UK Newspaper Interviews Rawlings

'Africa is a jungle of deceit'

'Wake up! The West has to wake up!" There was a brief silence, then a thunderous smack on my thigh. Then a ferocious stare.

For a brief moment it was all too easy to see how this silver-haired African with the rock star attire - black jeans, bomber jacket and calf leather boots - is said to have once exploded in a cabinet meeting in his native Ghana and floored one of his ministers.

Jerry Rawlings, the one-time flight lieutenant turned military ruler, is an ex-president now, having bucked the continent's dictatorial trend, held elections and then stepped down from high office two years ago after two decades in power.

And his home from home in London, the Royal China restaurant in Bayswater, is certainly a long way from the barracks in Accra where his exhortations were once the law in the land.

But more than 20 years after he stormed to power and executed half a dozen senior officers including three former heads of state, as mobs bayed "Let the blood flow", the one-time revolutionary socialist is as angry as ever.

He is enraged with the West for "failing" Africa and the developing world. America needs to "win the respect and admiration of the world as opposed to instilling fear".

He is furious with some of his fellow African leaders for betraying their people. "Africa is a jungle of deceit, hypocrisy, power-mongering and greed," he said.

He is also - unsurprisingly, his critics would argue - particularly impassioned when questioned on the bloodshed that accompanied the first of his two military coups in 1979. He stepped down after 112 days but returned for good on New Year's Eve, 1981.

He suggests that so angry were the people with years of corrupt and inept rule that without a few killings - and implicitly a strong ruler in charge - the country would have exploded.

His argument, and indeed his successful record as a reformist leader, go to the heart of the question that has vexed Africa's post-colonial states for decades: do they need an autocrat to work?

"The world was made to believe it was as if I just lined up people. There is no way I would still be living in my country [if that were the case]. I had to. I had people executed for corruption. It was the only way to prevent the carnage that would have enveloped my country.

"We tried everything to stop the executions. If we hadn't gone ahead a lot of people would have been executed. The deprivation, corruption and growing anger were becoming unbearable.

"I am talking about a classic French or Soviet style revolution. People who look fat and prosperous would have been executed. When you keep people in a state of subjugation and humiliation for so long, when they blow up they want your blood. That is the point to which my country was driven."

Now, far from being vilified as he was in 1979 when he tookpower, he is widely hailed in the West as a reformist model leader for Africa, a tribute to his record as one of the few African leaders to leave his country in a better state than he found it.

After an early bout of revolutionary philosophy, part-inspired by a close relationship with Col Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in the 1980s he allowed his head to rule his heart and swallowed the bitter pill of submitting to the World Bank's advice. Bit by bit the economy grew and stability and security returned.

And he did eschew the fancy titles and cut down on the corruption that so many other African leaders indulged. Indeed when Bill Clinton toured Africa as president in 1998 to hail an "African renaissance", he chose Accra as his first port of call, and Ghana as one of three countries, along with South Africa and Uganda, that pointed to a brighter future.

But he is far from a praise singer of his latter-day backers. He turned his fire on the West for its "failure" to help Africa, for its "hypocrisy" in condemning corruption while all the while looking after tyrants' ill-gotten gains in banks, and for its "idiocy" in trying to impose western values willy-nilly on the continent.

The West, he suggested, was too quick to put forward multi-party democracy. Rather it should seek to adapt its medicine to suit the African patient.

Rawlings briefly switched into Latin and recited the catechism remembered from his days at a mission school, before contrasting the West's churches with the charismatic African churches that are springing up all over West Africa as a fusion of two very different traditions.

"You have a cold church. We have a free one. We give expression to God with loudness, with drumming and dancing. One thing you couldn't take away from us was our rhythm." That, he suggested, was Africa's future, a fusion of north and south.

After winning two elections in the 1990s, Rawlings is now a member of the old African presidents' "club".

It is a decidedly mixed bag, ranging from Nelson Mandela to the Big Men, such as Daniel arap Moi, the former president of Kenya.

Shortly before the interview, he bumped into two sons of Mobutu sese Seko, the late president of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

But unlike most of his fellow African leaders, Rawlings is not shy about breaking ranks and criticising his continent.

"Governing in Africa is like paddling in a canoe with a hole punched in it," he said, referring to the entrenched patronage and corruption.

"In the West you tend to put in who is best. In our society we choose the one who is nice to me or who is my son."

So what about his successors in office? Six months after he stood down he caused a furore when he implied that the new government did not have the confidence of the military.

Can this restless and outspoken populist abide watching from the sidelines and devote his time instead to his current project, an Aids initiative for Africa?

For the first time during the interview - and possibly the first time in his career - he held his tongue.