it.

That he was subject like most of us to the human frailty of ambition was demonstrated shortly after the coup when the structure of the Police, hitherto a Force, but now renamed a Service, was altered. The head of the Police Service became the Inspector General of Police. That position he assumed. Under him were several Commissioners in charge of various functions. The head of the Criminal Investigation Department, for example, became Commissioner of Police, CID. That was Deku. All the Police members of the NLC became Commissioners.

For a man of such few words, he talked to me from time to time about the antecedents of the coup. It was not long after the coup that stories started circulating about its organisation by the American CIA. Of course, the loudest charges of CIA organisation of the coup came from Nkrumah's supporters, both at home and abroad. I got Harlley talking by his relations with foreign intelligence organisations when I took to him a complaint from his old friend, John Thompson, the MI5 representative in Ghana for nine years before he left some time after the rumours of an aborted coup which led to the retirement of Generals Otu and Ankrah from the army. John Thompson was a very nice and mild-mannered Englishman who sang madrigals with a choir. He was attached to the British High Commission for his period of assignment to Ghana but his ostensible task was the training of Special Branch Officers. He was so knowledgeable about Ghana that in diplomatic circles it was taken for granted that what he did not know was not worth knowing. When he left Ghana after his nine years' service, the top echelon of the Police Service gave him a terrific but sentimental farewell party. My understanding of why he left at the time was that he had served long enough in Ghana that his superiors in Britain thought it was time for a change. But John Thompson reappeared on the scene soon after the coup. Some time later, he complained to me that he was not being made use of by the NLC; that he came expecting to help but so far he had been used only as a post office for carrying messages to and from the British Government. He was frustrated, because he complained that Howard Bane of the American Embassy was being selfish and doing everything to keep him, John Thompson, out of the picture. This was the complaint that I took to John Harlley.

Upon hearing me out, Harlley, with some emotion denounced the British Government, almost accusing it of perfidiousness. The British Government had nearly given him away to Nkrumah in 1964. That was the time of the rumours of a planned coup by the army while Nkrumah was away at the Commonwealth Heads of States Government conference. According to Harlley, he had advised Generals Steve Otu and Ankrah to overthrow Nkrumah while he was away. But the Generals were unwilling. Harlley had told them how foolish they were because they were going to be arrested anyway when Nkrumah got back. As it turned out, they were not arrested but suddenly retired from the army without any official explanation. But the news of the planned coup, with the involvement of Harlley, got to the British Prime Minister, who nearly passed it on to Nkrumah. The British, he thought, were prepared to betray him. Obviously, the news got to the British Prime Minister through John Thompson, because Harlley said he had approached the British Government through him for assistance, described by Harlley as the supply of equipment like listening aids. The request was turned down. John Thompson was withdrawn at that stage. But immediately the British saw that there had been a successful coup against Nkrumah organised by him, Harlley said, they hastily sent back his (Harlley's) friend to Ghana with the expectation of picking up relations from where they were. That was the reason why he was refusing to see John Thompson.

I returned to John Thompson with Harlley's reasoning and asked him whether it was correct. John Thompson treated it rather lightly and said the news got to Prime Minister Home while he was about to receive his Commonwealth colleagues for the Heads of State Conference. The Prime Minister asked whether it was not right and proper for him to pass on the information to his Commonwealth colleague that his Chief of Police was plotting a coup against him. But as John Thompson said, “We soon dissuaded him from doing that”. He went on to ask me whether I could imagine Harold Macmillan even thinking of doing what Douglas Home thought should be done. Home, he thought, was such a religious man. John Thompson stayed on without having much to do and he left, being replaced by John Lawrence.

Apart from Harlley's annoyance at the closeness of the risk he had run, the reason why John Thompson did not have more to do was the presence of the CIA station chief in Ghana, Howard Bane. As Harlley said, when the British Government refused his request, he turned to the Americans for the equipment he needed and he got it. Howard Bane must have then occupied the position with Harlley as John Thompson previously did. As John Thompson found out, Howard Bane was a man who did wanted no help nor would he brook any interference. He was a tallish but round and jolly looking man, who occupied no obvious position of importance at the American Embassy. He entertained quite a lot. Not knowing who he was, I once asked a diplomatic friend at the Embassy who this man was? The friend cautioned that I should not underestimate him, he was a very important man. When the claims of CIA involvement in the coup were made, attention was not focused on Bane as the man responsible, it was focused on the American Ambassador, Franklin Williams, the first black person appointed Ambassador to Ghana by the U.S Government, who took his position a few months before the coup. Accusations against him continued long after he had left his position as Ambassador. He had continued to visit Ghana after his mission from time to time but he was always worried by these accusations. He stopped coming to Ghana after a visit during which he went to a curio shop and, upon being identified, the shopkeeper said, “so you are the one who overthrew Nkrumah”. He thought he had had enough.

