Jerry Rawlings And His Men

By Colin Essamuah

One afternoon in April 1978, as students of my secondary school were returning to school after a friendly soccer match with St. Augustine’s College, we were confronted with a funeral procession right in front of the main entrance to my school at the intersection of Kotokuraba and Aboom Wells streets in Cape Coast. The striking thing about this funeral was that in the procession were buses full of students from the then three universities in the country, Legon, Kumasi and Cape Coast.

Suddenly, a considerable number of policemen from nowhere pounced on the procession, fired tear gas canisters into the mourners, and started beating the students who jumped from their buses, running helter-skelter, some right into the campus of my secondary school. We joined the brave ones into throwing stones and other missiles at the police who retreated after a few minutes. The police succeeded in dispersing a solemn gathering because the whole event had been organized as an anti-SMC political meeting by the NUGS, arguably the vanguard of the struggle against the Acheampong and Akuffo regimes from 1972 to 1979.

We learnt later that the deceased was one Anthony Yorke, a student leader who had met his death in a contrived accident in Accra involving agents of the Acheampong regime, and the car in which Yorke and others were involved. Among those injured in that accident which took the life of Yorke was the NUGS president, Kofi Totobi Quakyi, who still bears the scars of his injuries to this day. He was then a well-known political activist even in those days. Among the form one students who took part in that confrontation was 12 year-old Nii Lante Vanderpuije, now a presidential staffer and NDC party satrap.

My mates and I were in Lower Sixth Form, having passed the Ordinary Level held the previous June. Our preparations for the examinations were interrupted several times by student leaders from Cape Coast University who recruited some of us and our colleagues from Adisadel and St. Augustines to join a demonstration against General Acheampong at that year’s Cocoa Day celebration held at the Victoria Park. We were given placards lambasting the SMC and told to assemble behind the dais. The signal for the aluta would have been a contingent of fishermen hired to protect us starting a commotion. The fishermen did not show up, even though they were paid, and the demonstration was called off at the last minute as the organizers were reluctant to sacrifice us to the mercies of the gun-toting bodyguards of General Acheampong. It was that day that the beleaguered Acheampong made his famous speech criticizing those who thought he was God to make rain fall to ensure adequate food production!

I recite this thirty-two year old fragment of our political history to make the point that in politics, everybody has a usable past. That past may or not be employed for personal advantage in the future, but certainly it is uncharitable and ungentlemanly to refer to comrades who had given their all to a continuing struggle as upstarts and underlings. But even more telling, this fragment only illustrates that June 4, 1979, did not just fall from the skies, and that without the January 13, 1972 coup of General Acheampong, and the struggle to remove him, President Rawlings himself may not have emerged. There is always a history behind events which must be acknowledged.

To cite another example. Kwame Pianim, at the launch of the book by Akenten Appiah-Menkah a couple of weeks ago, revealed that the author had left out the name of Ato Ahwoi out of the five or so men who were invited into the country by Finance Minister JH Mensah in 1970 to assist in restructuring the Ghanaian economy in the time of Prime Minster Busia in the Second Republic. It then struck me that the white-haired Ato Ahwoi is far, far older than I had thought, and that he had been a major player in public policy formulation and management in the Ghanaian polity for four decades, just as his colleagues Pianim himself, Ashiagbor, Donkor-Fordwor, and the others.

As for his youngest brother, Kwamena, who is one of the few Rhodes Scholars this country has produced, we all had read him avidly in the Legon Observer in 1980-81 conducting a valiant defense of AFRC constitution-making precedent to the inauguration of the Third Republic in October 1979 against the formidable Professor Kweku Folson, then the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the university. In 1979 specifically, Kwamena Ahwoi had conducted live interviews with the presidential candidates for the June 18 general election, and had achieved the distinction of nearly being lynched in the studio by Mark Diamond Addy, an independent presidential candidate. I disliked him at the time because as a PFP fanatic in those days, he had embarrassed my party leader, Victor Owusu, by asking of his marital status. The question not only made Victor uncomfortable, but it produced a farcical phase in the 1979 campaign in which Paa Willie Ofori-Atta of the UNC was shown in party adverts with his wife to taunt the PFP whose leader was wifeless!

