June 4th 1979: The Day Adolf Hitler Visited Ghana

Like September 11 in the lives of the people of America, I have decided never to forget June 4th 1979. 

We may forgive those who trampled on our rights when this day of madness came knocking on our doors but surely, we will never ever forget this day of craziness, mayhem, murder, intimidation and show of “Soldier Power”.

Thirty years down the road, the memory of the atrocities and images of June 4th are still stored in our collective memory. It was the day images of apocalypse reached Ghanaians in real time.  In fact it was simply terrorism that held Ghanaian lives in disdain.

On June 4th 1979, it suddenly became very clear how fragile freedom is when it is attacked by insane fanatics who call themselves revolutionaries. 

This year, I will not dwell on the atrocities committed by the so-called revolutionaries because it has been done year after year by your Earth Angel.  By now, I am aware all Ghanaians, irrespective of their ages, have come to know one thing or the other of the madness that was visited on Ghanaians by Rawlings and his drugged and drunken goons on that fateful day and the subsequent three months that they held us in bondage.

The modern-day Ghanaian soldier must learn a great deal of lesson from the June 4th episode because if they fail to do so they may be taken for a ride by self-seeking junior officers who may try to use them for their own parochial interest. 

Thirty years ago, all those who joined Rawlings to treat Ghanaians as sub-human beings are nowhere to be found. 

Whereas some have gone mad and living in penury, others are either in exile or simply dead through sickness because they could not afford to pay for their medical bills.  After all, did the Holy Scriptures not say the wages of sin is death? 

The few who are trying to make ends meet are also living in perpetual fear.  Their fear is that another mad soldier will take up arms and line them up and shoot them like the way they did to Afrifa and co.

Even though there is an Indemnity Clause enshrined in our constitution, their fear is that another man will also set the clause aside and take the necessary action against  them one day. 

In the 1969 constitution, the soldiers who handed over power also made sure there was an enshrined Indemnity Clause but sadly, when the drugs went into the brains of the soldiers of June 4th, they set aside the clause and shot General Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa, who was the Head of State when the 1969 constitution was formulated. Apart from Rawlings and his family who are living luxurious lives, the rest have regretted being part of that deception.

June 4th did nothing good to Ghanaians. To the outside world,  June 4th portrayed the Ghanaian soldier as barbaric and inhuman who acted like the Stone Age overlords.   Nobody should be blamed but Rawlings who led the carnage. 

You see, under a lunatic like the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, Germany was responsible for World War II.  Ghanaians were treated with contempt around the world during the June 4 revolution even though not all of us sanctioned the action of those sick brains. 

We were made responsible for the murder of three of our former Heads of State because we were so docile for our own political good.

Tomorrow, June 4th 2009, Rawlings and his cadres will subtly celebrate the damned revolution.  By doing that, they will be raking old wounds and telling us that they can do it again. 

They will be reminding widows and orphans that thirty years ago they were the ones who killed their breadwinners and loved ones. 

The sad thing about this expected celebration is that there are still some cadres who have not realized that they were tricked.  A few of them are in responsible positions whiles a greater number of them are wallowing in abstract poverty. 

Tomorrow, instead of going out to struggle for their bread, these poor souls will gather to shout praises on Rawlings who has made life very difficult for them. 

There are some of the cadres who lost the opportunity to be educated properly because they spent their youthful days following the man called Rawlings.

When they were shouting “JJ, JJ, JJ” and revolutionizing, the man was educating his children in prestigious universities abroad.  In addition, he was secretly acquiring landed properties whiles he continued to tell these cadres that even the consumption of milk was a bourgeois luxury. 

In the heat of the revolution, these young men and women were made to understand that the deliberate cultivation of filth was part of the revolution and it became the norm for those a la mode and being unkempt in dressing, uncouth in manners and violent in action were considered part of the revolt against conformists. 

Whiles they were wearing “Afro Moses” sandals, Rawlings was wearing military boots. It even became revolutionary fashionable to believe that the revolution had no place for soap because some of them refused to take their bath for weeks.

Thirty years down the road, look at Rawlings and his family! 

The thirty-year-old young man who followed Rawlings in the early days of the agitation propaganda is now sixty years old, uneducated, unemployable, unacceptable, weak,  useless and a liability to his community. 

There is one of such an old soldier in my holy village who is a pitiful soul.  He always curses the day he enlisted into the Ghana Army and took part in the June 4th uprising. 

He lives from hand to mouth and wears tattered clothes.  What is more pitiful about this old man is that he could not educate his children and both children and father have become a liability to the community. 

Do you think the sages were wrong when they said revolution devours its own children? 

Think about that and repent, son of man!!!