With what I had seen on the day of the coup and what I had heard later, especially from Harlley, I could hardly credit claims that Kotoka or Afrifa organised the overthrow of Nkrumah. Two accounts of an incidental nature, which I later read, confirmed me in my view that Harlley was the strategist behind the coup. The first is Richard D. Mahoney's JFK: Ordeal in Africa, published by Oxford University Press in 1983. Richard Mahoney was a son of American Ambassador Mahoney who preceded Franklin Williams. At pages 235-6 he said this: “For all the political fury in Ghana, work on the Volta Dam proceeded smoothly. In January 1966 the dam was dedicated - a year ahead of schedule. At the dedication ceremony, Nkrumah was gracious to those assembled but it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. He told Mahoney that he wanted to fly to Beijing and Hanoi to put a stop to the Vietnam War. He needed American endorsement of the peace effort. Washington responded that it was not interested in his mediation. The Americans now knew through their covert sources that it was simply a matter of time before the conspirators - chiefly, General J. A. Ankrah, Colonel E. K. Kotoka and Police Commissioner, J. W. K. Harlley - made a move against Nkrumah. Nkrumah's advisors urged him to postpone the trip to Asia. The rumours of a plot had the ring of authenticity, they said. Nkrumah told his trusted aide, Michael Dei-Anang, that he had never allowed such 'small things' to stop him. If he had, where would Ghana be today. He spent the remaining days before the trip in his study reading histories of Vietnam and preparing for his talks with Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. On February 18, 1966, he composed his final will. The following day, he left Ghana for the last time. He was deposed on February 24, 1966.”

This passage names three people as the conspirators: Ankrah, Kotoka and Harlley, who were planning the move against Nkrumah. I have mentioned the limitation of Kotoka as having the overall view of the movement against Nkrumah. Ankrah's position of a civilian without command of troops and the ease with which he was later removed, made him an unlikely candidate for the position of chief strategist. There is no mention of Afrifa. That leaves Harlley as the strategist. The passage which gives unequivocal confirmation of this comes from Tom Bower's biography of Dick White, the Englishman who at different times headed both MI5 and MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. John Thompson had always spoken of him with pride as the man who recruited him, and the man who broke the spy ring consisting of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt. In The Perfect English Spy -Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935-90 published in 1995, at page 346, Tom Bower says this:

“In the same month, another embarrassment in West Africa was unfolding. John Thompson, the MI5 officer in Accra, Ghana, signalled London that John Harlley(sic), the commissioner of police, had asked for assistance to overthrow Kwame Nkrumah. The Marxist's policies had plunged the country into dictatorship and financial disaster. The ideal date, Thompson reported, was during Nkrumah's visit to China in February. Martin Furnival Jones, Hollis's successor, echoing the Commonwealth Relations Office, vetoed any involvement, Harlley was told by Thompson to consult Howard Bane, the CIA station chief. On 26 February, Nkrumah, with the CIA help, was deposed.”

This, though not identical in detail, confirms Harlley's story of his seeking assistance from the British Government. What exactly the assistance which he required was, I have only his word for it. I have no confirmation of that. But then neither do I have confirmation or even the details of CIA action of those claiming that the coup was organised by the CIA.

One exercise that he ordered which was disapproved by the public was to put Boye Moses, a security officer in Nkrumah's regime who was caught sneaking back to Ghana, into a cage and had him paraded round Accra being dragged behind a vehicle. Harlley felt strongly that Moses had been sent by Nkrumah in Conakry to kill him and, at first, appeared unrepentant when reports of the disapproval were being conveyed to him. People, however, felt that whatever he had done, Moses should not have been treated like an animal. I am sure Harlley eventually accepted that the procedure he ordered was wrong.

