The Processes of Making Ghana’s Independence Constitution and the Triumph of the Unitary State Model

What were the processes in the making of Ghana’s independence constitution, and why and how did the unitary school triumph over the federalists in terms of the type of constitution produced? These questions are precisely what this author sets out to answer. Constitutional history is a not a favourite terrain in Ghanaian historiography, yet the historian is endowed with the rare wherewithal to write on the making of Ghana’s independence constitution with a focus on the stakeholders, the processes, and the outcome, which constituted the juridical foundation of modern Ghana. The methodology of data collection for this study is essentially qualitative, and both primary and secondary sources were deployed. This study revealed that constitution-making in colonial Ghana was a step-by-step process starting with the British colonial authorities, who laid down the foundation in a succession of constitutional experiments embedded in the Executive and Legislative Councils with the timid involvement of Africans in the pre–World War II era, and a significant number of Africans after the war. Radical nationalists championed by Kwame Nkrumah hijacked the constitution-making machinery from the timid and conservative nationalists represented by chiefs and their acolytes and accelerated the movement to independence under a unitary constitution. The constitutional debates over the appropriateness of the federal or unitary constitutions constituted a real battle of conflicting ideologies, where the proponents of the unitary state emerged triumphant.