A nation’s gateway is its first handshake with the world and its last embrace of the citizen; it is a sacred threshold that should radiate the warmth of democracy, not the cold steel of subversion.
The announcement by the Majority Leader that the Ministry of Transport is set to present a bill to rename the Kotoka International Airport to the Accra International Airport is not merely a change of signage. It is an act of spiritual and political hygiene. It is the final dismantling of a monument to the bullet in a land that has rightfully surrendered to the ballot.
For over half a century, we have committed a grave cognitive dissonance. We preach the sanctity of the 1992 Constitution in our schools, yet we glorify its antithesis at our borders.
Lieutenant General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka was many things, but to the soul of a democratic Republic, he represents a fracture, a man who led the 1966 coup d’état that violently aborted our first republic.
To keep his name etched in neon at our primary portal is to institutionalise the memory of treason. It suggests, subtly but lethally, that the highest honour in the land is reserved not for those who build institutions, but for those who overawe them with gunpowder.
We cannot continue to host the ghost of an insurrectionist at the very point where Ghana meets the globe. A coup maker is a thief of the people’s mandate, a hijacker of the national destiny. To have a putschist at the entrance and exit of our Republic is to signal to every investor, every tourist, and every returning son of the soil that our foundation is built on the shifting sands of military adventurism rather than the solid rock of the Rule of Law.
Legally, the State possesses the sovereign right to curate its public narrative. Morally, it has a duty to ensure that its symbols do not contradict its virtues. History is a relentless witness, and it judges a people by what they choose to venerate. When we fly under the banner of Kotoka, we are inadvertently endorsing the ‘might is right’ philosophy.
By transitioning to Accra International Airport, the government is performing a masterstroke of de-escalation and dignity. This is a broadening of scope, moving away from the divisive, blood-stained biography of an individual and towards the collective, inclusive identity of our capital city.
It is a transition from the personality to the polity. In the geography of honour, the city belongs to everyone; the coup maker belongs only to a dark chapter we have outgrown.
Consider the juxtaposition: Ghana is today hailed as the “Black Star of Africa,” a beacon of stability in a sub-region currently haunted by the resurgence of the “men in uniform.” How do we lead the ECOWAS charge against modern coups while our own national airport serves as a shrine to a pioneer of the practice? It is an irony too heavy for our wings to carry. We must align our symbols with our soul.
This policy direction is an aphorism for our maturity. It says that we are no longer a nation of “Big Men” who take by force, but a nation of laws that endure by consent. The renaming is a symbolic cleansing of the palate. It removes the bitter taste of 1966 and replaces it with the neutral, enduring prestige of Accra, a city that represents our commerce, our culture, and our constitutional heartbeat.
Let this bill be the herald of a new era of self-respect. A house that continues to celebrate the one who broke its windows can never truly feel secure. By stripping the name of a coup leader from our skies, we are telling the next generation that the path to immortality is paved with service, not subversion.
Majority Leader, this move is more than politics; it is a restoration of the Ghanaian psyche. It is an assertion that the “Gateway to Africa” will no longer be guarded by the shadow of a usurper, but by the light of a settled democracy. Let us welcome the world to Accra. Let us finally leave the era of the bullet behind at the tarmac, and fly into a future where the only thing that takes off from our soil is our collective, law-abiding ambition.
The name Kotoka belongs in the history books, where its lessons can be studied in the sombre quiet of a library. It has no business being the first word a visitor reads when they touch down on the soil of a free and democratic Republic.
By Raymond Ablorh
