Kafui Dey interviews Major Agbeko Sedziafa (rtd), DSO

From Anyako to the Flagstaff House: A Conversation with Major John Komi Agbeko Sedziafa

Soldier, security chief and living witness to history, Major John Komi Agbeko Sedziafa, Retired DSO, sits down with Kafui Dey eight days after his 91st birthday. Born in Anyako in the Volta Region, he traces a journey from a childhood illness that sent him across the border to Togo for treatment, to the halls of Flagstaff House where he served as head of security for Ghana's first president. This is a conversation about loyalty, bombs, coups, exile, and what it means to serve a man you believed in with your whole life.

Born in Anyako: The Early Years

He was born on the 5th of January 1935 in Anyako in the Volta Region. His earliest memory is of illness — a health problem serious enough that his mother took him to her sister in Togo, whose husband was a medical doctor. He was sent to Lomé to be treated and cured. It was there, in a French-speaking country, that his education began.

He is the son of two traders — his mother sold clothes and sundry goods, his father was also a businessman. His father had around fifteen children with different mothers, but Major Sedziafa grew up with his mother, away from that household. When he was cured and had completed elementary school in Lomé, his father, by then living in Juakope in the Keta District, requested he come. It was there that his English education began — first at Jerlof, then at the EP Evangelical Presbyterian Church School in Keta, where he completed elementary school.

From there he attended Keta Business School, then known as PGO — later to become Keta Business College. His ambition was simple: to study as much as he could. What happened next, however, was not a classroom.

Joining the Army: The Long Road In

He joined the Gold Coast Regiment of the Royal West African Frontier Force at the age of 18 in the early 1950s — the first in his family to do so. He was not accepted on his first attempt in Kumasi. Determined to experience military life, he joined the regimental band in the interim, where he played the euphonium — a large brass instrument that gives the bass. He found it unfulfilling. He requested a transfer, was granted it, and was sent to Kumasi for proper military training at the Amputis Training School.

After passing out, he was posted to the 3rd Battalion where he first encountered a man who would later become central to Ghanaian history — at the time a lieutenant. At the 3rd Battalion he discovered he was an exceptional marksman, winning shooting competitions and being recognised as one of the best shots. He later joined the Army Volunteer Force, rising to the rank of Lieutenant. His shooting record and clean military conduct would open the next door.

The Flagstaff House and President Nkrumah

He was transferred to Flagstaff House, where security staff were observed, assessed, and placed where they best fit. Major Sedziafa fit in security. In 1963, when the Flagstaff House security unit needed augmenting with a dedicated officer, he was the only name considered. He was made Assistant Head of the Flagstaff House Protection Unit, and by 1965 he had become head of the security unit at the Castle.

Within the Flagstaff House, security was layered — the Protection Unit to which he belonged, a function unit, border guards, and the President's Own Guard Regiment, each operating within a security-within-security structure.

The Bomb Attacks: Ghana in the Early 1960s

He was present through years of bomb attacks aimed at destabilising Nkrumah's government — at Kulungugu, Dodu Villa, Lucas House, Christiansborg, and in front of Flagstaff House itself. A girl lost her legs. Children were injured. Five people were killed outside the stadium. The purpose, as he understands it, was to discourage Ghanaians from supporting Nkrumah by making proximity to him fatal. When that failed, the planners moved inward.

The most chilling incident he recounts happened at Flagstaff House itself. A police officer within the detail security was placed at the entrance to the president's office with five rounds of ammunition loaded into his rifle. When Nkrumah left his office to walk to his residence for lunch, the officer forgot the rifle was already loaded and tried to reload it. The ammunition fell out — and the sound alerted the security. It was that mistake alone that saved Nkrumah's life. The officer fired three more times and missed. By the fifth round the ammunition was spent, and he chased Nkrumah into the residence. He was later killed — the head of the bodyguard, Salati, lost his life in the exchange. The assassin was charged and sentenced to death.

On the Kulungugu bomb — the incident that he believes set in motion the cancer that killed Nkrumah — Major Sedziafa is definitive: it was not a timed bomb. It was thrown from the crowd, like a stone, with the pin pulled. Someone threw it as Nkrumah stopped impulsively to greet schoolchildren on his way back from a meeting with President Yaméogo of Upper Volta about cattle supply for the Bolgatanga meat factory. Nkrumah was not supposed to stop there. He loved children and broke protocol. Fragments of the grenade entered his spinal cord. Some were removed. At least one or two were not. Grenade, he says, is very poisonous. That, not poison, is what he believes killed the president years later in Romania.

The Peace Mission to Hanoi and the Coup

In February 1966, Nkrumah departed Ghana on a peace mission to Hanoi on a commercial Ghana Airways flight. Major Sedziafa was among a contingent of around thirty to forty people. They never reached Hanoi. The route took them first to Cairo to visit Nasser, then to Karachi, then Delhi, then through non-aligned movement countries before arriving in Beijing. In Beijing, Nkrumah sent the Ghana Airways commercial plane back to avoid disrupting its schedule, and requested a Chinese presidential aircraft to continue the journey. It was in Beijing that they received the news.

The Chinese Ambassador in Ghana had been briefing Beijing in real time about events unfolding at home. When Nkrumah and his party landed, they were taken to a conference room and told that on the 24th of February 1966, his government had been overthrown. The President's Own Guard Regiment had held their ground at Flagstaff House for a time, but the reinforcement they were expecting from Burma Camp never came. The coup succeeded.

