Gabby Otchere-Darko’s cryptic post amid new faces on cedi notes sparks controversy

A post by Gabby Otchere-Darko, a leading figure in the New Patriotic Party, has drawn a wave of hostile responses following the Bank of Ghana’s unveiling of the new Cedi Heritage Series, with social media users reading his reflections on national memory as a complaint about who appears on the currency. Writing shortly after President John Dramani Mahama launched the notes on November 12, 2026, he offered no names and made no explicit demand. “A nation that makes a battlefield of its past weakens its defences against the struggles of the present,” he wrote. “Without the courage to accept a shared history, it cannot heal its divisions or forge a common destiny.” The abstraction did not survive contact with his audience, who supplied the specifics he had omitted.

The series he was responding to represents a substantial departure in how Ghana populates its money. Eight denominations now carry eight individuals, each paired with a theme and a landmark: Agnes Oforiwa Tagoe-Quarcoopome on the GH¢1 with Makola Market for commerce; Cardinal Peter Porekuu Dery on the GH¢2 with the Larabanga Mosque for religious freedom; James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey on the GH¢5 with Achimota School for education; Annie Jiagge on the GH¢10 with the Supreme Court for justice and equality; Dr Ephraim Amu on the GH¢20 with the National Theatre for the arts; Theodosia Salome Okoh on the GH¢50 with Jubilee House for nationalism; Kofi Annan on the GH¢100 with the peacekeeping training centre that bears his name; and Dr Kwame Nkrumah on the GH¢200 with his mausoleum for sovereignty. The selection broadens the currency’s representation of women, northern Ghana and professional achievement, and it retains Nkrumah at the apex denomination while dropping the collective treatment of the Big Six that had featured previously.

That last change is what respondents fastened on. Rather than engaging his argument about historical reconciliation, they treated the post as an appeal on behalf of figures from his own family and political tradition, and rejected it in blunt terms. “When the right history does not favour you, you don’t rewrite it and expect us to accept it as such,” one user wrote. Another stated flatly, “We will not put any of your family’s heads on our currency again.” A third asked what the three individuals he was assumed to want included had actually contributed before independence, while others described his forebears as traitors and declared Nkrumah the sole legitimate claimant to the independence narrative. One respondent observed the uniformity of the reaction itself: “Not a single positive comment here to back you, Sir. Your party really struck a wrong nerve with Ghanaians.”

The most substantive replies moved past insult to articulate a position on how commemoration should be allocated. One user argued that participation in a historical struggle does not entitle every participant to equal standing in its triumph, and another specified the objection: that figures who opposed Nkrumah’s demand for immediate independence and worked against his development programme cannot subsequently claim equivalent heroic status. This is a contestable reading of the period, but it is an argument rather than an abuse, and it identifies the real question beneath the exchange, which is whether national honours should record the breadth of a political struggle or reward only the side that prevailed in it.

Otchere-Darko’s formulation assumed that a shared history is something a nation can be talked into accepting, and the response demonstrates the difficulty. Currency is among the most consequential forms of state commemoration precisely because it is unavoidable, circulating daily through every transaction, and the choice of whose face it carries is understood by the public as a verdict rather than a gesture. A call for inclusiveness issued in the immediate aftermath of a redesign that removed figures from his own lineage was always going to be read as interested advocacy, whatever its merits as a general principle. He may well have intended a broader point about the weaponisation of Ghanaian history; by leaving it unanchored to any name or event, he allowed his audience to anchor it for him, and they did so in the least generous terms available. The episode illustrates how little room remains in the current political climate for appeals to shared memory that do not first specify whose memory is being shared.

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