His fortunes declined dramatically after the handing over to civilian rule in 1969. He was divorced from his wife, Aggie, to whom he was prepared to leave his personal fortune on the day of the coup and had, indeed, made a holograph will bequeathing everything, in case the coup failed and he was arrested and executed. I had to tell him that I thought the will would not have been accepted as valid. Aggie had, while they were married become a lawyer, and some thought that he could not bear the competition of a working wife. He had to sell his properties in Accra and moved back to the Keta area with his new wife. Reports about him thereafter were increasingly of an unhappy nature until he died.

Many appointments fell to made by the NLC. It had, for example, to appoint persons to replace all the Ministers that had been dismissed and been taken into custody. Omaboe was put in charge of Finance and Economic Affairs. There had been a view expressed that as Dr. Busia and his followers had openly opposed Nkrumah, now that Nkrumah had been overthrown, the spoils of office should be handed over to them to show what they could do. Afrifa, who was impressed by people holding high educational degrees was of this opinion. I was opposed to the idea. The argument that a critic necessarily is the proper substitute for the person he criticises, did not impress me. As the NLC had promised to return the country to a democratically elected government, I took the view that it ought not to be partial to one political group at this stage. Busia and his group, I argued, should not be handed the government on a plate; they should wait and contest the elections. The majority view in the NLC at this stage was that the persons appointed should be independent of any known political party. So people like Sylvan Amegashie, the economist and businessman; Patrick Anin, the lawyer practising in Sunyani; Anthony Wood, the former trade union official and activist in the cause of the CPP but, by now, a respected businessman heading the Ghana Insurance Corporation, were made the Commissioners in charge of the Ministries. Later events were to make me realise that my eventual leaving of the Government must have dated from the time of this advice. I continued to oppose the conferment of political power or influence on Busia. But he had powerful friends in Afrifa and Kotoka in the NLC and a number of the rest were not as unsympathetic towards him as I appeared to be. A Commission for Civic Education, to educate the people on their constitutional and civic rights, was constituted and Busia, being an academician, was put at the head of it. The organisation seemed innocuous enough but it was sufficient to give Busia a platform for politicking at a time when party politics were banned.

Two of the most important appointments on which I advised during the time I was acting as Attorney General showed that the NLC was sensitive to the advice I had given on the first day that the NLC should not be seen to be concentrating its top appointments to a small part of the country. The first was the appointment of the Chief Executive of the Volta River Authority (VRA). The term of office of the incumbent, Frank Dobson, who was a Canadian, having come to an end, the NLC was determined that appointment of his successor should go to a Ghanaian. The position of Chief Executive of VRA was highly prized by the candidates because it must have been the supreme professional management position in the country. Its importance lay in the fact that it was the first time when a black African was to be asked to manage a multi-million dollar project like the VRA. The African south of the Sahara had won his political spurs when Ghana became independent, and achieved, in Nkrumah's words, the right to manage or mismanage his own affairs. The management of an engineering and quasi-commercial project of the size of the VRA, was another matter. It demanded a competence which no Ghanaian had previously demonstrated that he had. Many must have doubted the wisdom of promoting an African to this position at the time. There were two eminently suitable candidates, both of them distinguished engineers with some administrative experience. The first was Lawrence Apaloo, known affectionately as “Uncle Lawrence”, who was then a Principal Secretary in one of the Ministries. The second was Emmanuel (Nii) Quartey, who was in charge of Electricity Corporation of Ghana. By length of service with Government, I believe Uncle Lawrence was the senior of the two. He came from the same part of the country as Harlley, Kotoka and Deku. Nii Quartey was a Ga from Accra. I had expected that Uncle Lawrence's origins would give him an edge. But to my surprise, the strongest supporter of Nii Quartey was John Harlley. As he normally spoke little, when he did, what he said carried great weight and he could be a good advocate of the causes in which he believed. I stayed out of the argument because Nii was my cousin, in the Ghanaian sense, his mother and my father being first cousins in the English sense. In any case, I could not compare the two candidates as I did not know Uncle Lawrence at all at the time. The contest was very close but, in the end, Nii was appointed. The appointment proved to be inspired, because Nii Quartey's tenure as Chief Executive continued for over a decade, thus giving confidence to the African in his management ability and stability to the VRA. As a consolation prize, Uncle Lawrence was made the Secretary of the NLC. In that position, he was extremely kind to me, remembering me in many ways even after I had left advising the NLC.

