He came, he saw, and he conquered.
He was neither a Nelson Mandela nor a Thomas Sankara, but he was the next best, outlandish though that may sound when we factor in the likes of Kwame Nkrumah, “Zik of Africa”, and our own Sir Seretse Khama. He had Mandela’s phosphorescence, not his political superstardom that transcended race and defied bigotry. Like Sankara, he too was hailed as his country’s messiah, but he fell far short of Sankara’s general sangfroid and seraphic cool-headedness, least of all attaining to the consummate economic equality Sankara registered in the space of only four years that he was in power.
When he passed on, on November 12, 2020, from COVID-19-associated complications after a very brief stint in a hospital ICU, incumbent Ghanaian President Nana Akuffo-Addo lachrymally lamented that, “A great tree has fallen, and Ghana is poorer for this loss”. Nana there and then declared 7 days of national mourning and all political parties temporarily put their campaign on hold ahead of the already scheduled December 7 General Elections.
Whatever his virtues and foibles, there is no denying the fact that Jerry Rawlings was a polarising figure who was liked and loathed in equal measure, both in his own country and outside it. He was as gregarious and as clubbable as he operated on a short fuse, with one vice president publicly complaining that Rawlings once beat him black and blue in the middle of a Cabinet meeting, with proceedings continuing apace thereafter.
Well, great men typically are like that – with aspects both of a saint and an eccentric. Contrarieties and contradictions are integral to these agreeable freaks of nature. Rawlings thus was not the odd one out in the pantheon of icons of our day and age. However extreme his indiscretions were once in a while, and whatever blots were there on the sum total of his character escutcheon, they pale in comparison to the positive and lasting mark he left overall in the annals of Ghana. They did not subtract a tittle from the foregone conclusion that is his place in the Gallery of Gaia’s greats, Gaia being the ancient name for planet Earth.
DISOWNED BY WHITE FATHER
Jeremiah John Rawlings was born to Victoria Agbotui, a full- blooded African beauty, and James Ramsey John, a Scottish chemist, in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, on June 22, 1947. His original name was Jeremiah Rawlings John, but the military academy reversed his last two names in his letter of admission, hence his still enduring affectionate moniker JJ. Rawlings calmly resigned himself to this unintentional misnomer as he thought it was not worthwhile kicking up a fuss over the order of his names both of which were his anyway.
As was typical those days, when colonial rule was at its zenith and colourbar was all the rage, John, an already married man back in the UK, did not recognise his baseborn black son. The burden of raising Rawlings therefore fell wholly on Victoria, who already had two children from a previous marriage.
It is not clear whether at the time Rawlings was born Victoria was a divorcee. Rawlings’ philandering white father had another extramarital child with an African woman, who a kind-hearted Victoria later adopted notwithstanding the fact that he had rejected her after she begot Rawlings.
Despite growing up without fatherly sustenance and nurture, Rawlings was not condemned to a life of lack or delinquency. After attending a Catholic primary school, he did his high school at the prestigious, fee-paying Achimota College, indicative of the fact that his mother, initially a dress maker and in due course a caterer, was far from a pauper. Alumnis of the same college included Kwame Nkrumah, Robert Mugabe, and The Gambia’s first president Sir Dawda Jawara.
It was at Achimota that Rawlings met Nana Konadu Agyeman, with whom he tied the knot in 1977. The couple would have four kids, three daughters and a boy. Konadu was one year younger than Rawlings and had Rawlings smitten possibly because she had an uncanny physical resemblance to his mother.
Reminiscing on his Achimota stint, Rawlings said it was the finest chapter of his life. Nana describes him as a “very visible student” and a likeable, kind of court jester bully.
BECOMING A DOG OF WAR
Having completed high school, Rawlings joined the Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot. In this vocation, he excelled resoundingly, both at flying jets and aerobatics. He would go on to win the Speedbird Trophy for the Best Cadet in Airmanship at the Ghana Military Academy.
