Jerry John Rawlings
The man whose name went on the famine, and whose government survived it.
Ghana-Net.com · History & Empires · All regions · 1982–1984
Ask any Ghanaian over fifty about 1983 and you will hear two phrases: "83 kɔm", the hunger of '83, and the "Rawlings chain", the collarbones that stood out on thin necks. In one year the rains failed, the bush burned, a million people were thrown out of Nigeria and sent home, Lake Volta sank and the lights went out. It is the closest independent Ghana has come to national starvation, and it changed the country's economy for good.
Ghana entered the 1980s already exhausted. A decade of military rule, kalabule (profiteering), price controls, an overvalued cedi and smuggling had emptied the shops. Cocoa, the backbone of the economy, had been declining for years as farmers smuggled beans to Côte d'Ivoire and Togo for better prices. On 31 December 1981 Jerry Rawlings overthrew the elected government of Hilla Limann, the second of his two coups.
Then the weather turned. The rains of 1982 were poor and those of 1983 far worse: in many places well under half of normal, with Accra getting only a little over half its usual rainfall. The same drought hit the whole of the Sahel and much of West Africa.
The harmattan of early 1983 was brutally dry, with humidity falling below ten per cent. Bush burning for farming and hunting, normal every dry season, went out of control. Fires ran through savannah, farmland and forest edges from the north to the cocoa belt, burning food crops, stored harvests and cocoa trees. 1983 is remembered as one of the worst fire years in Ghana's history.
The forests never fully recovered: fire opened up forest margins that logging had already thinned, and parts of the transition zone turned to scrub. The forest reserves that remain, like Bia and Kakum, show what the belt once looked like.
In January 1983, in the middle of the fire season, Nigeria expelled its undocumented foreigners. Roughly 900,000 to 1.2 million Ghanaians, about one in ten of the population, came home within weeks, through Aflao and by sea to Tema, often with nothing but a plaid bag. The full story, and the Ghanaian expulsion of 1969 that came first, is on Two Expulsions, One Story.
The drought hit the Volta basin too. The level of Lake Volta fell below the minimum operating level of the Akosombo Dam, Nkrumah's great project, and electricity had to be rationed across the country. The aluminium smelter at Tema, the dam's biggest customer, had to cut production. Rivers and village streams dried up, and women and children walked for hours to find water.
Today: see Visiting the Akosombo Dam. Ghana's power crises of the 2010s, known as dumsor, brought back memories of 1983 for anyone old enough to have lived through it.
The PNDC had come to power with revolutionary talk: people's defence committees, public tribunals and attacks on "exploiters". The famine forced a U-turn. In April 1983 the government, with Finance Secretary Kwesi Botchwey, launched the Economic Recovery Programme backed by the IMF and the World Bank: massive devaluation of the cedi, higher producer prices for cocoa farmers, cuts in subsidies and the end of most price controls.
Food aid came in, the rains returned in 1984, and the returnees, many of them now farmers again, helped bring in a strong harvest. The famine ended as fast as it had come. The economic model it forced on Ghana did not.
Not only drought: 1983 was also the year of repeated coup plots against the PNDC, and death sentences handed down by its tribunals. Hunger and fear came in the same year. See Ghana's Coups, 1966–1983.
The Economic Recovery Programme made Ghana the World Bank's model pupil of the late 1980s: growth came back, the markets filled, cocoa recovered. It also brought the pattern that has shaped Ghana ever since: dependence on IMF programmes, a falling cedi, and cuts felt hardest by the poor. Ghana has gone back to the IMF many times since.
The man whose name went on the famine, and whose government survived it.
Every head of state since 1957.
The crop that burned in 1983, and where it came from.
Land, water and the next threat to the landscape.
The famine of 1983 was not only a natural disaster. The drought and fires were real, but they hit a country whose farms, roads and markets had already been run into the ground by ten years of bad government, and whose own people had been thrown out by a neighbour. Ghana survived it because families shared what they had and farmers planted again, not because anyone had planned for it. The price was an economic model decided in Washington. Forty years on, with forests shrinking, rivers poisoned by galamsey and the cedi still falling, 1983 is not only history. It is a warning.
Verified: 28 September 2026. The drought of 1982–83 and rainfall shortfall, the bushfires of early 1983, the estimate of 0.9–1.2 million returnees from Nigeria, the loss of roughly 40 per cent of the food supply, about 1.5 million people malnourished, the low level of Lake Volta, and the launch of the Economic Recovery Programme in April 1983 follow published histories and standard references. Death figures are uncertain. Corrections welcome and will be published in full.