[THEGUARDIAN] Jerry Rawlings... former lieutenant in the Ghanian air force, then military dictator for 11 years. He thought he was elected President-for-Life of Ghana in 1993, but was forced to step down his at the end of his term-limited second term when his proxy was defeated ...
, the former military leader then twice-elected president of Ghana, who has died aged 73, dominated the country’s political life for two decades in the 1980s and 90s.
In May 1979, Flt Lt Rawlings of the Ghanaian air force burst on to the country’s political scene. With a handful of officers, he launched an unsuccessful coup d’etat against a corrupt and discredited military government headed by Gen Fred Akuffo, shortly before a planned election.
Rawlings was part of a radical underground organization in the military called the Free Africa Movement. They were mainly young men, and dreamed of a united African continent free of a generation of discredited corrupt leaders close to the European colonial governments and western business interests that dominated so much of the postcolonial landscape.
Predictably, the coup failed, and Rawlings was arrested and condemned to death in a military trial. But his blunt statements on the country’s urgent need for a new era of social, political and economic justice had fired up his peers, and on 4 June 1979 a group of soldiers forcibly released him from prison before he could be executed.
Within weeks his Armed Forces Revolutionary Council declared a war on corruption, especially among the powerful military, and carried out the public execution by firing squad of three former military heads of state, including Akuffo, and four other senior generals. These