Major Sedziafa is clear: had Nkrumah been in the country, he does not believe the coup would have happened. And he believes that the most sophisticated weapons had been moved from Flagstaff House to Burma Camp prior to departure — on security advice, to avoid accidental explosions near those they were meant to protect — which contributed to the vulnerability.

The Moscow Incident

After Beijing, Major Sedziafa was selected to lead an advance party to Guinea, the country Nkrumah chose for exile. They flew from Beijing toward Moscow en route. No senior officer or ambassador delegation met them at Moscow airport — only a single security officer from the Ghana Embassy who led them there. When they met the Ambassador, he told them the portraits of Nkrumah had been removed from the Embassy walls. Then he made his offer: denounce Nkrumah, and he would arrange their passage home to Ghana.

Major Sedziafa pretended not to hear the first time. The Ambassador repeated himself. The second time, Major Sedziafa told him plainly: as leader of the group, they would not be denouncing Nkrumah in exchange for a passage home. They had a mission — to prepare the ground for the president's arrival in Guinea. They were then expelled from the Ghana Embassy into a Moscow February snowstorm with the gates locked behind them.

It was African students studying in Moscow who came to their rescue. The students took them to the Guinea Embassy, whose Ambassador received them warmly, restored their dignity, and arranged their passage to Conakry. When they arrived, Nkrumah was already there — having taken a different route — and had already been received and given co-presidential status by President Sékou Touré.

Six Years in Conakry

Life in Guinea was hard. They were initially housed at Hotel Camayenne, but as time went on, Guinea could not sustain the cost of feeding the whole group three times a day, and they registered as refugees. Through it all, Major Sedziafa and his colleagues continued performing the same security duties for Nkrumah in Conakry that they had performed in Accra. They had no contact with their families in Ghana for six years. Nkrumah himself, he says, did not summon his own family, because it would not have been fitting for a leader to bring his wife while his men had no such comfort.

They kept up with Ghana through Radio Guinea's Voice of the Revolution — the same station from which Nkrumah broadcast weekly to Ghanaians between March and December 1966. Some colleagues died in Guinea. Others were sent on intelligence missions into Ghana and were arrested. One — Moses — was caged and driven through the streets of Accra like an animal. It remains a source of visible pain to recount.

He was thirty-one when he left Ghana. He was thirty-seven when he came back. He says he has no regrets. They were suffering for a purpose, and the purpose was their belief that they would return.

The Death of Nkrumah

Nkrumah was flown from Conakry to Romania for medical treatment in 1972. He died there in April of that year. The cause, in Major Sedziafa's view, was the grenade fragments from Kulungugu — specifically the fragment that lodged in his spinal cord. He dismisses the poisoning theories: grenade is poisonous enough, he says. Anything else is speculation.

The funeral was held in Conakry. Major Sedziafa wept — a little, he admits, smiling. The body was later returned to Ghana after General Acheampong sent a delegation to Sékou Touré requesting its release. Without that intervention, he believes, the body would never have come back. He and the exiled party returned to Ghana with the body. They were received well, under Acheampong, though all of them had been dismissed from their security positions during the years of exile.

Return and the Border Guards

Back in Ghana, Major Sedziafa's clean military record and marksmanship history worked in his favour. When the Ghana Border Guards were reformed, he was reinstated at his previous rank of Lieutenant and placed in command of various border posts. He rose to Acting Commanding Officer of the 3rd Border Guard Battalion, where his most cited achievement was dismantling cocoa smuggling networks in the Brong-Ahafo Region — arresting both civilian smugglers and corrupt guardsmen, which directly increased the country's foreign exchange earnings from cocoa and coffee. This work earned him the Distinguished Service Order, Military Division, presented at the Castle on 6th March 1981 by President Hilla Limann.

He later served with immigration until he resigned rather than be associated with practices he could not endorse.

On Nkrumah: The Man Up Close

At close quarters, Nkrumah was simple, kind, and unselfish. He never drank alcohol — Pepsi-Cola was his drink, a brand he introduced to Ghana. He did not smoke. He was a spiritualist who held regular meditation sessions, going into isolation and prayer. He was not a superhuman being, Major Sedziafa insists — he was a man who trusted the people he appointed to give him the truth, and some of those people failed him. He names Harley, then Inspector General of Police, as the man who made Nkrumah most unpopular — arriving at Flagstaff House with files under his arm before the 1pm news, detaining people whose guilt was never properly established, mixing the guilty with the innocent under the Preventive Detention Act.

Nkrumah himself reflected on this in exile. He told them in Conakry: if you appoint someone to investigate wrongdoing and they come to you with a name, what are you supposed to do? You cannot run a country if you cannot trust the people you place in positions of authority. He expressed no fear of death. His words at Kulungugu in 1962 say it directly: the bomb was not aimed at him but at Ghana and Africa, and no matter when he died, the torch he had lit would continue to burn.

On Africa, Leadership, and the Airport

He believes the people of his generation who came up under Nkrumah know something that younger Ghanaians cannot fully access — partly because many of Nkrumah's books were deliberately banned and destroyed after the coup. He wants those books read. He is leaving his personal copies with Kafui Dey.

He is openly uncomfortable with the naming of Accra's international airport after General Kotoka. His position is simple: you do not make the centerpiece of entry into your country a monument to the man who carried out a coup. He would have it renamed Accra International Airport — returned to what it was.

He believes that if Nkrumah had come back from exile, he would have governed differently — less reliant on inherited advisors, more focused on the young people who had the courage to remain loyal. Ghana, he says, would have been a paradise.