A Man of Great Vitality, Dynamism, Energy and Somewhat of a Nuisance

Like President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, I am still in some sort of a daze and shock, to speak much less of trauma, over the seismic passing of the former Ghana Airforce’s Flight-Lieutenant who meteorically catapulted himself, for the most part, into the firebrand revolutionary and paradigm-shifting strongman who, nevertheless, ended his quite remarkable political career as no more than the sterling populist demagogue just as he had begun (See “Rawlings’ Death: I’m Extremely Disturbed, Saddened – Akufo-Addo” Modernghana.com 11/13/20).

Like Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, I am equally saddened by the meteoric exit from this life and existence by Chairman Jeremiah John Rawlings, who increasingly began to make his presence on the Ghanaian political landscape more progressive and relevant, if also because he publicly matured to rue having established the most thoroughgoing corrupt political and downright fascistic machine in the country, namely, the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

According to Nana Akufo-Addo, although the late Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and the former had “a tempestuous relationship,” by the close of the life of Ghana’s most extortionate and sanguinary military ruler cum democratically elected President, the two men had begun to healthily envisage “value in each other.” Of course, this ideological turnaround, on the part of Chairman Rawlings, was the indisputable fact that till he drew his last breath on Earth, the infamous junta mutineer of the erstwhile Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) had arrived at the grim but inescapable realization that the man who was really destined to bring real prosperity and qualitative development to Ghana was the petit-statured man he once contemptuously described as a personality who was damn too short to succeed to the Presidency of the Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana.

Yes, increasingly and inescapably, Chairman Rawlings came to envisage in the “Giant Dwarf” the Political Messiah that Ghanaians had been searching for in the Political Wilderness for some 40 years. Indeed, as painful and morally disappointing as it might have appeared to the half-Scottish and half-native Ghanaian citizen, it was crystal clear that the scions of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition were the heirs that Chairman Rawlings had been looking for all along, and not the pathologically corrupt pupils that he had spent the bulk of the past 30 years grooming to carry on his revolutionary mantle and mantra or credo of Probity, Accountability, Transparency and Justice.

He would loudly and incessantly raise the alarm bells that his former Communications Minister, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, was the most thoroughgoing and pathologically corrupt postcolonial Ghanaian leader. And to the very end of his life, Chairman Rawlings bitterly lamented the fact that he had caused the summary execution by firing squad of relatively far more righteous Ghanaian leaders like Generals Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa, Frederick William Kwasi Akuffo, Joy Kobla Amedume, Neville Odartey-Wellington, George Yaw Boakye, Robert Ebenezer Abossey Kotei and Colonel Roger Atogetipoli Felli.

Which very likely explains why in the wake of the epochal passing of Chairman Rawlings, the popular comedienne and local TV personality and entertainer Ms. Afia Schwarzenegger (aka Valentina Nana Agyeiwaa) publicly castigated the Rawlings corpse-scrambling leaders of the National Democratic Congress by reminding the latter not to make any blunder about the incontrovertible fact that former President Rawlings had died as a bona fide member of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party at heart.

When President Akufo-Addo opines in his rather soft and mellow voice, to the family members of the late President Jerry John Rawlings, that he is having a difficult time coming to terms with the abrupt and tragic passing of his former political and personal archnemesis, he means every morpheme or syllable or phonetic sound of such pronouncement. The fact of the matter is that over the course of the last 40 years, no single individual personality towered above Ghana’s political landscape higher than the wiry 31-year-old Flight-Lieutenant of the Ghana Airforce who first came to national attention through the May 15, 1979 abortive coup that got him arrested and court-martialed, with the possibility of a sentence of death looming over his head and those of his associates and coconspirators.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

November 16, 2020

E-mail: [email protected]