Managing Election- Relation Violence for Democratic Stability in Ghana starvation. Among the lies against me personally was the one that I had accumulated a large private fortune; this was to form the basis for an all-out character assassination attempt”(Nkrumah, 1973:394). However, it was impossible for the coup makers not to castigate Nkrumah's legacy, by pointing them in the direction of Nkrumah's negatives, as this was possibly the only way of gaining mass support and legitimacy. Although the takeover had been successful, there were residual difficulties with getting and maintaining popular support. According to Hansen and Collins, once the military takes over power, it is confronted with two crucial issues: one being the question of legitimacy, while the other is disengagement (1980:302). Legitimacy comes in two forms:(a) internal legitimacy, which is the ability to garner sustained local support for the takeover; and(b) external legitimacy, which is gaining international support through political and economic performance. For most military takeovers, garnering local support in the period immediately after the takeover is not as difficult as the latter stages. The'Big Lie' populist strategy of the NLC was successful and led to stinging verbal attacks against the former President. In one such attack, a March 1966 headline in the Daily Graphic was titled:'The Fall of Satan'. In a congratulatory message to the regime, the chiefs and people of Gbese Traditional Area in Accra wrote that the'fall of Kwame Nkrumah is more spectacular than that of Satan, a most vivid warning and an appreciable lesson to all who pursue the political kingdom and its volatile treasures'. Other newspaper headlines included,'All is Quiet';'Kwame's myth is broken', where for the first time, 76