Accra · Landmarks
Jubilee House, Flagstaff House, and the Palace You Cannot Visit
Ghana’s seat of government is shaped like an Asante stool, cost a sum nobody agrees on, changes its name with every change of government, and is closed to you. Here is what you can actually see, and why the name on the sign tells you more about Ghanaian politics than the building ever will.
On this page
Can you actually visit?
No. Let us settle that before you read another paragraph, because a great many travel pages will spend six hundred words describing the architecture before mentioning that you will be seeing it through a car window.
Jubilee House is a working seat of government. It contains the office and official residence of the President of the Republic, the Office of the President, conference facilities, and the security apparatus that goes with all of that. It is not a museum. There is no visitor centre, no ticket, no guided tour, no gift shop and no viewing gallery. Access requires accreditation and advance security clearance, and it is granted for official purposes, not curiosity.
What you can do is see it from Liberation Road. That is genuinely worth thirty seconds of your journey if you are passing anyway — the building is unlike anything else in Accra and photographs well from a distance. But be sensible about it. This is a guarded government installation. Do not stop in the road, do not aim a long lens at the perimeter, do not photograph security personnel or the gate, and if someone in uniform tells you to move along, move along without an argument. Nobody at that fence is interested in your press card or your explanation.
The name war
Ask a Ghanaian what this building is called and the answer will tell you how they vote. That is not a joke and it is not an exaggeration. It is the single most useful thing to understand about the place.
The British Gold Coast government builds an administrative complex on the site and calls it Flagstaff House — a standard British military name, used for the residence of a commanding officer, and applied to comparable buildings from Hong Kong to Delhi.
Kwame Nkrumah uses Flagstaff House as residence and working office through the independence years. This is the building associated with him, and that association is the reason the name still carries weight for many Ghanaians.
Soldiers storm the premises during the coup that removes Nkrumah while he is abroad. Whatever else the building is, it is the site of the end of the First Republic.
President John Agyekum Kufuor inaugurates the rebuilt palace as the Golden Jubilee House, marking fifty years of independence. Construction is only about seventy to eighty per cent complete.
The incoming government of President John Evans Atta Mills declines to occupy it, moves the presidency back to Osu Castle, and changes the sign back to Flagstaff House — arguing that the renaming had never been effected by Legislative Instrument as the law required. Kufuor calls the reversal small-minded. The building is used for a time as offices for Foreign Affairs.
Under President John Dramani Mahama, the seat of government finally relocates to the building — five years after it was inaugurated.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo restores the Jubilee name on taking office, having used it throughout his campaign.
One building, four names, three reversals, and not one of the changes had anything to do with the building.
ModernGhana summarised the position with admirable bluntness some years ago: the NDC calls it Flagstaff House, the NPP calls it Jubilee House. The argument is dressed up as a debate about colonial heritage versus national achievement — and there is a real argument in there, since Flagstaff House is a British military name while Jubilee marks Ghana’s own anniversary. But the pattern of who says what, and precisely when they start saying it, suggests the heritage question is doing less work than the party colours.
For travellers and for anyone reading Ghanaian news, the practical upshot is simple: Jubilee House and Flagstaff House are the same building. You will see both names in current use, sometimes in the same newspaper. Golden Jubilee House is the same place again. Neither name is wrong and neither is neutral.
A note on the current sign. Whether the name has changed again under the present administration is worth checking locally rather than trusting any website, including this one. This is a detail that moves faster than travel pages update — and if you find the sign says something other than what you expected, we would like to hear about it.
What stood here before
Understanding why Ghana built a new palace at all requires understanding what it was replacing, and that story is not a comfortable one.
For most of the country’s independent history, the seat of government was Osu Castle — Christiansborg — on the coast. A seventeenth-century Danish fortification, extended and rebuilt repeatedly, which held enslaved Africans in its cells before they were shipped across the Atlantic. Every president of Ghana from Nkrumah onward worked in a building constructed for the slave trade.
That was the argument for moving, and it is a serious one. The practical arguments ran alongside it: the Castle is cramped, awkward to secure, expensive to maintain as a heritage structure, and entirely unsuited to the technical requirements of a modern presidency. A head of state cannot run a government from a fort.
Read the two decisions together and the picture sharpens. Kufuor built a new palace partly to leave the slave castle behind. Mills then moved the presidency back into the slave castle rather than occupy his predecessor’s building. Whatever the stated reasons, Ghanaian governance spent four more years inside Christiansborg because of a dispute between two political parties.
The building itself
The design is the one thing about Jubilee House that nearly everyone agrees on, and it is genuinely clever.
The main structure is built in the form of an Asante stool — the curved seat on a central column, with the flaring supports beneath. In Akan tradition the stool is not furniture. It is the seat of authority and, in the case of the Golden Stool, the soul of the nation itself. Housing the presidency inside a giant stool is a statement about the source of legitimate power, and it is the kind of architectural argument that most modern government buildings never attempt.
Whether it succeeds is a matter of taste, and Ghanaians are not shy about it. From certain angles the building reads clearly as a stool. From others it reads as a spacecraft on a launch pad, and you will hear it described exactly that way in Accra, usually with affection and occasionally without. The white curved mass and the raised profile make it unmistakable on the Liberation Road approach either way.
