Rawlings - Still defiant

GRi brings you a special interview, in which Jerry Rawlings speaks with NANA YAA MENSAH about the revolutionary years, his vision of where Ghana is going and life after Osu Castle

“The people reject what’s going on. They’re taking it with a lot of grudge. That is why they would want to see this government out of the way.”

His tone these days is perhaps more often that of the statesman, but the emotion propelling Jerry John Rawlings is unmistakeably the same fiery spirit that fuelled his first rise to power in the coup of 4 June 1979. And this evening, on a private visit to London, as we sit talking in a plush hotel, he is in a state of high emotion and plainly angry – angry at what he presents as a creeping culture of factionalism and petty-mindedness fostered by the New Patriotic Party, whose supporters pushed his National Democratic Congress out of office in 2000.

“In terms of redressing [the situation], they know what is right,” he says more gently. “And people generally – the vast majority of the masses anywhere – find it easier doing what is correct than doing what is wrong.”

He repeatedly alternates between anger and such thoughtfulness, taking a step back to reflect on the broader political implications of his own outbursts. Tony Aidoo, the former deputy defence minister, is also in the room, putting the NDC’s past into reflective context. When both men step back, it is usually into revolutionary socialist beliefs.

“We won’t need to do much,” says Rawlings of the near future, “because the people… will vote them out! They don’t like what’s going on. It’s just too painful, too humiliating, there’s a lot of anger in the country. You can – It’s like volatile fuel, just light a match and throw it inside. The country could have been blown up several times over.” He sighs. “I mean, that’s how dangerous it is.”

Not for nothing is he known as “Jerry Boom”. He feels deeply for ‘ordinary’ Ghanaians; but this quickly spills over into something else – he becomes deliberately provocative. He continues: “That’s why they’re concentrating on physical security. We lasted that long not because I was talking about physical security but because I was ensuring proper political security – ”

“Accountability,” interposes Tony Aidoo.

“And political security,” Rawlings insists, “ensuring that justice was being done, all the time, as much as we possibly could. Explaining things, not just using brute force of stability and the police.

“You start doing psy-ops, pretending you’re looking for armed robbers – while armed robbery is increasing?! Using it to terrorise society into submission.”

This sets a worrying precedent: after all, if the NPP has introduced such a pattern of oppression, patronage and favouritism, how will the NDC stem the rot? The party has just held its congress and appointed John Evans Atta-Mills as its presidential candidate for the 2004 elections. Assuming it bounces back and wins, how will it address this problem?

“We are not going to do that,” insists Aidoo pre-emptively. “It’s not part of our nature. It isn’t!”

But I was not suggesting that it would take violent or extreme measures to curb NPP excesses. “We are going to say that what has happened in the interim four years was an aberration,” Aidoo says. “Because we are not going to rekindle the old politics of divisiveness, tribalism and so on.” We leave it at that.

Both men are scathing about the record of the young Kufuor government. “We left power with the price of petrol at just about ¢6,700 per gallon,” Aidoo says. “And we were severely criticised for pitching the price of petrol so high. You come to power, and within two years we’ve had two successive increases.”

“Not just that,” Rawlings interrupts, “they led massive demonstrations – almost risked the lives of people – about the VAT increases, taxation, school fees, hospital fees…”

“Then you continue to propagandise,” continues Aidoo, “that you have created a modicum of economic stability, and yet behind the façade of stability is the destruction of business confidence in the economy. We were running a system of financing government projects through treasury bills and so on. You came and you said, ‘This system is bad’, so you were going to transfer the short-term credit system on to a long-term, three-year bond. What has happened is that, a small saver like me: I get money. I cannot afford to keep my money in the bank for three years before I get something. But if it’s on a three-monthly basis at least I get something…

“A considerable amount of investment capital comes from small savers who patronise the treasury bills. For one whole year, that long-term, three-year bond has never been patronised, such that there are no longer any more loanable funds. So investment has declined. “Ghanaians didn’t have a tradition of a high level of savings until during the PNDC era. We started from 3 per cent of national capital in savings to 17 per cent by 1992 – a very substantial increase in domestic savings capacity. It’s declining now because people are no longer saving! Therefore, the effect is that you’re going to be dependent on foreign inflow of capital.”

