Be honest about Jerry John Rawlings

Opinions on Saturday, November 14, 2020

Columnist: Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Esq.

2020-11-14

The only thing to admire about the late Jerry John Rawlings is that he handed over the power he illegally accessed twice, the first in June 1979 and the second in December 1981.

Between its two rules, there were pogroms across the country, in which people were executed, tortured, beaten, exiled, raped, impaled, and drowned.

So the question is: “What exactly are the bases of the current national anguish over his death?” Our hypocrisy is getting too much!

We affirm that it is not culturally permissible to criticize the dead. That does not mean that it is culturally permissible to extol the dead, ascribe superhuman status to them, so we are obliged to tell a panoply of lies about them.

When society allows all these lies to be told in praise of the dead, it also opens the door for the truth to be heard. If society is unwilling to tolerate the truth from the negative point of view, it must stop conjuring lies upon lies and pretending that a person suddenly becomes a saint as soon as he dies. That idea is both shameful and disgusting.

What exactly did Rawlings do for Ghanaians to make him suddenly become a model for anything? He burst onto the stage on May 15, 1979 when he was arrested on the charge of organizing a coup. On June 4, 1979, a more successful coup was organized that I knew nothing about.

Did those who carried out the coup get you out of jail to head the government? But the coup itself was unnecessary because at the time of the so-called uprising, the ruling Supreme Military Council was already in the process of returning the nation to civilian rule.

Therefore, there was certainly no earthly reason for another military intervention. Be that as it may, the nation was receptive to the coup and supported Rawlings and his clique in perpetrating a purge on the country. In this virtual pogrom, there were many military personnel who were summarily executed without trial.

Many soldiers and civilians also died or had their property confiscated.

In the end, Rawlings reestablished the path to civil rule and surrendered power after a brief period; only to return to power again on December 31, 1981 for no apparent reason.

The nation was under a curfew for several years, and again, many citizens were killed or imprisoned without trial, their property confiscated, and their lives destroyed. Finally, in 1992, the nation returned to a democratic government, so Rawling ran for president and was elected to serve two terms.

To this day, some of us are still looking for the achievements of Rawlings in the nearly two decades of power he wielded. More especially, those whose parents or relatives were summarily executed continue to suffer to this day without anyone trying to offer them any comfort. Those whose properties were seized and destroyed continue to suffer to this day.

Neither the country nor Rawlings himself did anything to reduce their grief, except occasionally citing their deaths in ridiculous anecdotes.

These victims were generally accused of corruption by both Rawlings and his cronies without any trial or evidence, and the country as a whole has never done anything to honor all these people who were summarily executed, and whose names and reputations are permanently tainted.

They were also citizens of this country who made none other than Rawlings. In their own collective consciousness, they were also patriotic citizens trying to do their best for the country. And they too failed like Rawlings himself, whose legacy remains generally ambivalent.

So why should Rawlings be entitled to a state burial and they shouldn’t? Why can’t we have a state funeral for General Afrifa? Why can’t we have a state burial for General Acheampong? And why can’t we have a state burial for General Akuffo? And all these other state martyrs who fell under the aegis of the scourge and the Rawlings purge?

And what exactly did Rawlings do for Ghana that all these people he executed didn’t do? I have gone to great lengths to list Rawlings’s accomplishments, and the more I try, the more the irony of his time seems quite strange to me. We can ask those who risked their lives to save yours.

They will tell you that he betrayed them all. We can ask those of us who live under the terror of his regime. And we can only speak of his terror, his murder, his torture, his lack of respect for the elderly and his general indiscipline.

We can ask about his personal life, and his associates will speak of his own moral degeneracy, his intellectual deficiency, his gross irresponsibility, his mendacity and exaggerations and fabrications and ingratitude and cruelty. So who wants someone to model their life after Rawlings?

Therefore, Rawlings was no better than anyone he killed or destroyed. And the nation did not benefit in any way from his rule. The only people who benefited from the Rawlings rule were the Rawlings family and a few of his henchmen.

After destroying the educational system, he sent his own children abroad to give them the best education. After persecuting those who, thanks to his own industry, had become rich, he became rich in the back of the country, bequeathing the Nsawam cannery and other state assets to his wife.

The economy was in shambles when he took power, but the economy got worse with him in power. There is no benchmark of national progress or prosperity, nor a measure of leadership that we can attribute to Rawlings.

Except to say that he was the greatest source of insecurity for the country until his death. And it is this country that served Rawlings, not the other way around.

He was not educated to any degree. He was not disciplined as an army officer. He did not achieve any feats in his life. He did not even write a memoir of political theory or ideas for posterity.

His greatest achievement is that he returned to the people the power that already belonged to him. Of this democratic administration that people give him credit for, they conveniently forget that the nation was on the road to civil government when he first came to power to disrupt the process; and after handing over power to a civilian government, he again upset the democratic administration by overthrowing the Limann regime. For nineteen years thereafter, the nation went from socialism to capitalism and something in between that no one can describe.

And if a person steals power from the people and gives it back to the people, what is the problem? Do you have less tearful or criminal intentions? He himself never stopped expressing his hatred for multi-party democracy until his sudden death. So how exactly can our democracy be his legacy when he openly denigrated it at every opportunity? Certainly, without him and his coups, this country would have advanced a couple of decades more in its democratic dispensation.

Those who are in strident mourning for Jerry John Rawlings should tell us about his achievements for Ghana, or else they are hurting all those citizens and their families who lost so much under his mendacious interregnum.

Alternatively, the government could make his passing a unique opportunity to commemorate all those other people it unjustly killed or destroyed. That will be a satisfying way to pacify a country whose citizens still suffer from the acts and deeds of Jerry John Rawlings.