He shot to fame and power with the putsch initiated by members of the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), a rag-tag bunch of frustrated and ill-bred junior military officers. Then in the name of rank corruption, he summarily executed nearly all the key leaders of the I. K. Acheampong and F. W. K. Akuffo-led Supreme Military Councils I and II in the name of abject political decadence and socioeconomic corruption. And then he reluctantly handed over power to the democratically elected Dr. Hilla (Babini) Limann and his People’s National Party (PNP). And then less than three years later, under the guise of righteous indignation, he shot his way back into the dictatorial seat of governance and in nearly two decades effectively ground the economy of Ghana to a screeching halt.
Today, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings claims that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) whose creation, by the way, he has been credited and knighted as The Founding Father, and on whose ticket he ruled the country for some 8 unremarkable years as a democratically elected president, is the most corrupt of its kind in the postcolonial history of the country. The interesting thing here is that Chairman Rawlings would force the presidential candidacy of his former arch-lieutenant and vice-president, Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills, on the party for three consecutive election cycles by insisting that Prof. Mills, now late, was the best qualified Ghanaian citizen to occupy his constitutionally vacated seat. And then once his infamous Swedru-Declaration Candidate had been voted into power, Mr. Rawlings would spend the next three years badmouthing and discrediting the managerial skills of the Fante Ekumfi-Otuam native.
He would even back his own wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, to tackily attempt to wrest power from President Mills during the 2010 Sunyani, Brong-Ahafo, NDC congressional primaries. Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings would be badly beaten and be forced, largely by shock and shame, to renounce her membership of the party whose eagle-atop-of-an-umbrella logo she claims to have invented. Well, nobody can dispute the fact that the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress is thoroughgoing corrupt; but we ought to also not forget, as my maternal grandmother, Mrs. Grace Akosua Ateaa Agyeman Sintim, was fond of saying that: “A crab does not beget a bird.” The fact of the matter is that no conjugal pair of politicians is as corrupt as Chairman Rawlings and his wife Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings. Even as I write, the residents and indigenes of Nsawam-Adoagyiri, of whose royal stool I am a legitimate claimant, are up in arms over the summary, devious and unconscionable expropriation of their land, to wit, some 800 acres of fetching farmlands, by Chairman Rawlings and his wife.
Reliable legend has it that the bloody couple used the cold-calculating pretext of Eminent Domain to get the Adoagyiri lands nationalized by the National Democratic Congress. And then they morphed themselves into the State, a la French monarchical style, and got these prime landed properties ceded to them at giveaway rental rates for some 50 years, with the automatic chance for a renewal of their lease for another 50 years. Talk of “legitimate thievery.”
What this piratical takeover of the landed prime properties, located less than 25 miles from Ghana’s capital of Accra, means is that like the globally detested erstwhile white-racist regime of Apartheid South Africa’s Bantustanization of the lands of indigenous South Africans, the people of Nsawam-Adoagyiri, having been summarily and callously dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods, must now resign themselves to working as day and wage laborers for the Nsawam Cannery which, Chairman Rawlings, as founding leader of the National Democratic Congress, as well as first leader of Ghana’s Fourth Republic, literally gifted to his wife in the name of an IMF-World Bank-induced Divestiture Program.
In essence, what we have here is a striking case of the most corrupt and wealthiest thieves of Fourth-Republican Ghana calling another filthy rich political criminal and a thief a thief. Not surprisingly, Mr. Rawlings and his wife, Nana Konadu, have been incessantly hammering at President John Dramani Mahama and his cronies for being bloodily guilty of some of the same crimes and criminal activities modeled for them by the Rawlingses. Chairman Rawlings, by the way, has categorically declared in various shades of not-so-subtle rhetorical salvos that the Rawlings Clan stands way over and above the laws of the land. Our elders and sages of old have observed that “Birds of similar feathers consort together.”
If the preceding maxim and informed observations have validity then you, the dear reader, ought to wonder what really makes the Rawlingses brazenly and impudently believe that they are any morally superior to the Mahamas and their cronies.
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