Although their relationship with the NDC was an amicable one in the 1990s, Aidoo is also very critical of multilateral lending institutions such as the IMF and IBRD, of their policies and the subsidies in western countries for their own agriculture. But most of all, he describes the NPP’s actions as “killing” the economy – and thinks that its efforts to stimulate the private sector mean very little.

“How do you call yourself ‘pro-business’ when you channel business into the small proportion of the business community that supports your political party?” He says that although “any businessman could participate in public contracts during the PNDC time” things have changed. He himself was stripped of his directorship of Ghacem when the NPP came in. And “I know of so many NDC people who don’t get contracts at all.”

“But to make matters worse,” Rawlings interjects, “the other ethnic groups who are contractors are having to change their names. Not even change their names – they enter the names of this other ethnic group in order to probably win a contract. I mean, how shameful.”

“If a political opponent talks,” Aidoo says, “it’s ‘sour grapes’. It’s better the people themselves see it, so that they get a level of comparison.” But he does not claim that dismal performance by the rival side alone will be enough to swing the next election for the NDC. “If they get enough money to finance and control the minds of the people, their chances of winning again are there, because they have the support.” By that, the former minister does not mean popularity with the electorate: he claims the former opposition got “substantial funds” for the 2000 elections from “personalities within the British Labour Party”, the Netherlands and other West African countries (Nigeria, in particular). And he says that is “constitutionally unacceptable”.

As for the fortunes of their own party, Aidoo and Rawlings do nothing to hide their satisfaction with the outcome of the congress; they saw the contest for the flagbearership between Mills and Kwesi Botchwey, the two leading candidates, as being linked to an attempt to infiltrate the NDC. Both men drop veiled hints to the effect that rump sections within the party who supported the losing bid are finished.

But although Rawlings clearly sees a long future ahead for the NDC, our conversation revolves mostly around questions about the past – the attitude and posturing of ‘the establishment’ (he particularly dislikes the Catholic Church) and his record as an armed revolutionary. How will history judge him, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council of 1979, the Provisional National Defence Council of 1981, the two coups that brought all three to power? We meet just after the National Reconciliation Commission has begun sitting, which is bringing up events of the past. Allegations have been made and names named. How does he rate the NRC, I wonder, and how it operates?

“You know, my dear,” he says, almost apologetically, “there were some accidental things, some silly excesses, that I apologised for. There were others for which people needed to be punished, and were punished, like the judges’ murders and what not. OK? These people have not set up this so-called reconciliation – ”

He goes off at a tangent: “I can give you evidence to prove that they have ulterior motives… But I’ll tell you what: the only answer I will give you to this whole thing is that these people are not prepared to come to terms with the revolt of June 4. They cannot reconcile themselves with the revolt of June 4: that is their problem,” he says emphatically.

“There’s nothing for us to be reconciling about. They are the ones who have to reconcile themselves to what June 4 stood for, why it happened, why it had to happen. In other words, they want to punish people for punishing them. They did the criminal things, and were punished for it, and they’re lucky most of them got away with it and are alive. They can’t reconcile themselves with it, and so they want to punish people for punishing them. What they’re doing is just a charade.”

Rawlings’s indignation is compounded by the idea, which crops up more than once as we speak, that the army paid the price of Ghanaians’ anger in the revolutionary years: civil society was spared, in his view, but is still asking soldiers to pay for its misdeeds.

His voice tight with sheer fury, he returns to the question of the NRC. “You can start with the chairperson – the properties he has lost that we didn’t even confiscate, but other governments.” “The very composition of the committee itself goes to show what they intended,” Aidoo says, fleshing out the thought.

“It was something they just rushed through very fast,” says Rawlings abruptly. “The international community, all these embassies, Ghanaians – advised them not to do it. Like they just wanted to limit it to ’79. And they said: ‘No, then take it further back.’ They didn’t want to…”

“They still don’t want to,” says Aidoo.

And laughing angrily, Rawlings asks: “You know what their chairman [the NPP’s Haruna Esseku] said recently? That the only coup that’s acceptable was the one against Nkrumah.”