What about Captain Tsikata? Or PV Obeng? Or Sherry Ayittey? Captain Tsikata had fought in the Ghanaian contingent in the Congo and been mentioned in despatches, and had left the army in the mid -1960s to fight in the Angolan war of independence against the Portuguese colonialists, and is still a revered figure in that country, where he went under the pseudonym Comrade da Silva. Elsewhere, he was also known as General Gomez. He was jailed by the Acheampong regime for attempting to overthrow the regime, an episode in which Kofi Awoonor, then teaching at the University of Cape Coast, and now chairman of the Council of State, also suffered imprisonment. There are some who may not think much of this phase of his life, but as part of his well-known ideological convictions, that experience is a very serious credential indeed, and it is not the place of his comrades-in-arms to seek to denigrate his contribution arising out of his convictions and experiences.

As for PV Obeng, most of who can, can recall seeing the old faded picture of he with other student leaders at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology taken in the early seventies. Also in that picture was Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, who according to legend, was the one who introduced her articulate and intelligent former colleague to her husband, President Rawlings, in later years. He faithfully served in the PNDC and the first NDC government from 1982 to 1995, when he bowed out. Madam Sherry Ayittey who had previously stuck with Mrs. Rawlings, is also a contemporary at the KNUST of Obeng and the former first lady, and played, with other women, vital roles in the mobilization, organization and empowerment of women in the days of the PNDC and the first NDC government, both under President Rawlings.

Hanna Tetteh, the Trade Minister, has her name dragged in the mud because a high official in the current government, closely allied to President Rawlings, prefers to do business in the destination inspection business with a company promoted by the famous Wofa Kwame Boateng and his friends. Boateng, a cousin of President Kufuor, was the domestic chief of staff in the Kufuor presidency, a position formed to corner lucrative government contracts. This particular company was formed in the dying days of the NPP regime, for the contract sum of $600,000 per month, to ensure a foothold in the fat rents available in the customs business of the country. There are people in the NDC government who would like to sustain this cosy arrangement, by mounting a vicious media campaign and dragging in the name of the president, all for the benefit of political businessmen who are committed to the failure and defeat of the NDC? Wonders shall never end!

Ludwig Hlordze, Koku Anyidohu, Haruna Iddrissu, all relatively youthful members of the party and government, but with solid footing in the party, have all come under furious attack by President Rawlings for a variety of inchoate crimes which at bottom, may well be a sign of his waning influence in party, government and country.

The thrust of this article is to open another window into the import of this year’s June 4 celebrations in Tamale a couple of weeks ago, at which event President Rawlings was reported to have heaped personal abuse at the people I have named. These men and women are all serious card-bearing NDC members who are linked together by their service in high positions in the government formed by the party of which he is the founder.

But the brunt of the venom of the Rawlingses has always been reserved for the man who has been freely and democratically elected as the president of this country, President John Mills. When ex-AFRC chairman Rawlings was doing the same to President Limann from 1979, Rawlings could not have been elected as president under the 1979 constitution, and for that matter, the 1960 and 1969 constitutions. Whatever leadership qualities he possessed, and they are considerable, he managed by the 1981 coup, to display for the benefit of the people of this country up till 1992, when he was freely elected under a different constitution which permitted his legal involvement in our politics at the highest level for two terms.

Many observers believe this tirade, and the others before this, are informed by a an orchestrated plan to discredit fellow party members who appear now to be the backbone of the Mills administration, in order to pave the way for the emergence of Mrs. Rawlings as the 2012 presidential candidate of the NDC. I do not necessarily share that view, not because the evidence is not persuasive, but that that history is a dangerous and fatal guide. In our own political history, the meteoric career of Okatakyie Afrifa stares him in the face, offering somber lessons for those who refuse to let their mother sleep at night.