He graduated in 1969 and rose to Flight Lieutenant, equivalent to Army Captain, in 1978. By 1980, with 10 years of military life under his belt, Rawlings had become a charismatic and fearless speaker who was wildly popular among the younger-generation soldiers and a militant, impoverished urban working class.
At the time, Rawlings was imposingly tall and slender, and even somewhat scrawny, not the bear of a man with a booming voice that he would become as one of Africa’s pre-eminent statesmen of his day.
To his mother, Rawlings’ predilection for a career in the armed forces was recalcitrant. Since he was a promising pupil, she had always dinned into his mind that he pursue medicine at university and did not hesitate from slapping him around just to embed this aspiration, only for her hopes to be harrowingly dashed. From the age of six, Rawlings had decided he would take up a job that involved flying planes and nothing would stop that.
But it was at Achimota that the road to the Air Force in particular, and not the civil aviation, was paved. Says one feature on him: “Rawlings … had become aware of the injustices of Ghanaian society from an early age. He saw that the majority were suffering while some children, his classmates at Achimota Secondary School, had much more than they needed. Something was wrong and when he was around 16 years he began to think seriously about a solution. When he left school, he decided to make a career in the Air Force.”
Rawlings headed the direction of the Air Force because “I thought that would be one place where things would be either black or white, spick and span, not corrupt like the civil sector.”
He could never have been more wrong in his understandably naïve assessment.
THE SORRY STATE OF THE NATION
Rawlings’ disillusionment did not take long to set in. It occurred to him soon enough that the senior officers in the armed forces were corrupt to the core, that they worked in cahoots with extortionate retail traders and those in the higher echelons of the civil service to exploit the worker class, the already poor, and the downtrodden, and on whose emaciated, hapless necks their fat knees barbarously and gloatingly rested. That’s how he came to identify with the Free Africa Movement, an underground movement of military officers who wanted to unify Africa by booting out a generation of corrupt leaders close to the European colonial governments and western business interests that dominated so much of the postcolonial landscape. The members of the movement, who were overwhelmingly in their youth, resented the fact that the average Ghanaian tarred them with the same ignoble brush as their corrupt seniors.
The solution Rawlings pitched with a view to nipping the malignant tumour of corruption and wanton looting of national resources in the bud was not armed revolution but moral reform – purge the military of sleazy officers who embezzled the country’s resources, enforce price control regulations, retrieve monies stolen from the state, and reinstate the good image of the military by electing, not imposing, officers who personified conventional ideals.
What exactly lit the fuse of a power seizure in Rawlings, the straw that at long last broke the camel’s back? According to former Squadron Commander Major Ibrahim Rida, who was an instrumental hand in the Rawlings putsch, Rawlings was disgruntled that the army had insisted that he repay the $4000 stipend for a four-month military training course tenable in Pakistan that was cancelled whilst he was en route there by way of London and much of which he had already squandered. Rawlings, however, would counter that he had been thinking about the revolution for four years and that he acted to forestall or contain a cataclysm of explosion that was already brewing amongst the body politic. “I was an angry man,” he said in a later interview. “Ghana was on its knees and the real action was needed and I stood up to do a man’s job. Look, power was virtually lying on the floor and it was just a question of its being picked up by the most violent person, the angriest person, who could be the leader in those days.”
The picture of the Ghana of the day Rawlings painted was far from a figment of his own imagination. The economy was in free fall. Food prices were sky-high. Basic necessities such as toiletries could only be found on the black market at prohibitive prices and not in your conventional shop. There was an acute shortage of drugs in hospitals and clinics. Inflation had rocketed to intolerable highs. Rent for residentials was exorbitant. It was an uphill battle for the ordinary man and woman to put food on the table. Rawlings and his colleagues had every reason to take the law into their own hands and make a desperate, if not heroic, tilt at deposing the ruling military junta.
