“You might as well kill us!” That, ‘ku me preko’ in Twi, was the chant heard across Ghana in May 1995, when a 17% increase in value-added tax sent 100,000 people onto the streets.
Protesters were led by Nana Akufo-Addo, who was at the time an opposition figure and is now the Ghanaian president. Their message was simple: the tax was a death sentence. In a major political victory for Akufo-Addo, the tax policy was reversed.
Akufo-Addo soon became seen as a custodian of free speech and the rule of law, a reputation he further burnished in the 2000s as attorney-general. In 2015, two years before being voted in as president, he was critical of police overreach by the government during protests for electoral reforms, saying: “Brute force by the police against unarmed citizens exercising their constitutional rights should be a thing of the past.” During his inauguration speech in 2017, Akufo-Addo urged Ghanaians “to be citizens, not spectators”.
