Ghana’s new cedi notes have dumped the Big Six. Is there a political message behind it?
On Thursday, 12 November 2026, President John Mahama and Bank of Ghana Governor Dr Johnson Asiama unveiled the Heritage Series at Bank Square in Accra. Each of the eight denominations now carries its own face. Agnes Oforiwa Tagoe-Quarcoopome, the first Makola woman to open a bank account, is on the GH¢1. Cardinal Peter Porekuu Dery is on the GH¢2, James Kwegyir-Aggrey on the GH¢5, Justice Annie Jiagge on the GH¢10, Dr Ephraim Amu on the GH¢20, flag designer Theodosia Okoh on the GH¢50, Kofi Annan on the GH¢100, and Kwame Nkrumah, alone, on the GH¢200. Achimota School becomes the first high school to appear on the nation’s currency.
The collective portrait that has sat on the front of our notes for nearly two decades is gone. Of the Big Six, only Nkrumah survives, and he now stands alone on the highest denomination, labelled “Sovereignty”. J.B. Danquah, Edward Akufo-Addo, William Ofori Atta, Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey and Ebenezer Ako Adjei are nowhere to be found. The new notes enter circulation on 1 December, and the old ones remain legal tender, so for now both sets of heroes will share our wallets.
Is this a political message? My answer is that nobody can prove intent, but the effect is not neutral, and the way the decision was made is the real scandal.
First, credit where it is due
There is a great deal to like here. A market woman, a woman judge, a hymn-and-anthem composer, the designer of our flag, a Northern cardinal, an educator who argued for equal schooling for girls and boys: this is a broader and more human national story than six men in suits. A currency that finally says Ghana was built by traders, teachers, judges and artists as well as politicians deserves applause. The Bank of Ghana says the series is about security, durability and celebrating a wider cross-section of heroes, and nothing I have found contradicts the security claims.
But a broader story is not the same as an innocent one. Every selection is also an exclusion, and in Ghana, exclusions from the national story have never been innocent.
Money has never been neutral in Ghana
When Nkrumah was overthrown in February 1967, his portrait vanished from the banknotes issued between 1967 and 1971. A recent essay on Nkrumah’s legacy notes that the National Liberation Council set out to dismantle his place in Ghana’s official national story. Currency is the most widely handled public text a state produces. Whoever controls it controls what ordinary people see every day.
We already fight our memory wars through the calendar
Ghana does not need a conspiracy theory to explain why people are suspicious, because the contest is documented. Historian Adotey, in a 2019 article in the Journal of West African History, traces what he calls a matter of the apostrophe. When the NDC government declared 21 September, Nkrumah’s birthday, “Founder’s Day” in 2009, and when the NPP government later proposed 4 August, the founding of the UGCC, as “Founders’ Day”, the placement of one punctuation mark became a proxy war over who gave Ghana its independence. Adotey’s conclusion is that both the NDC and NPP narratives of the founding are parochial.
The back-and-forth did not stop. Under Akufo-Addo’s arrangement, 4 August became Founders’ Day and 21 September was renamed Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Day. In June 2025, Parliament passed an amendment under Mahama reinstating 21 September as Founders’ Day and removing 4 August from the holiday calendar. Commentators have described the restoration as placing Nkrumah at the centre of the independence story. Meanwhile, the NPP continues to observe UGCC Founding Day on 4 August, and this year its flagbearer, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, used the occasion to celebrate the Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition.
So when a government that has already reordered the national calendar around Nkrumah presides over a currency that does the same, it is not paranoid to notice the pattern.
The Big Six was itself a truce
Here is the part of this debate that gets lost. The Big Six were not a natural grouping. They were the six UGCC leaders arrested by the colonial authorities after the 1948 disturbances, and they became known by that name after their detention. Within a year, Nkrumah had broken away to form the CPP. Within two decades, Danquah, who would die in detention in 1965, and Ako Adjei were among the people his government locked up.
The collective portrait on the 2007 notes put rivals and victims in a single frame. Whatever its historical flaws, it was one of the few images in Ghanaian public life that both traditions could look at without flinching. Taking it apart, however well-intentioned, dissolves a truce. And the person who walks out of that dissolved frame with the highest denomination, with a symbol meaning leadership and authority beside his portrait, is the one the sitting government’s party claims.
Was it deliberate? The honest answer is that we do not know
The case for a political reading is easy to state. In the week before the unveiling, the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park publicly urged the Bank of Ghana to replace the Big Six image on selected notes with the famous 1957 photograph of Nkrumah declaring independence, while saying the Big Six should still be recognised. The Head of State personally unveiled the notes. The Governor was appointed under this administration. And the outcome, one Big Six member retained, four of the five who are linked to the NPP tradition and one former Nkrumah minister dropped, will be read through partisan eyes whether or not anyone intended it.
The case against is also real. The other faces are largely non-partisan: Aggrey, Amu, Annan, Okoh, Jiagge and Dery are not party icons. Ako Adjei’s exclusion cannot be easily squared with a simple pro-NDC reading. The Bank says each denomination tells a different story, and that is a legitimate design choice. A central bank can also reasonably decide that putting the same six men on every note was repetitive.
I cannot tell you which story is true, and that is precisely the problem.
Who decides? That is the question nobody can answer
In the Bank of Ghana statements and coverage I reviewed, I found no published criteria for choosing the eight, no named selection panel, no public call for nominations and no record of consultation with historians or Parliament. If such a process exists, it has not been shown to us. A decision about whose face appears on money that every Ghanaian handles every day should not be a black box.
Other countries have shown that it does not have to be. In 2016, the Bank of Canada opened a public call for nominations for the face of its new $10 note and received more than 26,000 submissions, of which 461 met the criteria. A seven-member independent Advisory Council of historians, authors, activists and academics cut the list to twelve. The number of nominations per person was not counted, so it was not a popularity contest. A public opinion survey and historical research then helped narrow the list to five, and the Minister of Finance made the final announcement in December 2016. Viola Desmond was chosen, and the criteria, including that nominees had been dead for at least 25 years, were published in advance. The Bank had commissioned that process after an internal review in 2014 recommended more public input.
Ghana could do the same. I would propose four things:
- Publish the criteria before the next series: who qualifies, what “national” means, and how party affiliation, region, gender and profession will be balanced.
- Appoint an independent panel of historians, civil society and cross-party representatives, with Parliament consulted on the shortlist.
- Open the process to the public through nominations and surveys, as Canada did.
- Explain the exclusions. If five of the Big Six are out, tell Ghanaians why.
The best case for the other side
In fairness, defenders of the redesign will say the following. The old notes gave one group portrait to every denomination, and a national currency can tell a richer story than one 1948 arrest. The Bank has not invalidated the old notes. Putting Nkrumah on the top denomination honours the founding president as widely as any currency honours its first head of state. And a central bank is entitled to make design decisions without every one of them being run through Ghana’s partisan lens. These are serious arguments. They would be more persuasive if the Bank had shown its working.
My verdict
I do not think the Bank of Ghana set out to rewrite history, and I do not think we should accuse it of that without evidence. But I also do not think we can pretend that a decision this symbolic, taken in a country that has spent years fighting over an apostrophe, can be made quietly and then defended as merely technical. In a society where trust in institutions is fragile, a heritage series that was meant to unite us risks reopening the oldest argument we have: who gave us this country?
The heroes on our money should belong to all of us. So should the process that chooses them.
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