A nation that is at peace with itself does not spend its time endlessly renaming its landmarks. It spends its time understanding them.
The renewed call and bill to rename Kotoka International Airport is not really about aviation, transport, or national branding.
It is about how we choose to relate to our past; whether we engage it honestly, in all its complexity, or reduce it to slogans, moral shortcuts, and selective outrage.
History is not a courtroom where only the innocent deserve to be remembered. It is a record of human struggle, flawed, contested, contradictory, and it demands maturity, not sanitization.
A. The Seduction of Simplism
The argument is often framed this way: Kotoka was part of the 1966 coup; coups are bad; therefore his name must go.
That logic is emotionally satisfying but historically unserious. By that standard, we would have to unravel far more than an airport name.
Our 1992 Constitution (PNDCL 282), the very document that anchors our democratic order and safeguards our freedoms, was promulgated under a military regime and signed into law by a coup leader.
Yet no serious person argues that we must discard it for that reason. We do not, because we understand that legitimacy can evolve, and that constitutional value is not erased by the circumstances of origin.
History often works that way.
B. Why Kotoka International Airport?
The appeal of the simplistic claim that the airport’s name exists to celebrate the 1966 coup rests on an incomplete reading of history.
The renaming of KIA was not intended to glorify the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah.
It was a memorial decision tied to a later and more specific event (see, General Kotoka Trust Decree, 1969 (N.L.C.D. 339), which expressly lists “the re-naming of the Accra International Airport as ‘Kotoka International Airport’” as one of the objects of the Trust (para. 8(1)(a)).
In 1967, during an attempted counter-coup known as Operation Guitar Boy, Lt. Gen. Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka was shot and killed at the Airport while resisting the uprising. Several other officers and soldiers also lost their lives in the violence of that abortive attempt.
The airport was later renamed to mark the site of his death, not to sanctify military intervention in politics.
The name therefore, records a moment of national turmoil rather than endorsing it, serving as a historical marker of our early post-independence instability, an act of remembrance, not celebration.
C. Nkrumah, One-Party Rule, and Historical Consistency
Consider another uncomfortable truth. On February 1, 1964, we became a one-party state under Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, through a referendum that effectively eliminated political pluralism.
The referendum results, reporting 99.91% approval with a turnout of 96.5%, were widely questioned, with critics describing the outcome as implausible and raising concerns about the integrity of the process.
Our current constitutional order explicitly abhors one-party rule. Yet no one proposes renaming institutions, streets, or monuments bearing Nkrumah’s name because of that historical fact.
And rightly so!
We do not honour Nkrumah because he was infallible. We honour him because he was foundational, consequential, and inseparable from the Ghanaian story, both its triumphs and its failures.
Why, then, do we suddenly pretend that historical figures must meet modern moral purity tests to remain part of our public memory?
D. Colonialism, Names, and Historical Honesty
Much of Accra’s civic geography already bears the imprint of colonial power. James Town, Ussher Fort, Cantonments, Osu, Labone, Pig Farm, etc. are not neutral names; they are reminders of conquest, administration, and extraction.
Yet they remain, not because we celebrate colonialism, but because we recognize that history does not disappear when names change.
We did not become free by pretending colonialism never happened. We became free by understanding it, confronting it, and then building beyond it.
These names now function as historical markers; entry points for education about who ruled, how power was exercised, and what our forefathers overcame.
If colonial-era names have not erased our sovereignty or dignity, then neither do retaining post-independence names that reflect our own complex struggles.
The lesson is not that names are sacred. It is that memory matters more than cosmetic erasure.
A confident nation does not cleanse its map to feel virtuous. It teaches its people to read the map, critically, honestly, and without fear.
E. What Names Actually Do
Names are not endorsements. They are anchors of memory.
KIA does not ask travelers to celebrate coups. It reminds us, silently and persistently, of a turbulent chapter in our national journey: post-independence authoritarianism, military intervention, Cold War pressures, internal dissent, and the long, painful road to constitutional democracy.
Erasing the name does not heal that history. It merely hides it.
A mature nation does not erase uncomfortable chapters; it teaches them.
F. Institutional Humility
There is also a question of institutional humility. Names that have endured for more than six decades have survived not one political moment, but military rule, constitutional change, democratic transition, and generational turnover.
They have been contested, debated, and ultimately retained.
Each generation has the right to question history. But no generation has the right to treat every inherited symbol as if it were freshly imposed.
Longevity is not accidental. It is itself a form of democratic ratification, quiet, cumulative, and earned over time.
A society that reopens settled symbols every generation does not deepen democracy; it destabilizes memory.
G. The Cost of Endless Renaming
There is also a practical wisdom we seem determined to ignore.
After more than six decades of public, legal, international, and cultural usage, KIA is embedded in aviation systems, treaties, maps, branding, and global consciousness.
Renaming it now produces costs, financial, administrative, symbolic, without producing any serious national gain.
What problem, exactly, does this solve?
Does it improve education? Does it deepen reconciliation? Does it strengthen democracy?
Or does it simply create the illusion of moral action while leaving deeper structural issues untouched?
H. What a Confident Republic Does
A nation confident in its identity does not make renaming its first resort in the pursuit of historical justice.
It draws from a richer and more serious toolkit: contextualisation, education, sustained public debate, and, where truly warranted, carefully considered change.
What distinguishes mature democracies is not that they never rename, but that they refuse to mistake renaming for reckoning. They resist the easy comfort of symbolism and instead commit to building a public memory that is honest, durable, and complete.
That is what grown democracies do.
If the concern is education, then the answer is not erasure but explanation. Let’s add plaques, timelines, and public history that tell the full story.
If the concern is context, then the solution is not renaming but teaching. Let’s strengthen how we teach our history, in schools and in public spaces, without fear or selectivity.
If the concern is moral reckoning, then the path is not symbolism but honesty. Let’s have open debates, confront the past directly, and argue our values in the open.
But let us stop pretending that changing names is the same as confronting history.
It is not. It is avoidance dressed up as virtue.
Our history, like all real histories, is complex, uncomfortable, and sometimes tragic. Our task is not to simplify it to fit present-day sensibilities, but to carry it honestly, learn from it, and move forward without amnesia.
Kotoka International Airport does not dishonor Ghana.
Forgetting how and why it got its name just might.
PS: Yɛde post no bɛto hɔ. Yɛnyɛ comprehension consultants.
Da Yie!
The author, Professor Kwaku Asare, aka Kwaku Azar, is an accounting professor and a private legal practitioner