“If we’re talking about atrocities, like you said, why are they not encapsulating all the periods in Ghana’s political history? Because each regime has had experience of this kind of thing, whether it was constitutional or not constitutional,” reasons Aidoo. “I was six years old when I saw a woman killed in front of my eyes. It’s never left me.”

He narrates a horrific incident, from the days of ‘mate me ho’, in which six supporters of the United Party (UP) pursued a Fante woman into his great-grandmother’s house in Kumasi, assaulted the woman and murdered her. The men came from the Asantehene’s palace, he says, and were under the command of Baffour Osei Akoto, the pro-Asante political pioneer who died last year.

“Why are they not going back to investigate that period?” he demands.

Aidoo later says: “For the first time in a period of 20 years, we’ve had a change of government from one regime to another – a good opportunity for national reconciliation. If they were as good as they thought they were – intellectuals with all the book knowledge and political experience – my strategy would have been to stretch the hand of friendship to my opponent. I’m telling you, if they’d done that, in 2004, they’d win again, whatever we do. But what did they do? Politics of vindictiveness. You criminalise everything that your opponent did. And you see, that kind of politics has a terminal point.”

He also accuses the government of involvement in the murders of 32 women around the time of the last elections, as well as the 9 May Accra Sports Stadium disaster, the shooting of five people by policemen at Taifa and the Dagbon crisis. Surely, similar things occurred during the years of NDC rule: the Konkomba-Nanumba conflict, for example. “Yes, that happened on our watch. But so far, there has been no evidence of our complicity, as there has been evidence of the complicity of this government in this thing. That’s the difference!”

He pooh-poohs the idea that the NPP has done anything to reach out to a cross-section of society and puts the kind of politics that it is pursuing on a par with the exclusionist hysteria of Côte d’Ivoire. “It’s too obvious… Even supporters of the government – newspapers that supported them – are thinking it, only they don’t dare come out.

“If you were to go to every ministry and count heads, you will find that Ashantis are more than anybody else in the government. That’s not the best system of politics of inclusiveness. It is rather evidence of politics of exclusion. Coupled with your campaign of criminalisation of the record of the past government, it means that you are not aiming for national unity or reconciliation.”

Rawlings is now largely taken up with his campaigning work around Africa on Aids and malaria. But he sees no change in his role in Ghanaian society, although he holds no functional, titular position within his own party. “I go round and I tell people the truth,” he says very quietly. “I go on exposing the NPP. I don’t keep quiet… Rawlings has not changed. Whether I’m president or not president makes no difference to me.

“What I’ve always been is what I am,” he continues, speaking more rapidly. “You can put a presidential cloak on me, you can take it off, but you won’t stop my fight against injustice, period. So whatever it is that made the people rescue me on 15 May and June 4, whatever it is that made the people vote for me, Rawlings has not changed. I’m not going to lie, I’m not going to steal. I will demand and insist on justice.”

There is one main reason for his belligerence. “Our people are tired of being lied to by politicians. We went through some of the harshest times in the history of our country, with the truth. Simply breaking the economic situation down, demystifying it and explaining it to the people.” He cites incidents where he has taken the opportunity to demystify Christianity – the idea that Jesus actually had a halo around his head, for example. “I’m trying to raise the level of consciousness of our people. OK? I look at the weak things in their minds, in their hearts. And that’s what I bring out and I clean up, or I expose properly for them.

“Stop keeping my people ignorant!” he roars.

In the former president’s mind, all this is of a piece with his campaign to free Ghanaians, spiritually and intellectually. “I tell our people: ‘Please.’ It’s like it’s liberating; I can see it in their faces. I tell them, ‘You engage too much in the prayer of thought, too much in the prayer of words. Please, get involved in the prayer of action.’ D’you understand what I’m saying? Do, do! Stop living it in your goddamn heads, or singing it always, praying to God for miracles. You are the miracle.”

He takes a deep breath, then resumes speaking, quietly, with intensity. “When I’m talking about the truth, it’s so – it’s so relieving, it’s liberating, just like ‘va wen katsoga’, or the fight against injustice.”