JJ IN THE SLAMMER
In a way, the Rawlings act was a contradiction in terms in that the ruling junta, which was led by General Fred Akuffo, was only five weeks away from fulfilling its pledge to hold elections which would restore civilian rule. A restive Rawlings acted precipitately, going against the grain of his co-plotters. The group leader in fact was not Rawlings but Captain Kojo Boakye-Djan, the intellectually razor-sharp founder of the Free Africa Movement.
According to Boakye-Djan, the revolution had been four years in the making all right, but it was scheduled for the year 1984 to coincide with the 100thanniversary of Europe’s 1884 partition of Africa in a tell-tale allegory. Rawlings and six other senior members of the group, however, decided practically on the spur of the moment that they should strike on May 15, 1979.
Meanwhile, Ghanaian intelligence had picked up stirrings of the plot but were not galvanised to foil it in all probability because it had their tacit blessings. On his part, Rawlings was so positive the coup would pay off that he had even prepared a victory-lap, raison de detre speech. He practically single-handedly went to unseemly lengths to rally the junior ranks of the Air Force to his cause though he met only minimal success. In doing this, he was not as circumspect as foolhardy, the reason it was easy for his actions to reach the omnipresent ears of Special Branch.
In the early hours of May 15, at exactly 2 a.m., Rawlings & Co sprang into action at the Air Force station. Unfortunately, they were too few and too rash for the act to come to fruition. In a firefight lasting for about three hours, Rawlings and six fellow combatants were arrested when they ran out of steam. Both sides had performed superbly anyway as only one man died in the process. The regular army in all probability fought with restraint and therefore deliberately listlessly as their aim was to spare rather than kill Rawlings and his men in the prevailing atmosphere of general discontent and disaffection with the government of the day.
The first thing Rawlings did upon his capture was to absolve all others of the treasonous step he had taken, insisting that only he should go behind bars as the inciter and ring leader. Seemingly, government hearkened to his entreaty as he was the only man subjected to a public-domain military trial both the local and international media gave ample prominence.
With the benefit of hindsight, affording the captive a silver platter opportunity to speak to the world was a miscalculation as Rawlings took advantage of the spotlight to give vent to blunt statements on the country’s urgent need for a new era of social, political and economic justice. Virtually overnight, he ensconced himself in the national psyche and was hailed as a messiah as opposed to a trigger-happy, knee-jerk subversive.
At the conclusion of the sprint court martial, Rawlings was handed a death sentence and locked up to await his due turn at the firing squad.
JJ’S DRAMATIC FREEING
As Rawlings languished in the slammer, Boakye-Djan was summoned to the office of a senior army officer. He had expected arrest, but to his surprise the officer bid him to do something about the fate of the incarcerated Rawlings – to snatch him from the jaws of certain death, which demonstrated quite clearly that what Rawlings had done was in the interests of, and had the sympathies of, even some of the military top brass.
Boakye-Djan, who had worked in military intelligence before becoming a full-fledged soldier, had also been tipped by his connections in this same outfit that General Olusegun Obasanjo, the then military ruler of neighbouring Nigeria, had sent word to Akuffo that Rawlings and all his co-conspirators should be rounded up and executed to deter Nigerian dissidents from replicating their daring in Lagos.
Boakye-Djan thus considered that he and his group had nothing to lose: they were damned whether or not they left Rawlings to his own devices. Thus it was that at midnight on June 4, 1979, Boakye-Djan had soldiers from the junior ranks of the army who found common cause with the coup plot forcibly spring Rawlings from his cell in a scenario that hitherto was only possible in movies.
Rawlings was immediately conducted to the broadcasting studio, where to the background of gunshots he made known live on TV his fairy-tale redemption and reiterated that the coup was now in effect, that the revolution had succeeded. He also spelt out civilised steps that were in the offing with a view to calming the public mood.
JJ had arrived, seen, and conquered.
(Mwalim Benson Saili)
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