It would be no exaggeration to assert that
Jerry John Rawlings dominated the politics of Ghana as no other leader did,
with the sole exception of Kwame Nkrumah. As with Nkrumah, Rawlings rode the
crest of an enormous level of national popularity, the product of a personal
charisma that he was able to project to the masses. Yet, in life and death his
legacy as a military ruler and civilian leader is often the subject of
polarised debate. For some he was the saviour of Ghana, the man who rescued his
country from the pit of economic degeneration and enabled it to regain by large
measure its previous mantle as the ‘Black Star of Africa’. To others he was a
demagogue and an authoritarian who held his country hostage for two decades
during which he betrayed the principles he had enjoined his countrymen to
embrace when he first came to national prominence. The contradictions in both
the personality, as well as the leadership of Rawlings are stark: many who saw
him up close considered him humble and down-to-earth. A man with the common
touch. Yet his extravagant ways of expression and theatrical public presence
were more than suggestive of a flamboyant egotism. He consistently spoke as an
idealist, but often had to justify many of his major decisions in the realm of
pragmatism. In a 1981 interview, he described himself as a “moderate” who
believed in “peaceful revolution”, an irony given the political violence that
characterised his first stint in power and the first decade of his second
coming. He promised a “people’s democracy” but ended up presiding over an
autocracy. The blood spilled during his regimes made some dub him an African
Robespierre. For them, Rawlings was the principal author of a form of
diabolical vengeance when the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, of which he
was elected Chairman, sanctioned the execution of senior military officers. A
dominating, larger-than-life presence, he alternately charmed, cajoled,
inspired, beguiled and terrified Ghanaians. But Rawlings was as much a
phenomenon of self-invention as he was shaped and moulded by the forces
propelling Ghanaian political history. Many refuse to acknowledge or seek to
downplay the serious fractures in the severely politicised Ghanaian military
which pointed to an inevitable ugly explosion with or without the agency of
Rawlings. And while his detractors point to his coup of 1981 as an illegal and
hypocritical enterprise driven by egotistical ambition, they fail to give
appropriate consideration to his putsch as a bold attempt by Rawlings to innovate
an alternative system of governance to that which had failed Ghana and other
parts of Black Africa. For Rawlings was, at least at the outset of his second
stint in power, determined, with the ideological tutoring of the “Legon Left”,
to map out an economic programme that would remove Ghana from a harmful, but
seemingly ineradicable dependence on the West. Therefore any purposeful and
objective examination of the legacy of Rawlings cannot be solely based on the
man alone and his perceived successes and failings, but must necessarily
comprehend an honest reflection on the part of his countrymen about enduring
problems of tribal sentiment, endemic corruption, and institutional failings
that have prevented Ghana from transforming itself into an economically independent
post-colonial African nation.
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