For Rawlings, the idea that western religion subjugates extends to an open approach to traditional practices: fetish worship, for example. “You don’t believe in it, I don’t believe in it,” he stresses, “but if other people believe in it, don’t push them to do what they don’t believe in. Look elsewhere, let your men worship their shrines. After all, it costs you nothing.” And the question of faith is closely bound up with ideas of how people should organise their political lives.

“The point is that you are getting away with cheap lies too often in my country, when you can’t get away with such cheap lies in these developed countries.” He raises his voice: “D’you understand what I’m saying? You can’t get away with cheap lies here, but in our world, we get away with it.”

He leans forward and readies himself to lay in to another target.

“Can you believe that when I had my first daughter, I called her ‘Zanetor’, meaning ‘stop the nightmare’. It’s a name I made up, in my own language! The cream of the bishops in Ghana today, Father Buckle, was then a young priest. He wouldn’t have it. We were forced to go and call her some Christian name – thankfully she can’t even remember what it is, and I don’t either. You see what I mean? My second daughter I named Yaa Asantewaa, after the queenmother of the Ashantis! Can you believe, this stupid Catholic Church of which I’m a member still refused to accept ‘Yaa Asantewaa’. Me, a Ghanaian black African, I can’t name my daughter after my heroine?!” he bellows. “You see, you are damn well trying to deny me my identity! I’m saying Christianise me, but don’t Europeanise me! That’s the difference!”

He named his last two children Amina, “after Princess Amina of the Sokoto Empire”, and Kimathi. “Dedan Kimathi led the Mau Mau in Kenya. When the British caught up with him, you know what they did? They hacked him up and distributed his parts in various parts of Kenya.”

But far more than colonial history, it is the attitude of the Christian Church, its bigotry, what that implies about hierarchies of power within it, that get Rawlings most upset. “My mother would say a psalm one thousand times in a day,” he recalls. He links this to the structure of power within the Church, and the way it concentrates power in a few hands. “You see, our people believe in the Old Testament, but sometimes these people, they don’t realise it. Meanwhile, you’re forcing the New Testament on them and it’s not working.”

He has now got his second wind. He says, in his most biting tones: “You come and introduce” – and he starts singing – “‘Christo eleison, eeeeeeleison’, reciting things in a language we don’t even understand – ‘Et con spiritu, Domine, et corpore’ – on our knees for hours… You drove our people away; you said you didn’t want our drums in the churches: it was heathen, pagan. Gradually, our people started leaving the churches and going to the wayside Aladura churches where they were drumming, where they were worshipping in the way they know how. Ten years, fifteen years, twenty years later, they bring the drums into the Catholic Church and start drumming. Control! They were using control over their flock.”

Drumming is not the only tradition for which he has high praise: he also advocates customary practices that encourage family planning. Dr Aidoo elaborates smoothly: “What we’re saying is that those anchors were positive aspects of the society. They’re positive elements of nation-building. You don’t throw them out, especially when your process of modernisation is not powerful enough to sustain the people. You need to go back and pick those positive traditional things, so that they cushion the people against the negative effects of the modernisation process.”

Indeed, the anxiety about alien interventions in Ghana’s political life spawns a scandalous allegation about a senior member of the security services, a well-known public figure. For legal reasons, GRi cannot name him in this issue of the magazine. However, we will revisit the story in editions to come.

“The British sent a general to come and feel out [the man]…” says Rawlings, holding back on giving too much detail. “Kufuor was not the guy they were prepared [to back] … They were hoping to put someone like Obasanjo also in my country… But he told him to get out of his office. I mean, they sit here and they like to appoint heads of state, or appoint political figures for us and go back and finance them. Obasanjo was the one who was sitting there financing most of it.”

“But Rawlings also accuses” the man of being implicated in the murder of one of the heads of state executed in 1979. “I don’t want to talk too much, but the point is that they all know it anyway. Because when the executions had to happen [the dead head of state] was not part of it. And I was the boss. It was a painful thing for me.

“It was like, he demanded [dead leader’s] head. After all, I’m a young officer – he was the one that was sitting up there. You see what I mean? And people had to die, for the rest of us to live… Much, much later, when I began to wise up to things, then I began to realise that [security man] is one of the most important CIA agents.”