The other appointment made was that of Chief Justice. The incumbent Chief Justice was Justice Sarkodie Adoo. He was seen as Nkrumah's man, when he was appointed Chief Justice after Chief Justice Korsah was dismissed. That reputation probably even preceded this event as he was the judge appointed in times of great contest between the CPP and the NLM in Ashanti in the 1950s to enquire into the affairs of the Asanteman Council. Political opponents of Nkrumah had taken the view that the Commission of Enquiry was appointed to see to the break up of the Asantehene's power. Even before that, when the sensitivities of some of the old judges had been bruised by the appointment of Justice Van Lare to the Court of Appeal, in preference to Justice Quashie Idun, which led to the departure of the latter from the Bench, Justice Manyo Plange decided to move on to Nigeria because he suspected that the next appointment to the Court of Appeal would be Justice Sarkodie Adoo, who was his junior, over and above him. When Chief Justice Sarkordie Adoo was appointed, his first case was the retrial of the Second Treason Trial accused, including Tawia Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Coffie Crabbe. Although power to convict at the Special Criminal Court over which he presided was taken away from the judge and left entirely with the specially selected jury, this was not an auspicious way of commencing a non-controversial tenure as Chief Justice. He seldom sat in Court after that, preferring the quietness of his Chambers where he did administrative work. As a result, no great decisions can be attributed to him as Chief Justice.

The Superior Courts which he led had, of late, had some dubious appointments made to it. Besides, some claimed that some of the judges were corrupt or otherwise incapable of performing their functions satisfactorily. In the circumstances, the NLC took the decision that the Superior Courts should be restructured, and that in this exercise, Chief Justice Sarkodie Adoo must go. It was in these circumstances that the appointment of a new Chief Justice came under consideration by the NLC. The new Chief Justice was expected to work with me on the restructuring of the Courts. Two candidates were considered for the appointment. One of them was Justice Van Lare, who was the most senior judge after Chief Justice Korsah, and had resigned after the political storm created by the acquittals in the Second Treason Trials. His reputation and experience as a judge was a matter of record. The other candidate was Justice Akufo Addo, who was the third judge on the bench which acquitted the accused in the Second Treason Trial. His judicial experience by comparison with Justice Van Lare was limited but he had been one of the greatest advocates of his age. He was also a politician, being one of the Big Six, the others being Danquah, Obetsebi Lamptey, Ako Adjei, Willie Ofori Atta and Nkrumah, who were detained by the British colonial authorities after the February 28, 1948 riots in Accra. Justice Van Lare had one further quality. He, like Uncle Lawrence, came from the same part of the country as Harlley, Kotoka and Deku of the NLC. Justice Akufo Addo, on the other hand, was an Akan from Akwapim. I am of the view that it was this quality which made the NLC send him to Canada as High Commissioner rather than give him the Chief Justiceship. Justice Akufo Addo emerged from this contest the winner. He, in turn, proposed Alex Kwapong as the Vice-Chancellor of the University to replace Nana Kobina Nketia.

Justice Akufo Addo and I worked closely on the restructuring of the Courts. To assist us, we had appointed a committee consisting of distinguished members of the Bar like Victor Owusu and Bernard da Rocha to review each of the judges and to make recommendations as to their retention or otherwise. The hierarchy of the Courts at the time consisted of the High Court and the Supreme Court. A question which we had to consider was whether to retain this or to change it. Akufo Addo had always held the view that the quality of our law was founded upon the final appeals to the Privy Council. He obviously thought that the abolition of appeals to Her Majesty's Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was a mistake and he wanted a top court which could take its place. That, in his view, was the way to revive the courts to their former glory. I held, and still hold, the view that despite the long tradition of legal practitioners, we did not have many lawyers to man all the tiers of courts which would then be established, and that to establish a further tier of the Courts would be spreading our resources too thinly on the ground. A strong judiciary did not depend on the number of tiers of courts through which the appeal process went. It depended on the quality of the judges who adjudicated on cases. I was dead against his idea. We continued discussing this matter but could not resolve it ourselves. It was finally decided when we took the proposals for the restructuring and reconstitution of the Courts to the NLC for its final approval. Meanwhile, the committee reviewing the judges was going through the incumbent judges and I turned to other matters.

