On the Run: Konadu Rawlings Was the Staunch Criminal Partner and Accomplice of Chairman Rawlings

In the wake of the documentary broadcast by the Multimedia Group on the three Akan-descended Accra High Court Judges and the Retired Ghana Army Major, quite a number of former minions of the Rawlingses have come out of the proverbial woodwork to defend either couple from time to time. In the latest of such apologies, we have one Mr. Braimah Issaka, described as a former military driver to then-Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, scandalously and cavalierly presuming to be defending Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings against any complicity in some of the infamous brutal excesses attributed to both the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), a junta largely composed of some low-ranking members of the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF), that ruled the country from June to September 1979; and the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) that ruled the country from December 31, 1981 to January 7, 1992 or thereabouts (See “Konadu Couldn’t ‘Flex a Muscle’ During Revolution’ – Rawlings’ Former Driver” Ghanaweb.com 10/28/18).

On the question of the brutal Mafia-style assassination of the Accra High Court Judges, there is not much that is meaningful or historically factual and significant that can be provided by Mr. Braimah Issaka, since this former chauffeur of the Rawlingses does not tell his listeners or audiences on “Kofi TV,” hosted by Mr. Kofi Adomah, precisely the role that he played in both June 4^th, 1979 Mutiny and so-called Revolution, as well as the December 31, 1981 Rawlings-led junta of the Provisional National Defense Council, other than merely driving the bloody couple around the Greater-Accra Metropolis and perhaps some nearby parts of the country.. Besides, the most authoritative evidence that Ghanaians and the rest of the proverbial International Community have on the bestial slaying of the Accra High Court Judges comes from the blue-ribbon and high-powered Commission of Enquiry that was headed by former Chief Justice Samuel Azu-Crabbe, whose proceedings produced the “SIB Report” or The Special Investigations Board Report, which had officially been authorized by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council.

In the aforesaid report, the reader is provided adequate hints of the intimate knowledge of Mrs. Agyeman-Rawlings vis-à-vis the sinister events that led to the cold-calculated abduction and savage murder of Justices Frederick Poku-Sarkodie, (Mrs.) Cecilia Koranteng-Addow and Kwadwo Agyei Agyepong. For instance, we are informed that the keys to the infamous “Black Maria” vehicle in which the victims were so primitively hauled to their deaths near Kutunse, on the Accra Plains, were taken from the kitchen table of Mrs. Rawlings, with the latter’s express knowledge. We were also recently informed by one of the key players of the December 31, 1981 “Revolution,” then Lance-Corporal Matthew Adabuga, who has since penned and published a book detailing some of the atrocities perpetrated by the key operatives of the PNDC, that in the wake of the report of the brutal liquidation of the judges, Chairman Rawlings and his wife, Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, and several of their closest associates and friends, popped champagne and other assortment of drinks to heartily celebrate this apparently long-anticipated bloody event.

And so this cock-and-bull story provided Mr. Adomah by Mr. Braimah Issaka cannot be taken any more seriously than for anybody to claim that Mr. Joachim Amartey Kwei, the summarily executed PNDC’s cabinet member, had remorsefully committed suicide. Indeed, not too many weeks ago, Mr. Kweku Baako, the Editor-Publisher of the “New Crusading Guide,” told the Ghanaian public on a television talking-heads program that at least two days before Chairman Rawlings vehemently declared in a nationwide simulcast that his PNDC junta had absolutely no knowledge about and nothing, whatsoever, to do with the abduction and slaying of the Accra High Court Judges, Mr. Amartey Kwei had barged into the PNDC’s Headquarters at Gondar Barracks, in Accra, and exuberantly announced to the hearing and thunderous applause of all present that “We have finished them,” meaning that the allegedly missing judges and the retired army officer had been promptly executed as intended and planned by the key operatives of the PNDC.

In the afore-referenced news report on which this column is based, Mr. Braimah Issaka does not tell his audience precisely what sort of logos or pictures it was that Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings printed on the T-shirts which the then-First Lady ordered Mr. Issaka and some of his military colleagues and associates to sell for an unspecified amount of money for her personal upkeep. It is also rather preposterous for the storyteller to claim that Mrs. Rawlings had absolutely no say-so in the state-sponsored criminal activities of the PNDC, while at the same time being influential enough to commercially take advantage of her husband’s bloody junta by printing images – presumably of the members of the PNDC – on T-shirts for sale at the various military barracks and billets around the country.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York
November 4, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]