The charges are grave, and Rawlings sounds completely sincere about them. He describes the enmity between the security man and the dead leader as dating from a past coup, in which the security honcho felt “upstaged” because the other man had come to prominence. And he admits that the security man’s actions led to him losing control of the country for two weeks in 1979.

“You have to understand the pedagogy of the oppressed. When they started doing each other in, they started hating each other, more than their former master – that was the only point in time I could start arresting them. Until then, I had no force to arrest them.” Still, the main issues for Rawlings are faith, conviction and their relationship with power – three things that drive him. As he later says, talking about the 1996 elections: “You know what? These professors and bishops, they were saying, ‘Vote for God-fearing people.’ Simply because I said I didn’t fear God, because I love God. And I don’t vote for God-fearing people – because they want to rule our people with the medium of fear.”

The new bourgeoisie

“My wife was on the farms, sleeping in the huts. I was digging shit, to tell the people: hygiene! A priest gets up: ‘Give this country a vision.’ I said: ‘You help me with a vision of how to make this country a little bit more hygienic.’”

“That’s why they don’t like him,” says Tony Aidoo.

Both men are highly critical of the new leadership’s taste for fine hotels (there are claims about a government delegation of six dropping in to the Marcoussis talks on Côte d’Ivoire and spending a fortnight at the Hôtel Maurice, one of the most expensive in Paris), its preference for suits and President Kufuor’s wide programme of international travel.

“Sixty-two foreign trips for this man,” muses Aidoo. “For what? Sixty-two. In two years!”

And Rawlings recalls: “When I had to pay my visit here and I wore my smock, a batakari, to come and meet the Queen, and to go to the US, these people were insulting me in the papers that I have disgraced my country.

“Do you know what it did for us? It revived the cotton industry in Ghana; the farmers began to make money weaving the batakari… You see how stupid they are, these people who are in power today? But Ghanaians? It’s good for them, they should taste it small. They are crying.”

“No more than… one month in office, he takes state money to go and renovate his private residence,” Aidoo sneers.

“Busia [also] did it,” says Rawlings. “They always concentrate on their areas first and foremost. I developed every part of the country. Kumasi was first. My area was last, and even then, we left office, so I couldn’t even give them the road that corresponded to what we had given to other regions.”

He has a simple political explanation for his motives. “Class war is why I dare not steal, or nobody dare steal around me, where I would know and let you get away with it. Everything was hanging on us and it was a good thing, hanging on us, because it made us provide good pure leadership for our country.

“Let me put to you in my layman’s words. You, you’ve also been through your rough times [in] the evolution of Britain. You learnt your lessons from France and so on. So today, what Queen Elizabeth eats and what that coalminer eats is not in the content. She eats meat, like the one in the mine. The difference is that she eats out of china and he eats out of ordinary plate! In my country, we eat meat: the one who’s being exploited in the mine doesn’t even have any goddamn meat on his goddamn plate! He doesn’t even have the energy to be exploited. That in addition to all the nonsense of looking for my tribal person at the expense of merit…

“The difference is, what you face here is that [in hard times] your lifestyle may change a little. For us, when you make that difference, people die from starvation, from hunger, from lack of… They can’t even afford aspirin for headaches, they can’t afford the full course of malaria!

“After all, there’s a welfare system here. They have shock absorbers: there’s no shock absorbers where I come from.”

I return to questions of the verdict on what was achieved by the 1979 and 1981 revolutions, which were meant to address just such economic injustice. How can Ghana ever break out of that cycle? Did not the very act of containing the situation, of making it possible for the elite not to be completely destroyed, perpetuate a cycle of domination by bourgeois interests?

“Here’s your answer.” He springs to his feet, walks round the table in two strides, literally grabs a list of pre-prepared questions out of my hands and rustles the paper, pointing to one section. “You ask me this question here.”

Rawlings reads: “You were reported recently to have made a speech in Nigeria arguing that four years is too long a democratic dispensation, and that the people have a right to engage in positive defiance to remove their leaders if they decide… Can you expand on this? What is your political philosophy?” A silence. I protest that such were the reports in the papers. He leans forward, seizes my arm and shakes me. “Four years – too long a democratic dispensation?!” He literally splutters; he goes red in the face. Tony Aidoo tries to intervene. “Please, hold on…” He splutters again. “A thousand years will not even be enough! It is something we aspire to live forever…”

He is adamant that he was misquoted. “How can somebody like I – how can something so stupid be attributed to me? Because of the stupidity of the media people in my country.” Thankfully, Rawlings is now back in his seat on the couch. “Now, let me give you the answer, how you can stop this thing. My answer is what frightens them, and that’s what I said in Nigeria, that’s what I said in my country. And that’s how we survived. I was stoking the flames of positive defiance!