There was the case of the Frenchman and the Austrian who claimed when they were arrested that they had accidentally strayed across Ghana's borders. Nkrumah, on the other hand suspected that they were some agents of foreign powers up to no good and had had them detained, had the legislation on the penalty for illegal entry into Ghana changed from deportation to a minimum of ten years' imprisonment and had had the detainees tried, convicted and given a sentence according to the amended law. They were freed and sent away. A German doctor by the name of Horst Schumann, who was accused of being a war criminal who had experimented with the heads of Jews, had been in Ghana living and practising medicine in the Kete-Krachi area for years. The West German Government had requested his surrender without success during the Nkrumah era. The ground for refusal was that we had no extradition treaty with the West German Government. The West German Government now approached the NLC and requested his surrender. I was asked to negotiate a special agreement with the West German Government which would enable Ghana to surrender Schumann, which I did with the German Ambassador. Upon the presentation of the appropriate documentation showing a prima facie case against him, the undertaking to give him a trial on his return and, after following the usual practice for deportations, Horst Schumann was surrendered to the West German Government.

A major assignment was a case of extradition in reverse. The NLC wanted Kwesi Armah, former High Commissioner to Britain and, at the time of the coup, the Minister for External Trade, to be returned from Britain to Ghana to face trial for corruption charges. Extradition from Britain generally depends on the establishment of a prima facie case, which is placed before a Magistrate to consider. Thereafter, the matter went through the appeal processes, if put in motion. At the time, Britain drew a distinction between extraditions requested by Commonwealth countries, which were governed by the ***~[* missing ]~ Act, which covered a larger number of offences including political crimes and did not accept a defence that the motive for pursuing the offence was political rather than purely criminal, as would be the case in extraditions requested by countries outside the Commonwealth. They were governed by the Extradition Act, ***.~[* year missing ]~ I personally drafted and swore to the affidavit of the law of Ghana on the subject. I had had some experience of the type of affidavit required as I did the one for the extradition of Henry K. Djaba, which proved unnecessary as Djaba eventually agreed to return without going through the court process. The case went all the way up to the House of Lords. Ghana, at first, briefed Maurice Finer Q.C., to present its case. Unfortunately, a misunderstanding arose between Ghana's representatives and Mr. Finer and he withdrew. The case was thereafter handled by Robin Dunn Q.C., who later on became a judge of the High Court. Kwesi Armah was represented by my old pupil-master, Tom Kellock, now a Q.C. He saw it as a battle between the two of us. The English Court of Appeal had ruled in Ghana's favour. But Tom won in the end because although the law, as it stood at the time, was on our side, the House of Lords made history in the course of the case by issuing a practice direction that it was no more bound, as it had previously been, by its own previous decisions and then used the opportunity to decide by majority against the surrender of Kwesi Armah. Having worked so hard on the case, I felt terribly disappointed.

In Ghana, however, the old law which I had crafted with the help of Kofi Tetteh, years before, on corruption cases was revived. That was the legislation which modified Minister Aaron Ofori Atta's original Public Property (Protection) and Corrupt Practices (Prevention) Act against the dissipation of public property and corruption. It will be recalled that the reconstructed Act required that first there should be a commission of enquiry which, upon its making findings of fact against a person, resulted in a subsequent prosecution in which the prosecution would not be required to commence all over again to call witnesses against the accused but the findings of the commission together with the facts upon which they were based were taken as the prima facie evidence. The accused would then be called upon to make his defence on that basis. With the proliferation of commissions of enquiry into all aspects of the Nkrumah administration, the ****~[* missing ]~ Act, was brought into play. Indeed some of the enquiry findings fell foul of my suspicions that they would be made against persons without their being heard or given an opportunity to be heard. There were, as was to be expected, all grades of quality in the reports produced. Those written by our leading judges, such as Justices Ollennu, Azu Crabbe and Apaloo, were of the high quality that judicial experience determined. At the other end of the scale were a number of indifferent quality. Several prosecutions were brought under the Act. Lawyers whose clients were affected complained of the injustice in the Act which deprived the accused of his right to plead. When it was pointed out to them that the clients suffered no prejudice as they were all treated as if they had pleaded not guilty, one advanced the argument that it was nevertheless prejudicial in that it deprived the accused of his right formally to plead guilty. But nothing could be simpler than the accused, in his statement to the trial court, saying that he accepted the findings of the enquiry. Other lawyers said that it was prejudicial because it had a limited number of defences, which were stated in the Act. Again, a careful reading of the Act, would show that the defences therein stated were by way of examples and in no way limiting of the rights of the accused. Akufo Addo, when Chief Justice, thought that it was one of the most brilliant procedural statutes crafted. But having regard to Chief Justice Akufo Addo's political stance and the fact that the prosecutions after the coup were of his political opponents, the compliment cannot be accepted without qualification. A more unbiased compliment was paid to it some thirty years after the coup by the former Chief Justice Apaloo, who in the course of preparing a lecture on criminal procedure, without being solicited, repeated the compliment. He did not know that I had given the instruction and the guidance for it to be prepared. He thought it was one of Geoffrey Bing's better efforts, until I disabused his mind of that belief.

