Politicians rarely win awards the way artists do. Their honours tend to arrive as state decorations, exchanged between heads of state on official visits, so the longest lists belong to the people who spent the most time on the world stage.
That explains the shape of this ranking. Kofi Annan ran the United Nations for a decade and has almost three times the honours of anyone else. Behind him, Ghana's presidents are separated by only a few decorations each.
The most decorated Ghanaian politicians and statesmen
1Kofi Annan
33 honours. Nobody else is close. Kofi Annan shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations and collected state orders from Poland, Romania, Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. His list also includes the Olof Palme Prize, the MacArthur Award for International Justice and Ghana's own Companion of the Order of the Star, plus honorary degrees from 33 universities, which we count as one entry. Read full profile →
2John Agyekum Kufuor
12 honours. John Kufuor's honours cluster around his time in office. Britain made him an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath in 2006, and Brazil, Italy, Germany, Liberia and the Netherlands gave him their highest orders. In 2011 he shared the World Food Prize with Brazil's Lula da Silva for cutting hunger and poverty. Read full profile →
3Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo
11 honours. Nana Akufo-Addo's eleven entries are all foreign state honours. Five came in his first year as president, from Morocco, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Liberia. The latest was France's Legion of Honour, at the rank of Grand Officer, in 2024. Read full profile →
4John Dramani Mahama
10 honours. John Mahama's awards are more varied than his predecessors'. They include the Africa Award for Excellence in Food Security and Poverty Reduction in 2013, an honorary law doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, Cuba's Friendship Medal and Benin's Grand Cross. Read full profile →
5Kwame Nkrumah
8 honours. Ghana's first leader was honoured on both sides of the Cold War. Kwame Nkrumah received the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1962, and a year later Italy's Order of Merit with Collar. Egypt, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland also decorated him, and South Africa added the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo in 2004, long after his death. Read full profile →
6Alhassan Tampuli Sulemana
8 honours. Level with Nkrumah, for a very different career. Alhassan Tampuli Sulemana's awards came as head of Ghana's National Petroleum Authority, including Africa's Downstream Regulator of the Year in 2017 and a Climate and Clean Air award for moving Ghana to low-sulphur fuel. Read full profile →
7Kennedy Agyapong
7 honours. Kennedy Agyapong's honours reward philanthropy more than politics, from a G.O.D. Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 to Statesman of the Year at the Sankofa National Prestige Honours in 2025. Read full profile →
8John Setor Dumelo
5 honours. John Dumelo won his awards before he won a seat in Parliament. The Ghana Movie Awards named him Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2013 for A Northern Affair. Read full profile →
9Jerry John Rawlings
4 honours. Jerry Rawlings received Cuba's Order of José Martí in 1984, and much later an honorary doctorate from the University for Development Studies. He is level on four with John Atta Mills. Read full profile →
10John Evans Atta Mills
4 honours. Three of John Atta Mills's four honours came after his death in 2012, including the Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize for democratic governance. Read full profile →
What counts as an honour here
We count national and foreign orders, named prizes, medals and major awards. Honorary doctorates count as one entry per university, except for Kofi Annan, whose 33 are grouped together. We leave out chieftaincy titles and appearances on lists of influential people.
How we counted
Every figure here is a count of wins, not nominations, taken from the award list on each person's Agyedin profile. We built those lists from official winners lists, national newspapers and Wikipedia, and dropped anything we could not trace to a source. Two rules keep the musicians comparable: a collaboration award counts for every credited artist, while a song award counts only for the lead artist. A national or foreign order counts once, and a batch of honorary degrees counts as a single entry.
Totals change as new ceremonies happen. The Awards Leaderboard updates itself from the profiles, so it will always be a step ahead of this page. If you can document a win we have missed, send it to our corrections desk.
