Emmanuel Gyimah Boadi, the Board Chairman of Afrobarometer, has categorically denied that late former President Jerry John Rawlings is the father of Ghana’s Fourth Republic and, by extension, a hero of democracy.
According to the former Executive Director of CDD-Ghana, Jerry John Rawlings, he did not believe in democracy and despised the system of administration when it was pushed upon him.
“He didn’t believe in democracy.” He stated as much, and the records are public. This “father” had no desire for the child. “The child was imposed upon him, and he demonstrated his disgust for the child by assaulting the child,” Gyimah-Boadi wrote in an opinion post.
To call Rawlings the father of the Fourth Republic, he added, is to “insult the sacrifice of those who toiled, bled, suffered detention without trial; lost their jobs, businesses, limbs, or lives; or went into exile in the long struggle against military dictatorship under J.J. Rawlings and for the restoration of democracy in Ghana.”
“If we call J.J. Rawlings “the hero” or “a hero” of Ghanaian democratisation in the Fourth Republic, what shall we call Professor Adu Boahen, who broke the culture of silence, Kwesi Pratt, Kweku Baako, Akoto Ampaw, and others who led pro-democracy agitations in the 1980s and faced persecution and imprisonment?” he asked.
According to him, Rawlings’ disdain for democracy and the rule of law drove him to sabotage the Fourth Republic’s transition to democratic constitutional governance.
“Events and circumstances during the interregnum basically ruled out the possibility of the Limann government and the Third Republic prevailing,” he stated.
Emmanuel Gyimah Boadi mentioned, among other things, Rawlings’ assertion of violence as part and parcel of Ghanaian politics, muzzling free expression and free media, and undermining the judiciary and judicial independence through intimidation and name-calling in a long list of issues to bolster his point about the devastating blow Rawlings dealt to Ghana’s democracy.
“The J.J. Rawlings-PNDC era also left behind a poor human rights culture in which regime objectives define the bounds of human rights and society is frequently naive to the ramifications of human rights violations.”
“The “YESSA MASSA syndrome” that afflicts public administration in Ghana even now must be viewed as a long-term result of J.J. Rawlings and his PNDC executive appointees harassing and threatening senior public workers,” he stated.
He goes on to say that Rawlings’ most important and long-lasting damage to Ghana’s democratic growth was the 1992 Constitution.
“This Constitution, or at least as it has been understood and practiced in the Fourth Republic (beginning with the first and second terms of J.J Rawlings’ inaugural presidency), unduly concentrated power in the presidency and executive branch of government at the expense of the legislature, judiciary, and other horizontal accountability institutions” (Electoral Commission, Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Auditor General, etc).
“The Constitution gives the President vast appointing and patronage dispensing authority, which is typically used to perpetuate winner-take-all practices (appoint party functionaries as CEOs/Chairs and members of the most important public boards, state councils, public enterprises, and/or contractors for government projects) and keep the District/Municipal/Metropolitan Assemblies and their substructures in the President’s grip,” he explained.
“If anything, he was dragged to it kicking and screaming,” he says of Rawlings’ voluntary surrender to democratic governance.
“The dictatorship was driven to carry out a democratic transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of foreign and domestic anti-military rule and pro-democracy events, but not to the point of anointing J.J. Rawlings as the founder/architect of democracy in Ghana’s Fourth Republic.”
“As an elected President, J.J. Rawlings struggled to comply with democratic norms and treated both the opposition NPP and his own party, the governing NDC, with utter contempt,” he said, adding that “as a former President, he arrogated to himself the right to hector the two immediate successor Presidents and governing parties.”
Mr. Gyimah-Boadi believes Rawlings’ fast acceptance of democracy, particularly under the Akufo-Addo administration, is due to things finally going his way.
“His first daughter, Ezanetor Rawlings, had become an NDC MP; his wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, had created and was heading her own party, in addition to being permitted to reclaim real estate obtained mostly during her husband’s tenure as Head of State, notably under Akufo-Addo/NPP.” And; He himself was a statesman plenipotentiary extraordinaire and “consigliere” in the Akufo-Addo/NPP cabinet,” he claimed.
“The late President Jerry John Rawlings was no democrat,” he concluded, “and it is erroneous, or at the very least an exaggeration, to confer on him the title of “Father”/or “Founder” of Ghana’s 4th Republican democracy.”