“We stoked the flame of defiance among workers, the junior ranks, everybody, so that the manager could no longer say, ‘Go and put this cloth, or these cartons of soap and what not in the boot of my car.’ They couldn’t do that any more. They couldn’t have vehicles offloading cement at their private work sites, because the workers would take them to task and sack them! Simple! There’s nothing intellectual, nothing fanciful about it! This is the simple answer!” He contends that the object of spreading the gospel of ‘positive defiance’ has only ever been to fight the culture of silence and introduce a culture of accountability into Ghana.

“But you see, this government, these governments, they don’t want to be defied. They want a submissive, servile society that will do as they say. And I’m saying that if you will give correct orders all the time, you can get away with it – that’s fine. But invariably power corrupts, so I’m saying that let us create a situation – And if you want to fight corruption, which is what these people are claiming, then empower the people to help you fight the corruption!” he shouts.

We continue to discuss how this push for accountability relates to what the NDC did while in office. Dr Aidoo leaps to the past government’s defence. “If we didn’t do anything at all, we expanded the communications system. So today, in Ghana, even somebody who cannot find his daily bread has got a mobile phone in his pocket.” Not only that, he argues, but it was under the NDC that Ghana’s airwaves were deregulated, producing the boom in FM stations across the country. Such innovations played an important role in furthering the move towards the NDC’s vision of a distinctive democratic culture, he argues.

“If you establish a system of democracy that is narrow, geared towards the periodic, ritualistic election every five years,” notes Aidoo, “you haven’t achieved anything, because you haven’t given the people the means of informed choice.”

But that still doesn’t answer the question of how a country such as Ghana can break the cycle of successive elites coming to power, not doing the people’s will, and so being thrown out in violent upheavals.

“When the west stops pushing the political model down our throat, when democracy can be fashioned in such a way that it takes account of the peculiar circumstances of our countries,” says Dr Aidoo, “then we will have a meaningful democracy.”

Rawlings argues that under home-grown chieftaincy systems, “the people never grow to hate their leaders to that extent” because “they have direct access to them”.

“I didn’t leave the ordinary people out of decision-making processes!” he exclaims, implying a contrast with the NPP. “We empowered them. When we were drawing up the constitution, this stupid government was hollering all over the place: they would not accept this, they would not accept that, who are these ordinary people – dressmakers and what not – who were forming a constitution?”

So what specific aspects of the western democracy do they object to? “There’s no objection to a model,” says Aidoo. “What I’m saying is, the problem has always been conceived as Africans’ inability to live with democracy. The other side of the question is never considered. Which is the west’s inability to understand the difficulties that Africans would have implementing the model according to the exact specifications. All I’m saying is, make allowances for certain peculiarities and you will find that we will adopt it even better than you have done.”

Rawlings gets impatient: “Part of the answer is not going to be found in the highfalutin political jargon that you are looking for. We’re just talking about the simple, basic accommodation – ” And then he changes tack. “The intellectuals: you have failed! You academicians, you are the ones who have failed.”

I assure the former president I’m not an intellectual.

“OK, they are the ones who have failed. Justice Annan agrees with me when I say, ‘Shut up! You academics, you’re the failures. You’re not intellectuals: intellectuals should be able to practicalise, should be able to operationalise their thoughts’!”

Laughing, Aidoo objects: “Sir, there are various categories of intellectuals. There are those who are subservient and those who are patricians.”

“OK,” Rawlings concedes, “you are different.”

He certainly has a sharp sense of humour.

PULLQUOTES:

“Rawlings has not changed. I’m not going to lie, I’m not going to steal. I will demand and insist on justice”

“There were some accidental things, some silly excesses, that I apologised for.

There were others for which people needed to be punished, and were punished”