The NDC leader, Flt. Lt. Rawlings who at the time of writing was about to embark for the United States, has seven more months for his job in "volunteerism" to run out. He will be out of a job when the one-year programme runs out on December 15, 2001.
In its edition of Monday, May 7, 2001, The Accra Mail quoted UN sources as saying that Rawlings' recent Abuja visit was not sponsored by the UN. A rejoinder from his office to an Accra FM station argued otherwise. The Accra Mail has since discovered that extreme pressure was put on the UN office in Accra to provide him the ticket for the trip.
His work plan for the United Nation's International Year of Volunteer (IYV) 2001 runs from March 2001 to 15 December 2001when the closing ceremony on IYV would be performed in the former German capital, Bonn. The work plan states that "Mr. Rawlings will participate, alongside the other Eminent Persons for IYV, in the concluding event of the International Year of Volunteers."
The yearlong work plan will see him in a number of countries including Bonn and Botswana, two countries he has already visited. Others include a "5 day visit to a Southern or Eastern African Country, Brussels and a mid-term review in Accra in August. Between August to November, he "will visit Uganda, Tanzania, and a third country." He will be at the International Conference on HIV in Dakar, on December 1, and proceed to New York for World Volunteers Day on December 5, 2001. He will then fly back to Africa and attend another HIV conference in Burkina Faso which is expected to run from 9-13 December before the wrap up in Bonn on December 15, 2001.
After that he's home alone, and will have to occupy himself as best as he can without getting in any one's way. Even as the UN has bent over backwards to mollify him, for whatever reasons, he is yet to publicly come clean on his coup legacy. He still continues to glorify coups and has not gone on record to give his solid backing to the Kufuor administration against any adventurers who might want to destabilise it through means other than the ballot box.
Political observers have commented that he would have done himself great honour and given Ghana great pride if he had rather used his one-year volunteerism internship to travel the world, especially African countries promoting democracy and discouraging the culture of coups as a means of changing governments.
The test will come in seven months time when his one-year IYV internship ends.