By the time the use of the Act seriously took effect, I was no more in the Attorney General's Office. But one of the persons affected by the Act was Mrs. Akainyah, the wife of Justice Akainyah. A finding was made by one of the enquiries that she had been the middle-person taking bribes on behalf of Kwesi Armah, the Minister of External Trade, whom the British House of Lords refused to extradite and that she used the bungalow of her husband for this purpose. It was tragic for Justice Akainyah because he was put under all kinds of pressure to resign when the news broke. Brother judges spoke to him. They came away under the impression that he would. But he continued to refuse to resign. He remained on the Bench to the embarrassment of his brother judges until he was removed in the general exercise of reconstitution of the Courts.

The committee appointed to review all judges duly reported with their observations on each of the Judges of the Superior Courts and of the Circuit Courts. From the Supreme Court, they recommended the removal of Chief Justice Sarkodie Adoo, Justices Bruce Lyle and Prempeh. From the High Court, it recommended the removal of a number, including Justice Okyere Darko.~[* [Author's note] “check on others in The Contribution” ]~ The removal was for different reasons. A number of places became vacant, and Akufo Addo and I had to consider who to recommend for appointment to fill the vacancies. He consulted widely among the lawyers at the Bar whom he knew. I wanted to see good lawyers like Joe Reindorf, Victor Owusu, Bernard da Rocha, David Effah and Tom Totoe appointed to the Bench. Except in the case of Victor Owusu, Akufo Addo found it difficult to persuade them to leave the Bar. Akufo Addo also tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Justice Kofi Adumuah Bossman, in my opinion, one of the most learned judges Ghana had produced, who was removed from the Bench during the changes made after Nkrumah had secured the power to remove judges for whatever reason he deemed fit, to return to the Bench. I also spoke to Justice Adumuah Bossman, who was my father's good friend. But he said that once he had come off the Bench, he thought it better to stay off. On the Bench, he had tended to write lengthy judgements but they always showed scholarship and industry. His loss was a serious blow. He, however, accepted appointment as the Chairman of the Chieftaincy Commission.

With regard to Victor, Akufo Addo put to me the curious proposition that Victor had not decided what to do. There were two options open to him, either to become the Attorney General or to be in the top court planned. If he chose to be Attorney General, I could either be his deputy or come to the courts as a judge. Like a flash, I realised that both Akufo Addo and Victor Owusu wanted me out as Attorney General. From their point of view, I was a stumbling block in their efforts to gain control of the advisory instruments available to the NLC. I had been my own master for the past six months and I did not want to be deputy to Victor Owusu, a politician to his fingertips, who was coming to the Office for the first time in a situation where party politics were supposed to be banned. I must have also felt that after my period of service with the NLC, if I were to be asked to step down, that was a vote of no confidence. At the beginning, Afrifa has always said that I must be confirmed as Attorney General, but I had noticed that he now appeared to have forgotten about it. I told Akufo Addo that if Victor became Attorney General, I would rather become a judge than serve under him as deputy. But I added that I would like to keep Bing's house. In his most impressively ostentatious voice, he said with a look of disbelief, “Do you mean that you would like to keep the Attorney General's house?” I simply answered yes. I did not want to move house again after only four months. I did mention to Ankrah that if they intended to make Victor Owusu Attorney General, then I did not want to stay on as his deputy. But I said I would like to continue in the bungalow to which I had moved only a few months previously. Ankrah readily said that what they had intended all along for me was that I join the top court. My future had been decided behind my back.

