ACCRA, Ghana
Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, a former Ghanaian Air Force officer who led two military coups before steering his country toward democracy with an authoritarian hand, died on Thursday in the nation’s capital, Accra. He was 73.
Mr. Rawlings died in a hospital “after a short
illness,” President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana said. “A great tree has fallen,
and Ghana is poorer for this loss,” he added. The death prompted both main
political parties to suspend their campaigns ahead of the Dec. 7 general
elections.
A bear of a man with a booming voice, Mr.
Rawlings entered Ghana’s political stage as an archetypal African military
ruler, seizing power in 1979. He executed former heads of state, ordered the
flogging of market women accused of profiteering, and jailed dozens of
businessmen for corruption. His entourage called it a “housecleaning exercise.”
By the time he left office voluntarily 22 years
later, he had served two presidential terms brought about by free elections and
had established Ghana as a rare democratic example on the continent. Today,
peaceful handovers of power are routine in the country, hardly the case with
the country’s neighbors.
Mr. Rawlings’ contradictory legacy — brutal
beginnings, uncompromising military rule, then free elections — underscores the
difficult path to democratic governance still faced by many African nations.
But in Ghana at least, where Mr. Rawlings is regarded as something of a
founding father after the country’s difficult first steps, democracy is an
assumption.
Given Ghana’s first experiences of him, that outcome would not have been predicted. He appeared at first to have all the makings of one of the continent’s classic military autocrats.
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| Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings received with Flight Captain Thomas Sankara of Bukina Fasso |
Jerry John Rawlings was born on June 22, 1947,
in Accra to James Ramsey John, a Scottish chemist, and Victoria Agbotui. He was
educated at Achimota, a prestigious boarding school in the British
model in Accra. He enlisted in the Air Force, where he excelled in airmanship,
and reached the rank of flight lieutenant.
His first coup, in 1979, followed an earlier
unsuccessful effort and a brush with death: He had been awaiting execution for
that failed try when brother officers freed him. They then ousted Lt. Gen.
Frederick W. K. Akuffo, whom
Mr. Rawlings promptly had executed, along with two other former
heads of state.
The “housecleaning” that followed entailed more
killings and public floggings in a brutal attempt at controlling prices. Mr.
Rawlings and his fellow officers turned power over several months later to
civilians, but that experiment foundered as inflation hit 150 percent. Most
hotels were urging guests “to bring their own soap, towels, soft drinks and
sometimes even food,” The New York Times reported at the time.
Flight Lieutenant Rawlings, still in uniform and seething in the background, seized power again, on Dec. 31, 1981.
He
arrested President Hilla Limann and
most of his aides, and dissolved Parliament. The country was in ruins, Mr.
Rawlings told his countrymen; the government, he said, had turned “hospitals
into graveyards and clinics into death transit camps where men, women and
children die daily because of the lack of drugs and basic equipment.”
The next years were difficult ones for Ghana.
Mr. Rawlings initially adopted a Marxist outlook. Fidel Castro and the Libyan
leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, were his
lodestars. Government-run newspapers were told not to refer to Mr. Rawlings’
seizure of power as a coup.
The Libyans sent in tons of food, but the
effort didn’t work. Infant mortality was shooting up and food supplies were
dwindling. Mr. Rawlings in 1983 shifted directions, bringing Ghana under the
aegis of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, drastically
devaluing the currency, boosting prices for the country’s vital cocoa crop and
firing legions of civil servants. Inflation dropped, and the country’s economy
started to grow, finally.
Meanwhile, Mr. Rawlings outfitted Ghana with
all the accouterments of his continental counterparts: political prisoners, a
censored press, one-man rule. But he was also bending, slowly, toward his
country’s long transformation into a democratic state.
Rawlings welcoming Nelson Mandela of South Africa
He did away with a ban on political parties in
May 1992, and six months later Ghana held an election, which Mr. Rawlings won
without difficulty in a vote judged fair by outside observers. A pay raise for
civil servants helped.
The then-fashionable “structural adjustment”
program shepherded by the international financial institutions, in which loans
are conditioned on free-market reforms and fiscal toughness, appeared to be
making headway in Ghana, unlike in other troubled countries.
Mr. Rawlings was re-elected in 1996 and
embarked on a costly road-building program. Then, remarkably for an African
leader, he stepped down, becoming “Africa’s first former military leader to
allow the voters to choose his successor in a multiparty election,” as The
International Herald Tribune put it at the time.
In 2000, his vice-president, John Atta Mills, lost to John Kufuor, who had run against Mr. Rawlings in 1996. The 2000 campaign was notable for a rarity in African politics: a televised debate between opposing candidates.
Rawlings never shield away from working with
ordinary people, often rolling his sleeve to clean gutters and laying railway
lines
Mr. Rawlings continued to play a role in retirement, speechmaking around his small country, dispensing advice to his political successors, and regularly making the evening news.
Survivors include his wife, Nana Konadu
Agyeman-Rawlings, a candidate for president in next month’s elections; his
daughters Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, Yaa Asantewaa Rawlings and Amina Rawlings;
and his son, Kimathi Rawlings. - Africa
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