Samia Nkrumah

Samia Nkrumah, daughter of Ghana's first president, won the Jomoro seat in Parliament at her first try in 2008 and later became chair of the Convention People's Party, the first woman to lead a major party in Ghana.

Exile and return

Samia Yaba Christina Nkrumah was born at Aburi on 23 June 1960. On the day of the 1966 coup that removed Kwame Nkrumah, she, her mother and her brothers were forced out of Ghana, and the Egyptian government gave them a new home. The family came back in 1975 at the invitation of General Acheampong's government, and she attended Achimota School, but she left again in the early 1980s when her mother returned to Egypt.

London and Cairo

In London she worked as a clerk at the Bank of India from 1984. She studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies, finishing a BA in Arabic in 1991 and a master's in 1993. From 1989 she also wrote for Al-Ahram, the Egyptian newspaper, in several roles.

Politics

She is a co-founder of Africa Must Unite, a group set up to promote her father's ideas, and that work drew her into Ghanaian politics. After her 2008 win in Jomoro she went on to chair the CPP. In 2023 she said she would run for the Jomoro seat as an independent in the 2024 election. In 2024 she publicly urged the president not to sign the anti-LGBTQ bill passed by Parliament on 28 February, calling it harsh and unjust. The same year she began work on a coconut processing factory in Jomoro.

Keeping the Nkrumah name alive

In July 2024 she said her father never owned a house and gave Peduase Lodge to the state. At the 2026 NkrumahFest in Nkroful, marking his 117th birthday, she apologised for the family's long absence from his hometown and said they had come back to contribute to Ghana's development. She also rejected the idea that Ghanaians were happy when he was overthrown.

Family

Her elder brother, the journalist Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah, died in Cairo on 14 October 2026 after a long illness that followed a stroke. Samia announced his death on behalf of the family in a statement on Facebook, thanking his carers and the governments and people of Egypt and Ghana.