Rawlings should not entirely be blamed for revolution - Col Aboagye

Col. Festus B. Aboagye (Rtd), who once served under President Rawlings, has said that the blame for the 1979 Revolution should not entirely be blamed on the late statesman.

He added that the former president must have been close to apologizing for the wrongs if he didn’t actually do before he died.

He said that as much as the late former president, Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings led the revolution and whose actions affected many people, it would not be fair to lay all the blame on him when most people were just sitting on the fence doing nothing.

“On the one hand, he navigated Ghana and ECOWAS as a sub-region from very difficult circumstances to the current climate of relative stability that we have. But those processes exacted a heavy toll on the well-being of many Ghanaians,” he admitted.

He added that whether or not the former president apologized for his actions, there remains an unspoken fact that the political climate at the time, coupled with the silence of many people, gave him no other option than to do what he did.

“Whether he apologized for that before he passed, I’m not too sure but I get the sense that either he did it or he came close to doing it. But we also need to remind ourselves of the other side of this discourse: the idea that painful as the revolution was to us as Ghanaians, shouldn’t that be the result therefore that we must be scared of the current climate of politics that we are practicing in this country, where we don’t seem to be serious about the seriousness that governance entails?

“As if to ridicule what Rawlings had done, which we don’t like, but rather use it as a basis to ensure that we don’t go through that again. So, I cannot speak for him but I think that all of us as Ghanaians were complicit in all that happened: either we were part of it or we were sitting on the lines or it was because of our excesses that caused the revolution to come on,” he said.

He has therefore asked that Ghanaians apologize to the State for what happened and work towards ensuring that none of that ever happens again.

“So all of us need to apologize to the state of Ghana and learn lessons from that,” he said on the Saturday, January 30, 2021, edition of Joy News’ Newsfile.