OPINION
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, Ottawa.
For former President John Jerry Rawlings, two times civilian president and
two times coup maker, the political violence, mainly in a small town in the
Northern Regional city of Tamale, ahead of the upcoming December 2008
general elections, is so bad that it might engulf the whole of Ghana.
In Rawlings’ imagination, it is as if this is the first time there
is political violence in Ghana, 51 years on as a republic from British
rule. Also, it’s as if during his almost 20 year rule there was nothing like Tamale.
Reliving his years as Head of State, Rawlings, restlessly hyperactive,
hurriedly “met with security experts who were in charge of the various
security agencies during his tenure as President of Ghana” in his house,
reports the Accra-based investigative Ghanaian Chronicle that
picked up the meeting. People at the meeting, according to the Chronicle (Ghana’s leading investigative newspaper) “discussed how best they can also contribute in
solving the worsening security situation in the country, especially in the
north.”
Such a meeting has made democracy loving Ghanaians nervous informed by
Ghana’s coup d’etat ridden political history.
For Rawlings, it is as if in
Tamale Ghana is falling apart and that the ex-security officials who went
to his house are a reflection of Ghana’s weak elites in the context of Ghana’s
stability and progress.
Not only should they have reported Rawlings to the
security agencies, but as better educated and older, they should have
snubbed him and talked sense into him.
Some Ghanaians are apprehensive about the wrong signals such a meeting sends
security-wise and suspicion about Rawlings, who has successfully made two
coups (that overthrew the Gen. F. W. K. Akufo and Dr. Hilla Liman regimes
in 1979 and 1981 respectively) on flimsy excuses against Ghana’s “sleepy”
elites, who are universally known not to have good grasp of Ghana as a
development project.
Rawlings’ intentions may be altruistic, more informed by his almost 20
years as Head of State, but simultaneously, his hysterical behaviour over the
years, worsened after vacating the presidency, make his security goal
suspect, especially in a fully-steamed democratic setting and the fact
that there is genuine democratic growth on the ground Ghana-wide.
This makes Rawlings’s purposes as personal as they are national bordering on the
very national security he is purportedly worried about.
Highly mistrusted as a threat to the on-going 16-year old democratic
dispensation, such a meeting coming from Rawlings instantly met with
worrying responses among Ghanaians at home and abroad who perceive it as a
prelude to coup-making, or an attempt to ruffle the highly praised democratic process,
by making the President John Kufour almost eight-year old democratic
regime look incapable of handling the security of the state through
democratic means to resolve security and developmental issues.
For the
past eight years since Kufour came to power, Rawlings is seen as not only
disturbing Kufour’s regime but the entire democratic process as well.
Privately, last year or so, Ghanaian intelligence is said to have picked
up information that Rawlings has approached the Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez for monetary assistance to overthrow the Kufour democratic regime -
for reasons as senseless as the ones he used to overthrow President Hilla
Liman.
Added to this is that Rawlings is variously seen as rough, power-hungry,
autocratic and tyrannical, and he is notorious for long-running emotionally charged seditious
utterances and subtle incitements against the Kufour regime that border
on the very national security issues he is reported to be meeting on.
A complicated, megalomaniac figure, ever since his ascendancy to the Ghana
political scene in 1979, Ft. Lt. John Jerry Rawlings, 60, half-Scottish,
half-Ewe, has come to reflect Ghana’s security in some sort of unusual way.
Rawlings has the ability to cry or wail unnecessarily, on nonsensical
issues and make a mountain out of anything that plays into the emotional
state of unsuspecting and unreasoning Ghanaians who are also swayed by his
white, mulatto skin.
In fact, this may explain how he was able to overthrow the President Hilla
Liman’s democratic regime - for
the alleged reason that the Liman regime was inept without letting the
democratic process resolve the regime’s so-called ineptness.
For Rawlings,
Ghana is impatient, cannot communicate with itself to resolve
developmental problems and so with the slightest challenge any regime,
no matter how democratic, as the Kufour regime seems, should be
overthrown.
So for Rawlings, Ghana is under constant crisis - a display of
intellectual and emotional weaknesses and inability to resolve its
development ordeals democratically.
For Rawlings, Ghana is intolerant, unstable, scatterbrained, weak, a
playground of Freudian insane children, sick and ridden with mayhem, and
under some sort of strange dark forces that make it not only depressed and
small-minded but easily manipulable by unseen forces of which only
Rawlings can see and amend against Ghana’s fundamental reality.
Ernest Hemingway once said: “The most complicated subject that I know, since I
am a man, is man’s life.”
Rawlings is complicated man. The picture of him
calling a parallel national security meeting in his house against the
formal state security structures is one version.
He has other versions -
his ability to play on his white, mulatto skin against Ghanaians’ white
man inferiority complex, his incoherent statements that confuse and float
now and then to bizarre and almost infantile behaviour.
