Is J J Rawlings hoist by his own petard?

Between June and September 1979 J J Rawlings encapsulated the bravery of our ancestors, the idealism of our youth, the incorruptibility of our conscience and the very essence of the social contract between government and the governed. Within a twinkle of three months he re-established faith in the state and renewed hope and pride in Ghana and Ghanaians. The young air force pilot had everything going for him and if he needed a spring Ghanaians provided it in his steps with spontaneous alacrity. Students loved him and workers hailed him. He was the right leader at the right time in the right place for most Ghanaians, at least it seemed. The exceptions were those who confirmed the rule and served to affirm his veritable popularity and inherent legitimacy.

I was one of those teens in secondary school on June 4th when the popular uprising within the Ghana Armed Forces thrust the fiery J J Rawlings almost literally into every Ghanaian home. He thus became the name we woke up to and went to bed with. Those were the days when secondary schools were secondary schools; many were boarding, none was high, hardly any was senior or junior. For want of a better word we were all ‘secondarians’ and if there was anything junior it was Junior Jesus and that was the same as Rawlings. We modeled him in every conceivable student forum and celebrated the Junior, the Jesus and the Rawlings, a bit like what Catholics still do with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in one Holy Trinity.

Controversial as it might seem with some benefit of hindsight, and no matter what latter day critics would have us believe, J J was in many ways and in those times a saviour, a messiah and whatever else Jesus was except the divinity of course. And as in the biblical story of Zacheus the vertically challenged climbed trees and roof tops just to catch a glimpse of him whenever and wherever he passed by. In the absence of TV in most parts of the country many tuned into radio and read the newspapers with a new sense of religiosity just to keep pace with J J, what he said and what he was up to next. Not unlike Jesus, J J responded with characteristic empathy: he identified with the suffering, shared kenkey and pepper with the poor and stood shoulder to shoulder with ordinary workers everywhere he went.

Point is, several years before June 1979 Ghana had degenerated into a laughing stock within the sub-region. Very ordinary basics of soap, sugar and even toilet roll were flaunted as ‘essential commodities’ for which people queued if they were found in any store at all. The neighbouring Francophone capitals of Lomé, Abidjan and Ouagadougou provided the supply nerve centres for these essential commodities and most commercial businesses developed and honed expertise in ‘smuggling’, ‘hoarding’ and ‘profiteering’ to balance books and stay afloat.

So surreal was the situation that bribery and corruption hardly raised eye brows, or rather defined the very institutions entrusted with gate keeping national assets and generating revenues. ‘Kalabule’ became the Ghanaian coinage that summed up the rot in the economy and the decadence of the moral fibre that went with it without a flinch. This was the pit in which the nation descended and it was a bottomless one. With scarcely one single sign of a silver lining in the horizons, professionals – teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, etc – just picked bags and baggage if they had any and left in droves. While some went as far away as ‘Abrokyire’ (the ‘white man’s’ land or whatever that means) with their know how, Nigeria was the main destination and chief beneficiary of Ghana’s human capital, made tearfully superfluous by a national cul-de-sac. The Supreme Military Council (SMC) I and II that presided over these woes had obviously long run out of relevance to the development cause of Ghana and the aspirations of its citizens.

Such was the context that heralded the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and J J onto the Ghanaian political turf that people went wild with sheer joy of change per se. And there was the ‘house cleaning exercise’ meant to purge society of the ills and injustices that held it hostage and almost grounded the country to a complete halt. J J communicated the exercise and the need for it with his twin trademarks of articulate oratory and charismatic authority. Chaotic as it might have been implemented, the entire country obliged to him in near reverence and gratitude to the extent that masses of people across board called for more blood to flow when he embarked on executions of former heads of state and other military generals. It was a revolution underway and in a benign contagion of sorts the populace instantly subscribed to collective responsibility and thus validated his actions and inactions.

Most African leaders in the 1970s would have bought into such consummate popularity and hang in there till thy kingdom come. Instead, J J carved a rare niche for himself by following through with elections that were already underway. He cleaned up the electoral process with resolute immediacy and freed it from the strangled hold of vested interests. The outcome remains one of, if not, the fairest and most credible elections in post-independent Ghana, perhaps in all of Africa. When he finally and freely handed over power to the democratically elected President, Hilla Limann, on 24th September 1979 he had completed an African historic and his record elevated to the seraphic. Ghana returned to being the yardstick of hope and leadership in the continent and Rawlings’ name defined his generation as he bowed out to national ovation and universal acclaim.

