Rawlings on Ghana and the IMF: we were caught between East and West

Asaase 99.5 Accra presents tonight the second part of its ground-breaking 2020 interview with Jerry John Rawlings.

In Kwaku Sakyi-Addo’s epic, one-on-one encounter with Jerry Rawlings for Asaase Radio’s Sunday Night, the strongman spoke openly about why Ghana decided to return to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in 1983, though the country turned East immediately after his “second coming” in December 1981.

“This country’s political mode became revived after Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s role,” Rawlings told KSA. “But with time we suffered … decline, and then the spirit of this country got revived [in the 31 December Revolution].

“We were hoping that we could enjoy some financial assistance from the now matured socialist countries, because some of us are diehard socialists …” he said jokingly. “But … they wouldn’t give us any assistance of any sort.

“We were desperate for assistance. We didn’t even have enough money for drugs in our hospitals. So, we had no choice but to go to the IMF and the World Bank. And their restrictions, their constraints, the difficulties of dealing with their finances, was such that it was making it difficult to fly off the way we could have done,” he said.

“Those of us in Africa have had a very dicey situation, especially during the Cold War between the West and the East, where [both sides] just hung things in front of our noses to keep us in line,” Rawlings recalled.

“We should have enjoyed a lot more support than they [Western countries] were willing to part with,” he said.

Comeback

Rawlings also described the volatile political climate in Ghana back then to Sakyi-Addo, and explained why he signed a string of death warrants after both the 4 June 1979 and 31 December 1981 coups.

Six senior military officers, including three former heads of government – Akwasi Amankwa Afrifa, General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and General Frederick W K Akuffo – were executed on the orders of his Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) on 16 and 26 June 1979.

The 1979 AFRC coup followed a failed coup attempt against General Akuffo’s military government on 15 May the same year. After 112 days the AFRC stood down in favour of a democratically elected civilian government, led by Hilla Limann.

But a little over two years later Rawlings staged a comeback, ousting President Limann from power.

He told Sakyi-Addo, “I did what I had to do … I had no choice but to step in, because the last time they [the Hilla Limann-era security services] arrested me, they nearly succeeded in eliminating me. That’s when I decided, ‘No more – they have to go.’ ”

After his 1981 coup d’état he led Ghana for 19 years, serving as an elected president between 1993 and 2001.

“Boom” interview

The meeting between KSA and JJ took place over two and a half hours at the former president’s retreat at Vume-Tefle, in the Volta Region. Asaase aired the conversation in two parts, the first broadcast of the second part taking place on 12 July 2020.

It was the last major engagement between Rawlings and a reporter before his death on 12 November 2020.

Rawlings’s mother, Victoria Agbotui, died shortly after the conversation with Sakyi-Addo and he passed away less than two months later.

The rebroadcast of part two of the “boom interview” airs tonight (Sunday 30 July) on Asaase 99.5 Accra, and marks the station’s third anniversary.

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