President Rawlings is 70! - Alleluia!

Yesterday, June 22, 2017 was the 70th birthday of the first President of this Fourth Republic, President Jerry John Rawlings. He was in office as President from January 7, 1993 to January 6, 2001 when President John Kufuor took over as President.

This important milestone in the life of this man who has had the most remarkable political career in our history is really not a reason for the usual celebration, but rather speculative reflection on how far Ghana has come not only since independence from March 6, 1957, or the particular circumstances which thrust President Rawlings into our public sphere from May 15, 1979, and its aftermath, but the occasion for a few generalisations and observations of our country and ourselves, with specific reference to the part he has played in that story.

However, it would be remiss of this column not to have any reaction to other events in the past week, since some of them are very important to all of us. Let me identity a couple of them.

NDC committee report

First is the presentation last Monday of the report of the committee set up by the largest opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), to go into the reasons for the defeat of the party at our last election in December 2016.

This was the Professor Botchwey Committee whose work is now being handled by the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) as the Holy Grail to explain their electoral victory. I find that curious since, the overwhelming response of the NPP to similar but private work into the loss of the party after the 2008 elections by Dr Arthur Kennedy was extremely negative.

The reaction to the Botchwey Report is for me just a building block of my belief that something was not right with the election results of December 2016. The victors did not move beyond the four other regions they usually won elections with.

The difference in raw votes and percentages are not unique, since the NPP secured only 30 per cent of the vote in 1992, and lost by a margin of over 1,200,000 votes in the following election in 1996, securing 39 per cent of the vote thereby. The NPP overturned these historic deficits in performance into sweet victory in 2000.

What this means for me is that there is a large pool of undecided voters in this country whose numbers and contours have not really been identified, all of us just parroting the unexamined view that the votes for the winning party are the same as the decided membership of the victorious party in election cycle after election cycle, up to when the highly sophisticated voters change their minds.

Otherwise, nothing explains the determination of incumbent parties in 2000, 2008 and 2016 to secure a third term except the unsatisfactory theory of the fatigue of the voter after eight years. It would seem parties are much favoured by events rather than by any iron laws of tenure fatigue. The NPP distinguished itself in the past eight years by discrediting everything being done by the John Mahama NDC government, in the midst of the most intense and violent infighting that has characterised any party since 1951, yet won the elections handily, implying that the explanations nations proffered in the Botchwey Report is a clever smokescreen permitted by the rules of our politics.

We are being regaled daily with the allegedly catastrophic performance of the NDC, which I have shown to be false, and the ridiculous predictions of a 30-year tenure for the ruling party, all in defiance and denial of the facts of our political history since 1993. No political party has control of the events which may be seized upon by an active opposition to craft a narrative of failure for the government. Six months into our new government, many negative things have happened on the front of unfulfilled and unfulfillable electoral promises to alter the perception of competent management which heralded it into office. Understanding and manipulating the Great Middle pool of undecideds explains our electoral history better.

Corruption

Second, I need to repeat my belief that corruption is a function of business, private, public or even religious. The current fascination with it as the complete explanation for our current problems is misconceived and misguided. The responsibilities of office in a competitive environment will soon relegate this seeming pastime of our current government into irrelevance as the management of perceptions of competence takes centre stage.

The Rawlings phenomenon, in our political history, must await years after his demise to enable distance to be created for historians to properly explain his significance. This is all the more necessary, since he is very much an active player, though without any constitutional role, in the politics of today.

Nonetheless, I am free to speculate on his significance in relation to certain current usages. I note with interest that what marks him out today, probity and accountability, were the very words the late General Kutu Acheampong, who ousted Dr Busia in 1972, popularised in our political lexicon. But it was President Rawlings who sought to actualise them in the three regimes he headed in 1979, 1981, and 1993. Even his 70th milestone reminds me of a group of soldiers during the Acheampong regime who sought to overthrow the latter and execute all political leaders who were 40 years old and above. In the end, the eight senior officers executed during the AFRC regime of then Chairman Rawlings were all below 50 years of age, and included three former heads of state.

It is, therefore, striking for the lucky 70-year-old leader today to criticise the so-called “babies with sharp teeth.” He was all of 32 years when he burst on the scene in 1979, and secured legitimacy by painting the old and experienced as not only corrupt and incompetent, but also unfit to manage our affairs. He has so far been the least educated of our fourth republican leaders, but he chose the most educated to succeed him, first as his Vice-President in 1997, then later as President himself in 2009, the late Professor John Atta Mills.
One thing, moreover, I will give him credit for. His immense charisma and personal popularity were effectively utilised to supervise an orderly withdrawal of our soldiers from the political administration of this country, enabling us to have structured and predictable government, a prerequisite for progress and development, though under grievous threat now from wayward supporters of the current government.

This is no mean achievement, seeing that he entered our politics in 1979 to disrupt a credible programme for the return to barracks of our soldiers put in place by the General Akuffo SMC 2 government. He was himself thus a beneficiary of the climate of opinion which made acceptable this mode of government for over two decades of our political past.
Belated happy birthday to President Rawlings.