Some two years later, just when the applause was beginning to recede and the curtains were being drawn on what palpably appeared a tumultuous but unqualified performance, the act returned on 31st December 1981 and demanded encore a bit unusually. With a gunshot the government of duly elected President Limann was given the sack, the 3rd Republican Constitution that gave him legitimacy was suspended and the Parliament that kept him in check dissolved. People heaved heavily in neither sigh of love nor relief but of the kind tantamount to niggle curiosity bordering on ‘what is it this time, eh?’ The answer was hush and the rest is history.

The mix up in the legacy of J J would begin here and whether he should be seen today as the revolutionary who pulled Ghana back from the brink or an adventurist that held the country back from progress is a debate arguably fogged by this second coming. The new Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) that he led accused the Limann government of economic mismanagement and wrong footed his laissez faire economic policies in preference for socialist economics. Within a spell of 3 years the firebrance failed to put bread on tables and the jest of a ‘Rawlings chain’ in reference to the jutting collar bones that exposed the suffering of Ghanaians in his wake was soon followed by his own calls on people to tighten their belts knowing as he did that trousers and skirts were beginning to fall off waists from a combination of stress and malnutrition or under nourishment.

J J himself is reported to have once told journalists that he knew neither law nor understood economics, but he knew it when his stomach was empty. He needed no telling that the pinch of hunger had started to bite his compatriots. Soon he was at the feet of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank pleading for prescriptions of Western economics to salvage the situation. Before long he was a convert and a darling boy of the Bretton Woods institutions. With their tacit but clear instructions he began to administer not too dissimilar free market doses for which the trigger pulled on the 3rd Republic by his own admission. That trigger of 1981 remains an albatross and a palpable waste of the sympathy, solidarity and political capital of 1979 in retrospect. The continued attempts to conflate the two are not only revisionist, it confuses the ideals for which his popularity once buoyed with the shenanigans that left society nonplus and divided.

Why J J could not have transformed the June 4th movement into a third force in the politics of Ghana still baffles adherents of democracy in 1981 and his own admirers from 1979. Had he chosen to tow the democratic line and formed a party to contest the elections that were forthcoming in 1983 he would have done an Eisenhower and helped deepen institutional development in the service of homeland Ghana for which he was willing to die in an earlier coup attempt on 15th May 1979. For a man who had already paid his dues to the country it did not require effort; the goodwill was abundant and the mammoth following he enjoyed hardly required persuasion. And if he needed a name for the party it did not have to be ingenious either; simply June 4th Movement, Probity Congress, Accountability Party or whatever else would have sufficed as long as it had the seal and blessing of Junior Jesus.

Of course, he finally conceded wisdom when in 1992 he threw down the gauntlet at the traditional parties with his own National Democratic Congress (NDC). Although this was possibly informed by a restless local appetite for political freedoms and arguably dictated by international pressure following the collapse of the Berlin wall it was better late than never development, welcome news for democracy and a breath of fresh air for human rights. The very fact of the party creating a centre-left platform for expression and actualisation of social democracy in the country breathes health into the welfare ethos of national responsibility for the vulnerable and marginalised in society. Could this perhaps explain the winning record of four of the six general elections held so far under the 4th Republic? In any case, it does reinvent J J as the man of the people that he was in the heady days of 1979 and the democrat that he never was until 1992.

Yet the critique abides that had he tapped into his 1979 goodwill and founded the party that he finally formed in 1992 he would have avoided the controversy of the PNDC and its history that still trails and muddles the legacy of the June 4th heroism with the 31st December incongruity. By so doing, he would have engraved his name in the annals of history as the Flight Lieutenant who knew the place of the army is to protect the territorial sovereignty of the country, the supremacy of the Constitution and the governments elected on the basis of that Constitution. Ghana did not have to suffer truncation of constitutional governance in 1981, and notwithstanding vocal attempts at conflation of the two, the legacy that was once analogous to Jesus will remain indicted of having been blemished by the handiwork of everything opposite to that metaphor. Or is our Junior Jesus hoist by his own petard?

The writer is freelance International Relations analyst and political commentator