82-year-old Council of State member, Sam Okudzeto says he does not accept the popular notion that former President Jerry John Rawlings created the 4th Republic of Ghana.
The private legal practitioner insists Mr Rawlings was a “dictator” who made moves towards constitutional rule only after he was forced to do so.
The former president of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) told Paul Adom-Otchere in an interview on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana programme that the former military officer had no business occupying the seat of head of state following the 1981 coup d’état.
“Rawlings did not create it [the Fourth Republic]. Sometimes it is erroneous to say he created [it], he did not create. There were pressures upon him that he had to succumb to,” Mr Okudzeto said.
“I don’t think soldiers have any business interfering in governance, if they think there is something wrong [that] they need to remove, they should go and remove it and get out; this is my believe. That is why I was against it…that is the stand I took against him [Mr Rawlings],” Mr Okudzeto stated.
“What makes you [Rawlings] think that you know more than all these educated people and you can govern and they can’t? …What is your background, what have you achieved in life? That was the issue. That was the stand I took against him,” he recalled.
Even though he said Mr Rawlings yielded to pressure to return the country to constitutional rule, “he used the machinery of the state to support himself” in the 1992 elections, thus his victory.
“If the man is incumbent and he is in position, he is a dictator; he is in power, who do you think you are to marshal resources to go around the country and defeat him in an election?” he questioned.
Mr Okudzeto said there are lingering doubts about the 1992 polls because “Professor Adu Boahen felt he won”.
Prof Boahen lost to Mr Rawlings as he received 30.4% of the votes amidst alleged rigging.
Mr Okudzeto is of the view that Ghanaians “are giving him [Mr Rawlings] too much credit. One cannot say that he did not do anything; that is wrong, he did a lot but … he spending almost 19 years in power, this country could have made more milestones than he did. Don’t forget that the country was in the doldrums when Kufuor was elected into office”.