It was with this understanding that I continued working with Akufo Addo on the restructuring and reconstitution of the Courts. I remember making a recommendation that Dan Annan, then a Circuit Court judge, should be promoted to the High Court. He thought not. His reason was put in a question, how could Nee Odoi's brother be straight? I replied that I did not know Nee Odoi but I knew Dan well and had worked with him and I thought he would in every way be suitable as a High Court judge. He left me unconvinced. But he returned several days later to say that I must be right because everybody he had asked said Dan was excellent material. Dan was put on the list for the High Court. We managed to put down enough recommendations for the top court and the High Court to be able to present a reconstituted Judiciary to the NLC. I had thought that with the difficulty we had in finding enough suitable people who agreed to go on the Bench, Akufo Addo would forget about his design for a further court like the Privy Council. He did not. In the Council he made his plea. But my argument was accepted. As Harlley asked, “Where are the bodies to fill these courts?” The court system was reorganised. Once more, we had a Supreme Court consisting of a Court of Appeal and a High Court. These were the Superior Courts of the land. Below were the Circuit and Magistrates Courts. We did not have time to deal comprehensively with the staffing of the Circuit Courts. But we thought that the new Supreme Court would bring some inspiration to the subordinate courts. As it turned out, my victory over Akufo Addo was temporary. It lasted only through the remainder of the NLC regime. Akufo Addo later became the Chairman of the Constitutional Commission and managed to secure enough support for his top court idea. As a result, under constitutional governments we have had the High Court, the Court of Appeal and a Supreme Court. I have always found it amazing that people seem to prefer the glory and ceremonial aspect of things to their functional efficiency. I still cannot find a satisfactory answer to how the mere multiplication of tiers of courts improves the administration or quality of justice. Justice does not depend on the multiplicity of opinions or courts to which a case is submitted. The risk of having decisions made by the concurrence of the weakest minds is rather enlarged by that process. In a way, the lowering of the standards of judicial thought in the country and the dissatisfaction with the delays in the final disposition of cases by the courts can be attributed to some extent to this desire for several appellate courts.

Another issue over which I fought with Akufo Addo was whether the minimum qualification period for judges of the High Court and the Court of Appeal should be the same or different. Akufo Addo took the view that there should be a difference. My view was that as the requirement was a minimum specification there was no need to differentiate. A minimum requirement does not mean that a candidate ought to be appointed to the office once he had attained that requirement. Akufo Addo was quite adamant on this point. Starting on a requirement that High Court judges should have a minimum qualification requirement of ten years and Court of Appeal judges, fifteen years, we compromised on the Court of Appeal judges having a minimum qualification of twelve years.

The NLC went through the recommendations for the Court of Appeal and High Court. The Court of Appeal was to consist of Akufo Addo as Chief Justice, then Ollennu, Azu-Crabbe, Apaloo, Lassey and, as Victor Owusu wanted to be Attorney General, myself, as the other Justices. Thus Akufo Addo had come back to the Courts from which Nkrumah sacked him with an enhanced position. The order of seniority which put Ollennu before Azu-Crabbe meant that their positions were reversed. Azu-Crabbe was promoted to the Supreme Court during the Nkrumah regime before Ollennu and, thereby, acquired a more senior position. But from seniority at the Bar and, appointment first on the Bench, Ollennu was by far the senior. He had much more legal experience than Azu-Crabbe. Indeed, Ollennu was one of our ancient pillars of the law. He wrote a great deal on customary law and although some found his ideas controversial, he was nevertheless regarded as an authority in the field. He worked extraordinarily long hours. In court, he expected and exacted the greatest effort and preparation from the members of the Bar who appeared before him. When Ollennu was left in the High Court, a number of us thought that the treatment of him was an undeserved slight. The NLC thought the same and it was felt justified that he should assume a rank next to Akufo Addo, who was of the same vintage as himself. Apaloo and Lassey were serving judges. The choice of Apaloo was a happy one. His record before and after that appointment shows that he ranks among the greatest judges Ghana has ever produced. He subsequently became Chief Justice of Ghana and, after retirement, Chief Justice of Kenya. Lassey had a reasonable record as a judge and lawyer. But he turned to be a disappointment after he had gone through a bout of illness. He found it most difficult after that to take a decision or to write judgments. I was by far the baby of the Court. Because I had appeared a number of times in prosecutions and criminal appeals and also because of my tenure as DPP, many, even among the profession, considered me just a criminal lawyer. Even with that apparent weakness and, the absence of Justice Adumua Bossman, the Court was considered a strong Court.

