A former President of Ghana, Jerry Rawlings, has died, Ghanaian media reported on Thursday.
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| A file photo of former Ghanaian President, Jerry Rawlings. |
Rawlings is suspected to have died from COVID-19 complications at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra.
He was a former Ghanaian military leader and, later, civilian President between 1981 to 2001.
Rawlings initially rose to power in Ghana as a flight lieutenant in the Ghana Air Force, following a coup détat in 1979.
After initially handing power over to a civilian government, he took control again in December 1981 as Head of State.
In 1992, Rawlings resigned from the military and became the first President of Ghana’s Fourth Republic.
He was re-elected in 1996 for four more years.
Rawlings left office in 2001 after exhausting Ghana’s constitutional term-limit of eight years for Presidents.
“Jerry Rawlings was an African giant,” former Nigerian Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar said in a tribute shared on Twitter. “His tenure as leader of Ghana remains emblematic with the restoration of that country. Even after office, he stood tall for African unity and renaissance.”
Ex-Senate President of Nigeria, Bukola Saraki described the late Rawlings as a pan-Africanist.
“From his early days as a young revolutionary, to his later years as a renowned statesman and pan-Africanist, Jerry Rawlings always led from the front and matched his words with his actions,” Saraki said via Twitter.
Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said in a statement that Rawlings had died “after a short illness” on Thursday morning at a hospital in Accra.
“A great tree has fallen, and Ghana is poorer for this loss,” the president said.
Akufo-Addo ordered flags around the country to be lowered to half-mast for seven days of national mourning from Friday and said he was suspending campaigning for the upcoming election in December.
The candidate from Rawlings’ National Democratic Congress candidate, John Mahama, wrote on Twitter that he was also halting his rallies “following news of the passing of our Founder and former President of Ghana, Jerry John Rawlings”.
“May his soul Rest In Peace,” Mahama, also a former president of Ghana, said.
African Union Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat, said “Africa has lost a stalwart of Pan-Africanism and a charismatic continental statesman”.
“My sincere condolences to his family, the people and the government of Ghana,” he wrote on Twitter.
Uncompressed Leadership:
Under his uncompromising command as Ghana Head of State, several former heads of state and army bigwigs were executed, but to many of Ghana’s poor, Rawlings was their champion.
The son of a Scottish father and Ghanaian mother, the larger-than-life figure became a national icon as he headed Ghana for 20 years until 2001, being voted in as president at the ballot box in 1992 and re-elected in 1996.
Rawlings got the first taste of power in 1979 when he banded together with other junior officers frustrated over widespread corruption to take control.
He quickly handed the reins to an elected president but was soon back at the top following another coup on 31 December 1981.
Starting out as a populist inspired by the left-wing policies of the Soviet Union and Cuba, he eventually turned to free-market economics to boost Ghana’s suffering economy.
He was a contemporary and later a friend of Thomas Sankara — “Africa’s Che Guevara,” the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who came to power in Burkina Faso in 1983 at the age of 33.
But Rawlings also heeded the calls for multi-party democracy that swept through Africa in the early 1990s, and in 1992 held the first elections in his homeland since 1979.
With all the levers of power at his disposal, he beat out the opposition and then claimed re-election four years later in 1996.
He finally left office for good in 2001 as the NDC lost its grip on power after his vice-president lost at the polls.
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