John Mahama, in full John Dramani Mahama, (born November 29, 1958, Damongo, Ghana), Ghanaian politician who became vice president of Ghana in 2009. After the death of President John Evans Atta Mills in July 2012, Mahama ascended to the presidency. He was elected president later that year and served until 2017.
Mahama was born into a politically active family. His father, Emmanuel Adama Mahama, served as a member of Parliament as well as a regional commissioner in the government of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah.
John Mahama attended primary school at the Achimota School in Accra and attended the Ghana Secondary School in Tamale. He received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1981 from the University of Ghana, Legon, where he also completed postgraduate studies in communication in 1986.
Mahama taught high-school history for a few years before pursuing a postgraduate degree in social psychology from the Institute of Social Sciences in Moscow, which was awarded in 1988.
After Mahama returned to Ghana, he worked in Accra as the Information, Culture, and Research Officer at the embassy of Japan until 1995. He then worked at the Ghana office of Plan International, a humanitarian and development organization, as the international relations, sponsorship, communication, and grants manager.
In 1996 he was elected to Parliament under the banner of the National Democratic Congress (NDC); he was reelected in 2000 and 2004. While in Parliament he held several posts, including Minister of Communications (1998–2001), before being chosen as the vice-presidential candidate on the NDC ticket in 2008 with John Evans Atta Mills. Mills won the December 2008 presidential election, and he and Mahama were inaugurated on January 7, 2009. After the unexpected death of Mills on July 24, 2012, Mahama was elevated to the presidency, just months before the end of Mills’s term.
Source: TheBBCghana.Com