Our recommendations for the High Court were accepted, except in the case of Akilano Akiwumi. He was then seconded to the East African Community and the recommendation was that he be kept on in that capacity to continue his judicial role upon his return. For reasons which had nothing to do with his judicial capability or his integrity as a judge, the NLC would not have him continue as a judge and no amount of argument could sway them.

I had the task of writing the justification for the reconstruction and reorganisation of the Courts, for publication contemporaneously with the announcement of new judges and retirement of so many judges. Not wanting to deal with the reasons for each individual judge, I wrote a general statement stating that some were unsuitable or unfit for the positions they held, others were corrupt. There were some, who the NLC was prepared to re-deploy into other jobs. One such example was my uncle, William Bruce Lyle, who was on the dissolved Supreme Court. He suffered from his eyes and he gave the impression that he was unable to cope with the amount of reading required for his position. He would sit for days with his brothers through a complicated case and never ask a question relating to the issues of the case. At the end of it, he would simply agree with the view of his brother judge who wrote the judgment. This put strong judges like Ollennu into powerful positions because they always had a point of view and were prepared to write it. It was thought by the review committee and Akufo Addo, and I agreed, that the function of a judge of the highest court of the land was not simply to make up numbers but to also have an opinion, sometimes different from the others, which he could defend. But he was a likeable person with positive qualities and the NLC was prepared to offer him a high ranking appointment in compensation. I understand that he refused. He left later for Zambia, where he found a position on their Courts which he occupied for quite a long time, and later became their Chairman for Law Reform.

Personally, his case had repercussions in the family. I had a public cursing and dressing down in the Kingsway Stores from his wife. His mother, Lady Julia McCarthy, who was my mother's aunt, stopped talking to me from the day of the announcement. Her husband, Sir Leslie McCarthy, was always fun to visit. He had been Solicitor General and later a judge of the High Court in the Gold Coast. After retirement, he had been Chairman of the newly established Ghana Commercial Bank, a position which he held for a considerable time. Above all, he was a scholar, a historian who liked to talk about his special subject, the Middle East. He had tutored in this subject in England after his graduation. In Stella and myself, he had willing, almost mesmerised listeners. We soon discovered that we could continue visiting and hearing him talk, with my great aunt retired in some part of their substantial house at Farrar Avenue. Akilano Akiwumi, with whom relations had become strained after I had succeeded him as Crown Counsel in Kumasi, must have thought that this was my final act of treachery. But I could not save him.

On 1st October, 1966, that is three days before I turned 36, I left the Attorney General's Office and became a judge of the Court of Appeal in Ghana. At the time the announcement was made, I fell short of the minimum qualification requirement for appointment to the Court of Appeal of twelve years' practice by some eight months. I thought the appointment was going to be announced as an acting one. But it was not. Many must have wondered why a young person like me should been put in the highest Court of the land. Two years before the event, Justice Akainyah had asked me why I did not want to come on the High Court, then after serving a few years, I could be appointed to the then Supreme Court. I told him that I was not interested in the High Court. Justice Apaloo, who was my closest friend in the Court of Appeal, always said that I came on the Court too young. With hindsight I came to agree with him. But there were some who were happy at my appointment and wrote to congratulate me. Among the congratulatory letters was one from K. G. Konuah, Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, which said:

“The members and staff of the Civil Service Commission join me in sending our heartiest congratulations to you on your merited appointment as Judge of the Court of Appeal.”

There was also one from A. J. Prah, the Accountant General, which said:

“The news of your appointment as a Judge of the Court of Appeal has given me great pleasure. Somehow I know that it was bound to come in due course, irrespective of whichever Government was in power.”

He must have had great faith in me, because my mind shot back to the days when, as a young State Attorney, I had given him advice which he thought wrong and he had walked over to see me to argue his point which, to my embarrassment, I accepted as correct. I remembered that when I asked him then whether I should write to him reversing my advice, he had merely produced my letter and said you have this back and write me the correct advice. A kind man, I thought.

Justice Van Lare, who had lost the contest for Chief Justice, sent congratulations from New York. My old teacher, Mike Ribeiro, then Ambassador in Rome sent me congratulations. There were also messages from old school friends, lawyer friends, my father's friends regretting that my father did not live to see me that day, police officers I had worked with, and some friends in the diplomatic service in Accra. One of them sent a letter with just one word, “Whoopee!” I had no reason to feel sorry for myself.