As on 4 June 1979, so on New Year's Eve 1981, it was the rank-and-file of Ghana's armed forces which overthrew a corrupt and incompetent government. The coup surprised very few people and was widely popular. At the end of President Limann's second year in office inflation was running at well over 300 per cent and a currency black market, in which one British pound could be exchanged for eighty cedis (compared with an official bank rate of approximately £1l), was fast becoming the dominant national medium for financial transactions. A trade liberalization policy effectively nullified price controls, which had serious consequences on the already low living standards of the mass of the people.

The minimum daily wage for workers was fixed at 12, about the same as the price of a loaf of bread. Corruption was becoming rampant as PNP ministers and officials signed contracts with multinational companies in exchange for' kickbacks'. Kalabule had been re-established at all levels of society. At the last parliamentary session a dominant issue was the increase in MPs' salaries and the importation of subsidized cars for them.

General Jerry Rawlings ruled Ghana to its stability and democracy

As on 4 June 1979, the take-over by the National Defence Council on 31 December was less of a military coup in the classic contemporary sense, where one faction of the petty bourgeois elite seizes state power from another faction, than a popular rising by the proletariat of the military and supported by the civilian proletariat.

Jerry Rawlings had been dismissed from the air force after the hand-over to Limann in 1979 and he formed the left-wing June 4th Movement. His second coup was not meant to entrench the military in power but to involve the broad masses.

In his first broadcast on 31 December Rawlings announced:

"The military is not to take over. We simply want to be a part of the decision-making process in this country,'

In his second broadcast, on 5 January 1982, he called for 'nothing less than a revolution, something that would transform the social and economic order of this country'. He exhorted the people 'to take over the destiny of this country, your own destiny, and shaping the society along the lines that you desire . . .' People's Defence Committees were set up all over the country not merely to root out Kalabule but to work for the lasting social and economic transformation of Ghana.