But Rawlings is
also a remarkable and serious figure - that may explain ex-security
officials he called to his house not telling him to go to hell or leave
Ghana’s democracy alone or meet President John Kufour on any national
security issue instead of near-treasonably meeting such officials in his
house secretly till The Ghanaian Chronicle stumbled upon it.
Rawlings’ utterances are so recklessly strange both for his age (if
traditional Ghanaian/African culture is anything to go by) and his former
office as President of the Republic of Ghana that the media has dubbed him
“Dr. Boom” - a reference to his infantile outburst that may be the after
effects of long years of heavily smoking marijuana and his childhood
crisis as a child without a father.
Rawlings has come to exude
simultaneously the crudeness and refinement of Ghana in the face of
hapless elites who are struggling to find ways to contain him as his
hysterical behaviour worsens day in, day out.
For Rawlings, it is as if Ghana is perpetually wailing, crying, disordered,
spiritually feeble, or suffering a commotion and needs to be rescued, by whom,
by Rawlings and that without Rawlings nobody can deal with Ghana’s
problems.
This is shocking not only for one who is not well educated and
does not know Ghana well enough but who also cannot think well and is
emotional mess rather than an intellectual.
No doubt, Rawlings’ projection of Ghana’s
ongoing democracy as “war,” not as a vehicle for an all-inclusive
discussion of developmental issues,is false. The fact is though there
have been 21 years of military regimes and 6 years of one-party systems,
Ghana is one of the most peaceful countries in the world.
At a deeper level, Rawlings cannot run away from some of the political
violence or developmental troubles, a reasonable number of which are the
remnants of his almost 20-year rule, where unfreedoms, human rights
violations, skewed rule of law, high octane tribalism, proliferation of
arms, indiscipline, threats, harassment, weak transparency and
accountability, impunity, fear of either being killed or vanishing, and
all that one can think about dreadful Stalinism were dominant. There were
more macho antics than ideas and debates, brutality far outweighing reasoning.
Still, part of the reasons why political violence and other Rawlings
complaints have come about is because of a Rawlings revolution that failed
to revolutionalize the allegedly rotten system Rawlings purportedly came to
cure despite its perceived efforts.
The reason is that unlike revolutions
elsewhere in the world, the Rawlingsian revolution basically didn’t flow
from Ghanaian/African cultural values - the "revolutionaries" followed
Marxist-Lennist, Stalinist, Maoist ideas, among other foreign ideologies, than
Ghanaian/African cultural idiosyncrasies and thoughts.
This made the Rawlings revolution not only superficial from scratch but
also not sustainable, more emotionally charged than rational, hence the
very social problems Rawlings is crying vainly about today in the run up to
the December 2008 general elections as old as Rawlings’ ascendancy to the
Ghanaian political scene some 20 years ago.
That Rawlings doesn’t
understand and know Ghana deeply enough is unarguable and critically no
secret.
Despite almost 20 years of a revolution that saw public executions,
bombings, seizures, wailings, exiles, lootings, cries, deaths, intense pain, and
attempts at public therapy, the fundamental decayed issues that the
Rawlingsian revolution had aimed to correct are still deeply around, some
worse, entangling the development process.
Indiscipline is still a serious
setback as manifested by Ghanaians’ appallingly poor sanitation awareness; the elites still do not think from within Ghanaian/African
values first to the global prosperity ideals; most political/developmental ideas
are shallow and dont reflect the real Ghana; dark spiritual practices
and irrational beliefs still inhibit progress; certain cultural practices
like juju still stifle progress; tribalism flows around like leprosy;
corruption is still pervasive; Ghanaian/African cultural values do not
inform policy-making despite Ghana’s priding and projecting itself as the
“Black Star of Africa;” and the education system is still Eurocentric and horribly unprogressive in terms of thinking and
planning development issues.
In such an atmosphere, traditional cultural cohesion that had sustained the
Tamales for centuries are weakened and normally peaceful people who see
each other as one become suspicious of one another against an atmosphere
where figures like Rawlings constantly rain incitement, divisiveness,
commotion, darkness, chaos, tribalism, insults, cries, negative
energy, seditious statements, and trashing the developing
multiparty democracy, while describing the impending December 2008 general elections as “war” among the political parties.
On the flip side, not only is the multiparty democracy developing and
politicians and Ghanaians are rapidly learning the nuances of democracy, more and more
from within their cultural values, as the electioneering atmosphere in the
upcoming December 2008 general elections reveals.
But Rawlings,
instinctively undemocratic and entrenched in dictatorial tendencies, could
be used as a catalyst for Ghanaian elites to come together, to awaken from years of intellectual
servitude and inferiority complex, lack of a thorough grasp of Ghana, and more commitment
and determination to sustain the ongoing democratic system.
Photo: Ex-president Jerry Rawlings, the Ghanaian media’s "Dr. Boom."
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