John Kufuor
fifth President of the Republic of Ghana and Lawyer
John Kofi Agyekum Kufuor (born 8 December 1938) is a Ghanaian politician who served as the tenth President of Ghana from 2001 to 2009. He was the fifth Chairperson of the African Union from 2007 to 2008 and his victory over John Atta Mills at the end of Jerry Rawlings' second term marked the first transition of power in Ghana from a democratic party to another democratic party.
Kufuor's career has been spent on the liberal-democratic side of Ghanaian politics, in the parties descended from the United Gold Coast Convention and the United Party.
As a lawyer and businessman, he was a minister in Kofi Abrefa Busia's Progress Party government during Ghana's Second Republic, and a Popular Front Party opposition frontbencher during the Third Republic. In the Fourth Republic, Kufuor stood as the New Patriotic Party's candidate at the 1996 election, and then led it to victory in 2000 and 2004. Having served two terms in power, he retired from politics in 2008. He is popularly known as the Gentle Giant.
Early life and schooling
The scion of a royal maternal lineage, John Kufuor was born in Daaban, a suburb of Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. He started his primary and elementary school at the Kumasi Government School located in Asem built by Sir Gordon Guggisberg. Kufuor was the 7th of 10 children of Nana Kwadwo Agyekum, an Asante and Nana Ama Dapaah, a Queen Mother.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “John Kufuor” as fifth President of the Republic of Ghana and Lawyer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as fifth President of the Republic of Ghana and Lawyer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q51005. VIAF identifies the subject as 55238119. The Library of Congress control number is no2002111538. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 2001, 2009 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Kufuor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.