The Values Underpinning The 4 June 1979 Military Uprising Transcend Annual Rituals Of Political Rhetorics

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) when in opposition appears more committed to the ideals and core values of the 4 June 1979 Revolution than when it assumes the reins of government on the basis of promises to the electorate to strictly implement policies anchored upon those values. Every election the NDC has won under the 1992 Constitution has consistently been based on promises to the electorate to implement policies anchored on the core values of probity, accountability, transparency, and social justice underpinning the 4 June 1979 Revolution and Constitution of the NDC: the 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2024 elections speak for themselves.

However, NDC governments since 7 January 2009 have behaved as though on the occasion of the celebration of the anniversary of 4 June 1979 any time the NDC is the governing political party, the core values of probity, accountability, and transparency become binding only on NDC party executives and not on the government brought into power by the party.

The attendance at anniversary celebrations of 4 June 1979 by NDC Government leaders between 7 January 2009 and 7 January 2017 and again from 7 January 2025 to 4 June 2026 vindicates the fact that while the NDC as a party in opposition is quick to claim the values of the 4 June 1979 Revolution, when it assumes the reins of government the leaders of government do not accord the core values the same serious attention and compliance as shown by their absence from celebrations of the mandatory NDC anniversary celebration of Accountability Day. I need not underscore the fact that the 31 December 1981 Revolution which the NDC Constitution enshrines as Revolution Day suffers a worse neglect from NDC Presidents, Ministers, and other government appointees as well.

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) whether in government or opposition, consistently celebrates and honours its anniversaries and heroes, irrespective of what opposing significant others think. Mr. John Agyekum Kufuor upon assuming office as President of Ghana de-recognized the anniversary celebration of 4 June 1979 as a public holiday on 1 June 2001 as a political snob to the NDC, former President Jerry John Rawlings, and cadres of the Revolution. Nana Akufo-Addo also amended the Public Holidays Act, 2001 (Act 601) in 2019 to officially designated August 4 as “Founders Day” to honour heroes of the NPP with a public holiday. Subsequent NDC governments, on the other hand, appear to have accepted the de-recognition of June 4 as a public holiday by the NPP even though the NPP could not secure a declaration of unconstitutionality in the Supreme Court against the military uprising of 4 June 1979 for overthrowing the military regime of NRC/SMC that had overthrown a constitutional government of Kofi Abrefa Busia in 1972.

Whether one approves or disapproves the brave actions of the junior officers and men of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) that ushered in the 4 June 1979 Revolution and established the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which overthrew the military regime of the Supreme Military Council (SMC II), the event, nonetheless left behind the enduring values of probity, accountability and transparency as benchmarks of governance. Without theses values, no democratically elected government can legitimately claim to represent the will of the people of Ghana.

The elected government of the People’s National Party (PNP) government which succeeded the AFRC on 24 September 1979 was overthrown on 31 December 1981 and replaced by the military regime of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) for violating the core values and principles of the 4 June 1979 Revolution.

The PNDC subsequently returned the country to democratic constitutional rule with Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings as the elected President on 7 January 1993. The Constitution of the NDC, adopted in September 1992 before the 1992 elections, upon which he won that election, also enshrined June 4 as the Party Anniversary Date, designating it as Accountability Day. President Jerry John Rawlings - leader and Chairman of the AFRC, and later Chairman of the PNDC – was enshrined in the NDC Constitution as the “Founding Father of the Party upon whose vision and leadership the Party was established.” That Constitution also designated him as Chairman of the Council of Elders of the NDC.

The anniversary of 4 June 1979 was from 1982 to June 2000 celebrated annually as both a public holiday and as Accountability Day. However, on 1 June 2001, the NPP government under President Kufuor, acting under a certificate of urgency, passed the Public Holidays Act, 2001 (Act 601) to de-recognize 4 June as a public holiday.

The NPP, after boycotting the 1992 parliamentary election, filed an action in the Supreme Court in 1994 for a declaration that the celebration of the anniversary of 4 June as a public holiday was unconstitutional. The same court had in December 1993 declared that 31 December could not be celebrated as a public holiday and with public funds. But 4 June 1979 was an uprising of junior military officers that overthrew a military regime that had abrogated the 1969 Constitution and could not, therefore, be said to be unconstitutional.

The Kufuor government’s decision to de-recognize 4 June, just days before its celebration, was met on 4 June 2001 with a massive commemoration organised by the NDC leadership under President Rawlings and his dear wife at the Art Centre, Accra.

