John Kufuor
John Kufuor was president of Ghana from 2001 to 2009, the first handover from one elected party to another in the country's history when he took the office from Rawlings's party in January 2001 after losing to Rawlings in 1996 and beating his vice-president Atta Mills in a run-off in December 2000. The second came when he handed it back to Atta Mills in January 2009 after Mills beat his own candidate by forty thousand votes. Together they made Ghana the West African democracy that works. The eight years were the debt relief he took under the heavily indebted poor countries scheme in 2001, which the country's pride had refused, and which wrote off four billion dollars. There was the national health insurance scheme of 2003 that replaced cash-and-carry at the hospital gate, and the school feeding programme, the capitation grant that made primary school free in fact as well as in law. There was the growth of six per cent, the discovery of oil off Cape Three Points in 2007, the metro mass transit buses, the presidential palace built with an Indian loan. There was the redenomination of the cedi in 2007 that took four zeros off. He was born in Kumasi in 1938 into an Asante royal family, studied at Prempeh College, Lincoln's Inn and Exeter College, Oxford, was a deputy foreign minister at thirty-one in Busia's government of 1969-72, which the army removed. He was detained twice by the military governments after it. He served as local government secretary for seven months under Rawlings in 1982 and left. He founded the New Patriotic Party in 1992 as the heir of the Danquah-Busia tradition. He chaired the African Union in 2007-08, mediated the Kenyan crisis of January 2008 after the election until Annan took over, and was the AU's envoy to the Ivory Coast in 2010. The World Food Prize of 2011 was for the school meals. He is at eighty-seven the elder of the party that has governed for half the years since he founded it, and the man whose handover set the rule.
- Lived: 1938 CE – ?
- Nationality: Ghanaian
- Roles: president, politician
