Jerry Rawlings History
Jerry Rawlings was born in June 1947 to a Scottish father who had been a chemist in Accra, Ghana’s capital, and an Ewe mother. Many people see Jerry Rawlings as the most important leader in the “new generation” of African leaders. Rawlings went to the well-known Achimota Secondary School. He dropped out in 1966 to join the Air Force the next year.
After his first schooling as a cadet, he was sent to the No. 1 Communication Squadron. In May 1979, Jerry Rawlings led a military mutiny. At the time, he was a flight lieutenant with the No. 4 Jet Squadron in Accra.
There, Jerry Rawlings started to connect with a group of soldiers who thought Ghana needed radical political change right away. An abrupt drop in Ghana’s political and economic conditions led to a rise in radicalism in the military forces.
Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957, but by 1977, people believed that real wages had fallen to a quarter of what they had been in 1972, and military dictatorships had become the norm. Lack of goods and services in the economy, crooked politicians, black markets, and unchecked governments made people want big changes.
General Fred Akuffo, his deputy, replaced the military leader, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong. The government faced significant unpopularity due to its violations of political rights, deteriorating economy, and widespread corruption within the military leadership. There were calls for civilian government and for Acheampong and his colleagues to be punished for their crimes and poor management. The new government promised to hold multiparty elections, but the public was so unhappy that they wanted both.
Jerry Rawlings led a small-scale armed forces mutiny on May 15, 1979. He did this because of events like these that made people feel outraged and wronged, as well as a major and long-lasting drop in living standards. Two weeks after his arrest, on June 4, a successful military uprising freed Rawlings.
The leaders of the coup chose Jerry Rawlings as head of state and gave him the order to kill Generals A. A. Afrifa, Akuffo, and Acheampong for corruption. Even though Jerry Rawlings said he wasn’t in favor of these kinds of killings, he knew that most soldiers were very angry and couldn’t stop them.
According to Rawlings (quoted in Okeke 1982, 52), this would have led to the elimination of the “entire officer corps because they [the ordinary soldiers] would have seen this as just another example of officers’ solidarity, another conspiracy of the officer corps to protect itself.”
After a brief, intense, and unsuccessful period of “house cleaning,” the country held elections in September 1979. Hilla Limann led an elected civilian government at that time. Limann’s People’s National Party was based on Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party.
This regime’s short life was partly due to its incompetence and graft. Its relentless pursuit of Jerry Rawlings also helped to set off another military coup, which he led on December 31, 1981. This time, Rawlings said he wanted a revolution. He asserted that a revolution would significantly enhance fairness and justice in Ghana, empowering ordinary citizens to influence the formulation and implementation of policies. From 1981 to now, the second part of Ghana’s postcolonial past is a story of growing political and economic stability.
But the time period is still very controversial, especially when it comes to Jerry Rawlings. There is nothing that separates Ghanaians more than their views on their leader of the last 20 years. Everyone agrees that he has been a key figure in the country’s political and economic history. However, some people hate him and others admire him.
But even his harshest critics might say that his first chaotic, then authoritarian, and finally democratic rule saw Ghana through the uncertain 1970s and into the 1990s, when the country’s politics and economy were mostly stable.
Ghana’s bad economy got better when Rawlings was in charge. By 1985, two years after the start of a very controversial economic “structural adjustment program,” Ghana had become the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) star student in Africa. The rest of the region looked to Ghana as a model and a strong example of economic change.
In return, Ghana got more than $9 billion (U.S.) in loans from other countries over the next ten years, mostly from the IMF and the World Bank. Ghana had a lot of growth between 1984 and 1993. The economy grew by an average of 5% each year, mostly because of economic changes and investment from other countries.
Since the population was growing by about 2.6% a year, economic growth of about 2.5% a year was a great accomplishment and one of the best in Africa at the time.
But things have moved more slowly since then. At first, it looked like the second Rawlings government would set up a one-party system, but its political goals changed over time. It went from being socialist at first to trying to build local democracy with a “developmentalist” focus, which had mixed effects.
Under pressure from both inside and outside of the country, Rawlings started the move to multiparty national politics in 1990. This led to elections for the president and the legislature in 1992 and again in 1996. After running for president twice, Rawlings won both times. His party, the National Democratic Congress, also won the votes for parliament.
As Rawlings led the country from personalist rule with socialist overtones to a more stable pluralist democracy, this was how things changed. Rawlings could not run for a third term because of the law from 1992. John Kufuor won the presidency in 2000.
Also Read: Dr. Kwame Nkrumah Biography
