1981 Rawlings Coup Unjustifiable

I have had an occasion or two to joust with Dr. Kwesi Jonah, the Legon political scientist and fellow of the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG), an unabashedly left-leaning pro-National Democratic Congress think-tank, in the past. So, I was not surprised that this patent whiff of an intellectual would be up to his peevish game of muck-throwing in the revered, antiseptic marketplace of productive and constructive ideas, again, without any decent thought of bringing along a pooper-scooper, the way most responsible canine keepers would do. In his latest of such obstreperous mudslinging spree, Dr. Jonah is reported to have made the extravagant and inexcusably facile, to speak much less about the downright farcical, claim that the criminal overthrow of the democratically elected Hilla “Babini” Limann-led government of the People’s National Party (PNP), on December 31, 1981, was justifiable (MyNewsGH.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/3/21).

For starters, it is absolutely untrue that Ghana under the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) performed economically better or was a remarkable socioeconomic and political improvement in its first 27 months in office, that is, in the same temporal span on the eve of the violent overthrow of the Limann government. If anything at all, the PNDC, in its first three years in office was far worse than the previous Limann government. Secondly, the PNDC, by 1983, was desperately and doggedly pursuing the exact same IMF-World Bank economically regressive experimental policy programs that Chairman Rawlings had given as his overriding motivation for ousting the People’s National Party. It is almost certain that a far more professionally seasoned, ideologically experienced and intellectually astute President Limann would have been able to positively turn the country’s badly listing economy around, if he had been allowed to complete the 21 months or the just under two years that was left of his tenure.

Even more significantly must be observed the fact that Dr. Limann took over an economy that had been thoroughly battered and effectively bankrupted by the four months of nightmarish “revolutionary absurdity” that was the sophomoric control-price junta-madness of the so-called Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC). In sum, the most justifiable assessment of the performance of the Limann Administration would have to take fair and square account of the epic and scandalous market-deaf or insensitive damage wreaked on the economy by the novice and noetic adventurists of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. Put in simple terms, there was absolutely no viable national economy to speak of in September 1979, when the 32-year-old Flt-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings handed over the reins of governance to the 45-year-old Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann, a career diplomat and perhaps Ghana’s most accomplished and erudite governance expert.

About the only palpable weakness of President Limann that precipitated the fairly logical collapse of his government, was the Sorbonne- and University of London-educated leader’s inadvisable decision not to use his executive powers to decisively and effectively clamp down on the increasingly civic lawlessness and chaotic agitation by an economically depressed citizenry for change in their economic plight and status, with the concomitant riotous and rampant unionized industrial worker disruption of law and order throughout the country, and in particular the infamous invasion of the Old Parliament House by busloads of the workers of the Tema-based Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), led by the soon to be summarily executed Mr. Joachim Amartey-Kwei, later to be named a cabinet member of the Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). This was the one critical area of national security over which the Rawlings junta handily edged out the Limann-led People’s National Party.

We need to also pointedly underscore the fact that it was Dr. Limann’s relatively impractical and almost quixotic love of human rights and democratic justice and social responsibility that, in retrospect, regrettably ensured that a closely monitored motorbike-riding prematurely retired Flt-Lt. Rawlings would live comfortably to have another chance to stage his so-called December 31, 1981 Revolutionary Coup D’état. Several times, it was widely rumored, the extant Special Branch or Intelligence Division of the Ghana Police Service, presently renamed the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), by Capt. Kojo Tsikata, the Rawlings clansman and National Security Capo, alerted the Castle, the present-day Jubilee House, of the swift and imperative need to decisively and definitively “take care” of the Rawlings Menace, but all to absolutely no avail.

Which is why I am often amused to hear one of Chairman Rawlings’ aficionados and fanatics, including some of his own children, spew swill about how operatives of the Limann government attempted several times to literally liquidate the country’s most megalomaniacal, extortionate and destructive uniformed strongman and later faux democratically elected civilian politician.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

February 7, 2021

E-mail: [email protected]