The NDC has since then continued, in accordance with its Constitution, to observe 4 June as Accountability Day and to hold all governments, NDC and NPP alike, to account for adherence to the core principles of probity, accountability, transparency, and social justice. However, participation by NDC governments themselves in these commemorations has gradually diminished, particularly after the passing of President Rawlings, reducing the observance largely to party structures rather than state leadership.

With the transition from PNDC rule to constitutional governance, opportunistic political elites within the PNDC who had remained dormant during the PNDC era began to gradually reassert themselves within the democratic space, eroding the foundational values of probity, accountability, and social justice. This deterioration became more pronounced following the NDC’s return to power in 1997, when wolves in sheep skin in the government begun to brazenly violate those values because of the impending end of President Rawlings’ tenure on 6 January 2001 and his inability to prosecute them in his remaining lame duck years.

President Rawlings himself repeatedly warned about corruption and moral decline within the government, notably in his 1999 Ho Congress speech, which reflected deep concern about governance decay during the twilight of his administration.

The NDC suffered electoral defeat in 2000 largely due to perceived departures from its founding values, ushering in the Kufuor-led NPP government. Many party operatives also bore significant political and personal consequences for the transgression that made the party lose that election.

For the NPP government to succeed, the NDC had to be criminalized and destroyed as a political party by means of tampering with the judiciary, the military, police, and other security apparatus of the nation to demonstrate the perceived levels of corruption and other economic crimes allegedly committed by the government of the NDC and its operatives. The target of the Kufuor government in the attempt to taint the whole NDC government with criminality was to destroy the achievements of the June 4 and 31 December Revolutions that were led by President Rawlings.

The Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Isaac Kobina Abban was blackmailed with impeachment and prosecution to resign from office to enable the NPP appoint its preferred Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Edward Kwame Wiredu to administer the judiciary to achieve the object of politically prosecuting perceived criminals in the NDC. Both Mr. Edward Wiredu and Mr. John Kufuor had been lawyers in the chambers of Victor Owusu apart from Mr. Wiredu’s family

relationship with one of Mrs. John Agyekum Kufuor’s sister with whom he had fathered a baby girl out of wedlock. As the Deputy Attorney-General, I had on ethical grounds, refused to investigate and prosecute Mr. Justice Wiredu over allegations that he had acquired and developed a landed property in Accra in the name of this daughter when she was still a minor and subsequently rented it to a foreign embassy for payment in United States Dollar instead of Ghana Cedis.

Both Justices I. K. Abban and E. K. Wiredu were my friends through our common association with Alhaji Dramani Yakubu, the Judicial Secretary, even though each of them hated the other with a passion. It is within the foregoing context that Mr. Justice Wiredu who was acting as the Chief Justice in the absence of Chief Justice Abban for medical treatment abroad initiated the Practice Directions establishing the Specialized Fast Track High Courts and the manipulation of the appellate processes including packing the Supreme Court to ensure the government had a majority to review cases against NDC operatives it had lost before the ordinary bench of the Supreme Court. The Tsatsu Tsikata review application is an example.

After eight years of hunting imaginary criminals and looters within the NDC, the Kufuor government only succeeded in convicting just a few ministers and operatives of President Rawlings’s NDC government whose potential trial and conviction were predicted within the Attorney-General’s Office long before the NDC lost the 2000 elections. Records exist in the Attorney-General’s Office or in the archives which testify to warning letters written to some of these Ministers and operatives on the abuse of the procurement procedures they had embarked upon in their ministries.

As confirmation of the politicization of the Specialized Fast Track High Courts and appellate processes to taint the entire NDC as a criminal organization, President Kufuor pardoned all those NDC Ministers and operatives against whom the government had obtained convictions and sentences. Mr. Kufuor’s government further discontinued all pending criminal trials against NDC Ministers and other operatives before or on 6 January 2009: he handed over to an NDC government on 7 January 2009.

President John Evans Atta-Mills tried to move away from the politicized criminalization of past NPP political office holders except those who could be demonstrated to have looted the public purse with wanton abandon. I was his Presidential Advisor on Legal Affairs and knew his thinking on these matters. Nonetheless, the hawks within the NDC exploited the inexperience of the Attorney-General who had never appeared as a lawyer in any court of

record before her appointment and embarked on not well-thought-out criminal prosecutions, all of which resulted in acquittals of the suspects. Eventually, President Mills transferred me to the Ministry of Justice as the Attorney-General in the teeth of protestations from me because I knew I would treat crime as crime and not an instrument of political lawfare against opponents of government.

