Kofi Abrefa Busia

Kofi Abrefa Busia was a Ghanaian scholar and politician who was Prime Minister of Ghana from 1969 to 1972. A leading opponent of Kwame Nkrumah, he led the Progress Party to victory in 1969 and helped restore civilian rule after the first military government, but was overthrown in a coup in January 1972.

Early life and education

He was born on 11 July 1913 in Wenchi, in today's Bono Region, into the town's royal family. He attended the Methodist School in Wenchi, Mfantsipim School and Wesley College in Kumasi, where he also taught, and then taught at Achimota College while earning a London University degree in history by correspondence. At University College, Oxford, he took a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1941, and in 1947 a DPhil in social anthropology at Nuffield College with a thesis on the place of the chief in modern Ashanti politics.

Scholar and opposition leader

He was one of the first Africans appointed as a district commissioner in the Gold Coast, serving from 1942 to 1949, and became the first African to hold a chair at the University College of the Gold Coast. The Ashanti Confederacy elected him to the Legislative Council in 1951. In 1952 he led the Ghana Congress Party, which later merged into the United Party, the main opposition to Nkrumah. Fearing for his life, he went into exile in 1959, becoming professor of sociology at Leiden University and, from 1962, a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Prime Minister

After Nkrumah's overthrow in 1966 he returned to chair the National Liberation Council's advisory committee and the Centre for Civic Education. When party politics resumed he formed the Progress Party, which won 105 of 140 seats in the 1969 election, and he became Prime Minister. His government faced falling cocoa prices and heavy debt, and its 1971 devaluation of the cedi was deeply unpopular. On 13 January 1972, while he was in Britain for medical treatment, Colonel Ignatius Acheampong seized power.

Death and legacy

He died in exile in Oxford on 28 August 1978. The political tradition he led, the Danquah-Busia tradition, lives on in today's New Patriotic Party.