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Jerry Rawlings, who took power twice in military coups but is now seen as a driving force behind Ghana’s emergence as a stable democracy, died Thursday at the age of 73.
Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said in a statement that Rawlings had died Thursday morning in an Accra hospital after a brief illness. “A big tree has fallen and Ghana is poorer because of this loss,” he said.
His inauguration in 1979 and 1981 was marked by authoritarian rule and the execution of senior military officers, including General Frederick Akuffo, whom he overthrew in the first coup.
But Rawlings went on to oversee Ghana’s transition to multi-party democracy before resigning in 2001. Today, Ghana is considered one of the most mature democracies in West Africa and regularly sees power shifts between its two main parties.
John Mahama, the leader of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) party that Rawlings founded, said in a Twitter message that he had suspended the campaign for the December 7 presidential election. The election will pit Akufo-Addo against his main rival Mahama, a former president who lost to the incumbent in the 2016 election, and other candidates from smaller parties.
The son of a Scottish father and a Ghanaian mother, Rawlings first came to power in the 1979 coup when he was a lieutenant in the air force. He transferred power to the civilian government soon after, but then led another coup two years later, denouncing government corruption and leadership weakness. He ruled as president of a joint military-civil government from 1981 to 1993.
Rawlings started out as a populist inspired by the leftist policies of the Soviet Union and Cuba, but eventually turned to the free market to boost Ghana’s ailing economy. As president, he liberalized the economy and encouraged investment in the oil and gold sectors.
He also heeded the calls for multi-party democracy that swept across Africa in the early 1990s and held the first elections in Ghana since 1979 in 1992. With all the levers of power at his disposal, he defeated the opposition and demanded re-election four years later. in 1996.
In 2001, he handed power over to John Kufour of the opposition party, who had defeated his vice president in the previous year’s elections.
Rawlings remained a power broker in Ghanaian politics after he resigned, while serving in various international diplomatic posts, including the African Union representative in Somalia.
“Africa has lost a staunch pan-Africanism and a charismatic continental statesman,” said AU commission chairman Moussa Faki, said on Twitter.
A statement by Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said that “the entire African continent will deeply miss the excellent qualities of the great leader.”
“The passion, discipline and moral strength that the former leader of Ghana used to reposition his country for many years continue to reverberate across the continent and beyond,” he said.
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