Rawlings and the $5 million question

I first heard about the late Nigerian military dictator Gen. Sani Abacha’s having offered Ghana’s Chairman Jerry John Rawlings the whopping sum of $5 million to promote the former’s image and reputation abroad some 20 years ago.

And so it really beats my imagination how anybody could muster the chutzpah to claim that the infamous butcher of Sogakope ought to be patted on the back and profusely serenaded for being next to God honest for finally coming public to confess to the same

(See “Rawlings Must Return $ 2 M Gift – Nigerian Journalist” Ghanaweb.com 7/16/16).

And then the second time around, it was Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka who held a press conference somewhere in Nigeria and publicly disclosed that there appeared to be credible evidence indicating that the late kleptocratic Gen. Abacha had given the Ghanaian strongman some $5 million belonging to the Nigerian taxpayer, and that Chairman Rawlings needed to promptly return his ill-gotten or stolen money.

Now, this was at once rather funny and strange coming from the genius literary artist who has been widely and deservingly dubbed “The African Shakespeare.”

I have a feeling that Prof. Soyinka gloats on this accolade and may very well have encouraged it. For like the immortalized Bard-of-Avon, the legendary Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist, essayist and sculptor is known to sign off the initials “WS.”

Anyway, Prof. Soyinka’s revelation was also made some 20 years ago. And back then, when Chairman Rawlings was asked by some media operatives to either substantiate or repudiate the allegation, the founding-father of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) angrily shot back to the effect that Prof. Soyinka was full of sound and fury signifying zilch.

And so many of us find this early morning public confession in the market square by the junta leader of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that he had, after all, taken some money running into the millions from Gen. Abacha, to be fraught with the same level of shock and trauma that attended the Bastille Day’s mowing death of nearly 100 celebrants in the southern French city of Nice a couple of days ago.

Couple the preceding with the fact that the Rawlings Revolution was about the summary liquidation of any Ghanaian citizen who owned more than ?50,000 (Fifty-Thousand Ghanaian Cedis) in his/her bank account, and it begins to make sense why some relatives of many of his “accountability” victims and witnesses are of the view that Chairman Rawlings ought to be afforded the same deal that he self-righteously dealt his “revolutionary victims” in the name of “probity, transparency, accountability and justice.”

And, oh, I forgot to add that coming from Prof. Soyinka, the Rawlings payola scandal had the catastrophic heft of a 9.0 and above earthquake, because in his trenchant political commentary on the abjectly poor leadership caliber and rank corruption in postcolonial Africa, titled “The Open-Sore of a Continent,” the Nigerian literary legend and social thinker spent a remarkable amount of space and time rapturously lauding the Rawlings Revolution, in particular the summary execution of the 8 former military rulers, including Generals I. K. Acheampong, A. A. Afrifa and F.W.K. Akuffo as a salutary surgical ritual that auspiciously aimed to cauterize the postcolonial political landscape of Ghana of such inexcusable moral and cultural blight.

But even more significantly, Prof. Soyinka had called for the same “revolutionary process” to be replicated in Nigeria. Well, reading about the confession which Chairman Rawlings was reported to have let on in an interview that he granted a reporter from the Guardian Newspaper of Nigeria, I could not help but wonder what Prof. Soyinka would think of Chairman Rawlings today.