Ghana Switches the Entire Country to Driving on the Right

Operation Keep Right

Ghana inherited left-hand traffic from British colonial rule.

There was one increasingly awkward geographical fact:

Its neighbouring countries drove on the right.

That made cross-border road travel more complicated than it needed to be.

Ghana therefore decided to change sides.

Not one road.

Not one city.

The country.

The transition was organized under the wonderfully direct title:

Operation Keep Right.

Archival material preserved through Ghana's Public Records and Archives Administration documents the substantial preparation surrounding the national conversion.

Drivers had to be educated.

Road signs and markings had to be changed.

Traffic arrangements, intersections and public transport all had to adapt.

Public information campaigns reminded people which side would soon be correct.

Then came changeover day.

At 6:00 a.m. on Sunday, 4 August 1974, Ghana officially moved from left-hand to right-hand traffic.

This was exactly the kind of national experiment where one might reasonably expect chaos.

Contemporary archival reporting instead showed a heavily prepared operation.

Police and traffic officials were deployed.

Public warnings emphasized caution.

Only minor incidents were reported in immediate contemporary coverage, with no evidence of the widespread catastrophe one might imagine from changing a national driving habit overnight.

Two months later, Brigadier Frederick Akuffo, chairman of the Right-Hand Drive Committee, described the changeover as successful and said accidents directly connected with the switch had been insignificant.

He also reported that Ghana's overall August road-accident total had fallen compared with the previous August, apparently because drivers were being unusually cautious.

The change brought Ghana into alignment with the right-driving systems of neighbouring West African states and ended a major colonial-era transport mismatch.

But operationally, the sentence remains extraordinary:

One morning, an entire country changed which half of every road was correct.