Local craftsmanship and Ghanaian motifs run through the detailing, and the grounds are landscaped and maintained to a standard the rest of Accra’s public realm does not enjoy. You will not see much of that from the road.
The money question
Here is where a tourism page usually goes quiet. We will not.
The palace was funded through a credit facility from the Government of India, commonly reported at around thirty million dollars. The figures published for what the project ultimately cost vary considerably across sources, with commonly cited ranges running from roughly thirty to fifty million dollars and some accounts putting the final figure substantially higher. We are not able to state a verified final cost, and we are not going to invent one.
That, in itself, is the story. Nearly two decades after the ribbon was cut, the citizens of Ghana cannot readily establish from the public record what their presidential palace cost. That is not a failure of arithmetic. It is a failure of disclosure, and it is a pattern Ghanaians will recognise from a great many other public projects.
The opposition of the day argued the money was misdirected while the country needed hospitals, schools and water. The government of the day argued the presidency could not credibly operate from a slave fort. Both arguments were made in good faith by some people and in bad faith by others, and the reader is capable of weighing them without our help.
A country can afford a presidential palace. What it cannot afford is not knowing what the palace cost.
What happens at the gate
There is one activity at Jubilee House that is genuinely public, and it is not on any tourism itinerary.
This is where Accra’s protest marches end. Demonstrations over galamsey, over the economy, over electricity, over whatever has broken most recently, assemble elsewhere in the city and walk to the gates of the presidential palace to present a petition. It is the standard geography of Ghanaian public anger: a starting point somewhere central, a route down the main roads, and a terminus at the seat of power.
If you happen to be in Accra when one is running, you will know about it from the traffic long before you see it. Our advice is simple and unromantic: do not attach yourself to a demonstration you do not understand, in a country where you are a visitor, outside the gates of a guarded government installation. Watch the news, stay clear of the route, and let Ghanaians conduct their own politics.
It does, though, tell you something the architecture does not. The building was designed as a symbol of authority derived from the people. Several times a year, the people walk to its gates to remind it of that.
Worth your time instead
Jubilee House sits in the middle of the only part of Accra that functions as a genuine landmark cluster. Since you cannot go inside the palace, here is what is actually within reach on the same run — and all of these you can enter.
Accra city tours that pass Jubilee House
The realistic way to see the palace is from a vehicle that already knows where to slow down and where not to stop. A half-day Accra city tour typically takes in Jubilee House from Liberation Road, then Independence Square, the Nkrumah Memorial Park and Jamestown — which is the same route we would send you on anyway, minus the arguing with a taxi driver about where the security cordon starts. Check the itinerary before booking: not every operator includes the palace, and none of them can get you inside it.
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Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park
The mausoleum and museum of Ghana’s first president, on the site where he declared independence. If you want to understand the man whose office this palace ultimately inherited, this is the place, not the palace.
Old Parliament House
Directly opposite the Memorial Park, and where independence was formally handed over in 1957. Nkrumah’s statue stood outside it until a mob tore the head off in 1966. No entry, but you can see it from the Park.
Independence Square (Black Star Square)
The national parade ground and Independence Arch, among the largest public squares anywhere. Empty and baking on an ordinary day; extraordinary on 6 March.
Osu Castle (Christiansborg)
The building Jubilee House replaced — Danish fort, slave-holding site, and seat of government for most of Ghana’s independent history. Access has varied over the years; check current status before travelling out to it.
National Theatre of Ghana
The white modernist landmark toward Independence Avenue, and an actual working venue. Check what is on rather than just photographing the outside.
Ghana National Mosque
Roughly twenty minutes on foot, and one of the most striking modern buildings in West Africa. Dress and behave appropriately; it is a place of worship, not a photo opportunity.
Ghana Planetarium
A short walk away, behind the Police Headquarters in Cantonments. Small, privately founded, open year-round, and far more interesting than its size suggests — particularly with children.
The verdict
Jubilee House is a landmark you drive past, not a place you visit. Anyone telling you otherwise has not tried. Give it thirty seconds from Liberation Road, take your photograph from a sensible distance, and spend the afternoon at Nkrumah Memorial Park instead — where you can actually walk in, and where the history is on display rather than behind a security cordon.
What the palace is genuinely worth is understanding before you arrive in Ghana. A building that changes its name with the government, whose final cost is not established in the public record, and which stood finished but unoccupied for five years because two parties could not agree about a sign, will teach you more about how this country is governed than any museum in Accra.
Connected reading on ghana-net.com
- Old Parliament House — where Ghana became independent
- Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, Accra
- Dr Kwame Nkrumah — the man whose office this was
- The five forts of Accra — a coastline nobody walks
- The Martyrs of the Rule of Law — the three murdered judges
- Makola Market — the commercial heart of Ghana
- Parliament of Ghana
- Accra — the city guide
Verified: 22 August 2026.
Naming history compiled from Ghanaian reporting including Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, GhanaWeb, News Ghana and ModernGhana, covering the November 2008 inauguration, the January 2009 reversion under President Mills, the 2013 relocation of the seat of government, and the restoration of the Jubilee name under President Akufo-Addo. Construction, funding and design details as published in Ghanaian and international coverage. Final project cost figures vary between published sources and no verified total is asserted here. Public access status is as reported at the time of writing; security arrangements at government installations change without notice. This page takes no position in the naming dispute and describes the positions of both sides as they have been publicly stated.