The Woyome and Waterville, and the Austro-Invest gargantuan suspected crimes which the government did not want to prosecute, led eventually to me becoming the plaintiff in two constitutional cases in the Supreme Court after the termination of my appointment as the Attorney-General on account of my determination to prosecute the government affiliated suspected criminals. The Woyome case earned the NDC government the description “create, loot, and share” government led corruption in Ghanaian legal lexicon. The NDC government refused to enforce the judgments and awards with interests as ordered by the Supreme Court in those cases.

The NDC lost the 2016 election to the NPP on grounds of perceived corruption, abuse of power and impunity. Nana Akufo-Addo’s NPP government that succeed John Mahama’s NDC government on 7 January 2017 sought to gain traction and endear itself to Ghanaians by exhibiting a posture of impartially fighting corruption, just as President Kufuor had rhetorically declared zero tolerance for corruption after he assumed office on 7 January 2001. The declarations to fight corruption by the Kufuor and Akufo-Addo governments respectively were breached more in practice than in the observance.

The agents of foreign western governments registered in Ghana as Civil Society Organizations (CSO) who had aided Kufuor to power were at Nana Akufo Addo’s disposal with the establishment of an Office of the Special Prosecutor to fight corruption and abuse of power. I had the misfortune of the naivety of allowing myself to be persuaded to accept to be the first Special Prosecutor under the Office of the Special Prosecutor Act, 2017 (Act 959) and laboured to facilitate the promulgation of the statutory instruments that operationalized the OSP.

Unfortunately, on 8 May 2019 when I met President Akufo-Addo to brief him on the fact that I had filed corruption charges on 5 May 2019 in the High Court against an NDC Member of Parliament (MP) and an NPP Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), amongst other suspects, I came away with the understanding for the first time that I was not supposed to investigate suspected criminals within the governing NPP government and political party. The suspects were eventually acquitted upon a submission of no case long after I had resigned my office as the Special Prosecutor on account of interference by the government in the pending Agyapa Royalties Transactions investigations. The Deputy Special Prosecutor knew the outcome we expected from the President’s reaction against the corruption charges preferred against the MCE of the governing party because she was privy to facts that pointed to those outcomes which I can disclose if she denies my contention.

The Public Procurement Authority (PPA), the Right to Information Commission (RTC), and other accountability and transparency institutions were purposefully staffed by political loyalists of the Akufo-Addo government to defeat the laudable objectives of the institutions and to promote corruption and abuse of power. The goodwill which Nana Akufo-Addo earned with his campaign promises of anti-corruption and non-partisan good governance that catapulted him to defeat the NDC government was squandered. The Akufo-Addo government came to be perceived as more corrupt and undemocratic than the NDC government it defeated at the 2016 elections.

John Dramani Mahama whom Nana Akufo-Addo defeated at the 2016 Presidential elections was returned to power at the 2024 elections with an overwhelming majority in both the Parliamentary and in the Presidential polls in the hope that he had learnt lessons from his tenure from 2012 to 2016.

The John Mahama government has since it won the 2024 elections and assumed office on 7 January 2025 enjoyed the same massive level of goodwill the mass of Ghanaians accorded to President Kufuor in 2001, President Mills in 2009, and President Nana Akufo-Addo in 2017. Unfortunately, history appears to be repeating itself with what is clearly a replication of the Kufour and Akufo-Addo style and methodology of governance of weaponizing the security and intelligence agencies and other critical accountability institutions using the media as a means of criminalizing perceived adversaries of the government, instead of allowing the hallowed traditions of law enforcement and criminal justice administration to take their natural course in accordance with the due process of law.

President Mahama has also ensured that he has his own preferred Chief Justice. The superior courts have been packed with preferred appointees to out do the Nana Akufo-Addo government’s infatuation with court packing with loyalists’ appointments, including in appointments to all levels of the superior courts, for which I had occasion to criticize the Akufo-Addo government. The Specialized Fast Track High Courts of the Kufuor government have returned in the name of Special Criminal Divisions of the High Court.

The prosecution of galamsey, corruption and corruption-related offences, determinations by the Auditor-General and the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament are to become special criminal offences needing specialized courts and tribunals to try them. I belong to the school of thought that believes that once a government begins setting up specialized courts and tribunals to try specified criminal offences the presumption of innocence which applies equally to all criminal offences is thereby rendered nugatory for persons suspected of committing the specified crimes earmarked for prosecution by specialized courts.

The wind that blows over ordinary Ghanaians does not pass judges by. Consequently, as human beings socialized within our society their personal interests in ingratiating themselves for purposes of promotions cannot be discounted as the Kufuor and Akufo-Addo governments ingrained with selective compensatory promotions of preferred justices during their tenure.

