In the ‘Positive Action’ strike of January 1950 the Sekondi-Takoradi railway and harbour workers had demonstrated their enthusiastic support for Nkrumah's nationalist campaign. In September 1961 they staged a seventeen-day strike against the Nkrumah Government's July budget, a strike in which, according to St Clair Drake (who was present at the time), ‘the Government saw its very existence implicitly challenged’, and which ‘drastically altered the entire character of political activity in Ghana’. This latter strike action, while certainly motivated in part by economic grievances – most obviously, opposition to the budget proposals for a property tax and a compulsory savings scheme – was also undoubtedly informed by wider political motivations. The staging of an illegal strike in so determined a manner, in opposition moreover to measures which the government had made clear it considered essential to the achievement of its major objectives, and in what was politically an extremely sensitive moment – with Nkrumah out of the country visiting the Eastern Communist bloc, and widespread popular unrest in Ghana at the budget's austerity measures – suggests that, at the very least, the 1961 strike expressed a far-reaching disillusionment with the Nkrumah regime.

This opposition, it should be remembered, came from the former vanguard supporters of Nkrumah. If political allegiance in the Ghanaian nationalist movement entailed more than a purely immediate economic alliance, then the reasons for the railway workers' disillusionment merit extensive consideration.