I would counsel President Rawlings to re-read his copies of Afrifa’s autobiographical work, The Ghana Coup, and also the most authoritative work on the 1966 coup, Simon Baynham’s The Military and Politics in Nkrumah’s Ghana. Contrary to what Afrifa claims in his book, Baynham establishes that he was drawn into the conspiracy to overthrow Nkrumah only in late 1965, a few months to February 1966. We know that the charisma, courage and popularity of Afrifa rested on his singular, insightful decision to take a group of his soldiers pinned down by fire from the Flagstaff House to GBC to make the initial announcement of the coup around 5.30 in the morning of February 24, 1966. This obvious act of courage, morphed subsequently in the popular imagination and fanned by his own considerable ego, to the claim that he was the architect of the coup that overthrew Nkrumah. It earned him enemies and ended his life at the firing range at Teshie. Meanwhile, the real architects of that coup were Harlley and Kwashie, both of whom died peacefully, Kotoka, who died in the April 1967 attempted coup of Arthur and Yeboah, and Tony Deku, who is very much alive.

President Rawlings chose the June 4 anniversary to attack people some of whom had contributed immensely to his success in our politics from 1979 to the present. Like Afrifa, I say to him that he was not the architect of June 4, but its principal beneficiary, preparing the grounds for Ghanaians to receive, welcome and sustain him in power from 1981 to 2000. This is the longest period any person has ruled this nation since 1874 when the Gold Coast became a British Colony.

I supported enthusiastically June 4, 1979, and did not worry my head much over the execution of General Acheampong twelve days later on June 16. This was because, personally, I accepted, and still accept the logic of punishing the person who overthrew Busia, whose 1979 successor party, the PFP, I actively backed. But the execution of Afrifa on June 26, with five others, compelled me to abandon support for the AFRC, because I could not grasp, and still cannot, the sense in punishing someone for an event which had taken place thirteen years earlier, and which I now know, was not his brainchild. And so it may be with President Rawlings, who knew nothing about June 4, went along with the decisions to execute some senior officers, and still struts the land holding forth on the virtues of what made him a name and a presence in our lives for the past thirty-one years.

The lesson from the life and death of Afrifa was that he swore to divide the party which was his only and reliable shield against his enemies in the polity, because its leading members had refused to permit him to lead it. He succeeded in creating that division, and was duly elected an MP of the UNC for his hometown Ashanti-Mampong, but when the bell tolled for him, neither the PFP nor the UNC, could utter a word of protest. As for those in the NDC who are wishing to be appointed as ministers in the government of President Nana Konadu Rawlings, they would be well counseled to abandon the path of hubris and self-destruction that the life of Afrifa teaches the wise and discerning.

Outside our borders, I recommend for President Rawlings’ enlightenment, the biography of Major Enver of the Turkish Army who was stabbed to death on the streets of Berlin in the 1930s by the son of one of his victims in the several political convulsions he was actively involved in between the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI and the emergence of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1922. His murderer was acquitted by the jury, and Enver, who was a very powerful and influential figure in Turkish politics at the time, has all but vanished from the history books. Because President Rawlings has been the architect of the oldest constitutional dispensation in our history, I would wish he will choose a more statesmanlike path to enjoy his retirement from active politics. The battle to install his wife as the leader of the NDC is not a winnable proposition in both party and nation. He may, however, lose all he has gained in over three decades of politics in Ghana, and his real achievements scorned and derided by former friend and present foes. That is not an epitaph to aspire to.

If I were President Rawlings, I would wake up every morning and thank God for giving me the brains, intellect and loyalty of people like Professor Mills, Justice Annan, Nathan Quao, Harry Sawyerr, Tsatsu Tsikata, and countless others, who gave their all in service to him and this country for 19 years, in addition to the people named in this article. It is only fair and proper that President and Mrs. Rawlings also appreciate the service of these people who sacrificed all to help him run Ghana, and produce the success that has enabled the mandate of the party to be renewed. That renewal should be adequate compensation for him, because what must motivate people in politics is love of country, and not sycophancy.