The John Dramani Mahama government is just one and half years old and there is a lot of talk about economic successes without a commensurate verification of the impact of those policies on the pockets of the ordinary Ghanaian. As a citizen of Ghana who has retired from public office, I do not feel the impact of the economic successes of the past one and half years of the Mahama government in my pocket. When I visit the pharmacy to purchase prescribed medication for my chronic old age ailments the prices continue galloping skywards upon each visit.

The NDC celebrated the anniversary of the 4 June 1979 Revolution as Accountability Day without any noticeable participation by the Ministers of State and other appointees of the government ensconced at the Jubilee House, demonstrating once again that the values of probity and accountability matter only as instruments to winning political power and not enforcement of those values. The Public Holidays and Commemorative Days (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act 1142) and the fact that the government ignored the restoration of June 4 as a public holiday may explain the NDC government’s real thinking about that revolution.

Two days after the NDC rhetorically celebrated 4 June as Accountability Day, appointees of the NDC government who had boycotted the anniversary celebrations mandated under the NDC Constitution trooped to the Labadi Beach Hotel, Accra, on 6 June 2026 to receive awards for Ministerial Excellence they had bought themselves or through sponsorship payments to the organizers from the public purse between Twenty-Five Thousand Ghana Cedis (Ghc25,000.00) and Fifty-Thousand Ghana Cedis (Ghc50,000.00) a piece when the poor cocoa farmer and the ordinary Ghanaian worker struggles to make ends meet.

On this accountability occasion of the 47 anniversary celebration of the 4 June 1979 uprising mandated by the founding Constitution of the NDC under which Mr. John Mahama was elected the President of Ghana for his second tenure the government appears, like the Akufo-Addo government, to be using deception of the public through the media to cover up accountability and transparency breaches arising from the Ministerial excellence awards.

The media as usual reported that President John Mahama while on a state visit to Belarus lamely banned his Ministers of State and other appointees from buying or sponsoring excellence awards from the public purse for the sake of being nominated for questionable awards instead of allowing the appropriate law enforcement agencies to investigate whether the purchasing or sponsorship of the awards ceremony for purposes of obtaining an excellence award constituted abuse of public office for personal profit or other prosecutable offences.

President Akufo-Addo normally took action to close the stable after the horses had fled to defeat criminal investigations. President Mahama is coincidentally doing the same thing at a time when the NDC is purporting to celebrate the NDC’s foundational values of accountability.

The government directive issued and signed by the Executive Secretary to the President also raises issues of accountability and transparency on the occasion of this year’s 4 June anniversary. Callistus Mahama who issued it is known through the media to have been medically evacuated by the government under a certificate of urgency to the United Kingdom (UK) towards the end of April 2026 for emergency medical treatment for an undisclosed

neurological ailment affecting his mobility. Callistus Mahama has not been reported to have been declared medically fit by the doctors in the UK where he was medically evacuated by the government at the expense of the public purse for treatment and returned to assume work in Ghana.

I raise the issue of accountability and transparency on the alleged government directive because I know as a factual matter that the neurological condition that necessitated the emergency evacuation of Callistus Mahama to the UK for treatment takes more than three months to treat satisfactorily, if at all, excluding periods for occupational therapy and recuperation. I will say no more, for now! I hate propaganda and scams!

I put my reputation at stake for canvassing for the election of John Mahama as President on 7 December 2024 believing that there would be more accountability and transparency this time round of his second tenure. I am still hopeful that things will improve as the economists and international institutions continue praising our economic success story. But one thing I wish the government to remember after its one and half years in office is that when one objectively compares the period 7 January 2017 to 4 June 2018 with the period 7 January 2025 to 4 June 2026 it is difficult to state that the Akufo-Addo government performed worse in economic terms within the same time frame after coming into office than the John Mahama government has performed within its one and half years in government in his second tenure. See for instance the IMF Country Report No. 18/113 for April 2018 and how the then Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, received commendations for his stewardship of the economy.

The ability of the NDC to win the 2028 elections will as usual depend on how the electorate perceives the commitment of this NDC government to the foundational values of probity, accountability and social justice epitomized by the 4 June 1979 uprising for which the mass of citizens entrusted their confidence in the NDC and voted for it again on 7 December 2024.

It is, therefore, too early for sycophancy, gloating, and flaunting of awards about successes when one remembers the adulations of the early years of the Akufo-Addo government. Let us also remember that the NDC was founded on 10 June 1992, exactly 34 years ago today.

Martin A. B. K. Amidu 10 June 2026