The former leader’s blend of anti-corruption rhetoric and strongman rule still holds great appeal for a generation disappointed by contemporary politicians.
Ask any Ghanaian to guess which political party I am likely to support and they will, without mincing words, tell you the National Democratic Congress (NDC). That assumption stems from the fact that my family comes from the Volta region of Ghana.
The founder of the NDC was Jerry John Rawlings, who ruled Ghana as a military dictator and as a democratically elected president from 1981 to 1992 and from 1993 to 2001, respectively, and who died last month in a state hospital in Accra. Rawlings’s father was Scottish and his mother was from the Volta region, which is why the party he founded still gets more than 80 percent of the votes there.
Politics in Ghana is still very ethnically divided; the voters in the Ashanti region overwhelmingly vote for presidential candidates of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), which is why people reflexively assume my political allegiance is a function of my ethnicity. (It’s not; I believe that politics should transcend ethnicity and that politicians must convince voters to back them on the basis of policy.)
Rawlings did not cause the ethnic division in Ghanaian politics, but it played to his political advantage when he grudgingly re-introduced multiparty democracy in 1992.
Rawlings had first appeared on the political scene in 1979 following a successful military coup, and as chairman of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, embarked on his infamous “house-cleaning.” His mishandling of economic affairs, however, led politicians to persuade him to hand over the government to a civilian administration and he acquiesced. Later banned from the barracks between 1979 and 1981, he fraternized with leftist academics at the University of Ghana and got acquainted with dependency theory—which blamed the world economy’s wealthy “core” for the exploitation and underdevelopment of the poorer “periphery”—an approach that chimed with his core beliefs.
The economy had deteriorated even further, under Hilla Limann’s civilian government, by the time of Rawlings’s “second coming” in the coup of Dec. 31, 1981. Under his watch in 1983, the economy of Ghana was in shambles, it was the worst of times: Food and fuel were scarce, and people had to queue for hours just to buy uncooked kenkey (fermented corn dough). Because of economic hardship and widespread hunger, people developed what was popularly called “Rawlings chain”—characterized by “deep gorges” and emaciated skin around the neck, exposing protruding collarbones.
Faced with such deprivation, Rawlings made a U-turn; the dependency-theory devotee entered into an agreement with Western multilateral donors. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank saved the economy and there was food and fuel again, but Ghana sacrificed a lot to the banks’ neoliberal policies. The productive arms of government, state-owned enterprises, were privatized and people had to pay for various social services; the former angered leftist academics, but the latter, interestingly, did not diminish popular support for the charismatic Rawlings, who went on to win two national elections.
After the 1992 and 1996 elections, the Rawlings effect on Ghana’s ethnically aligned voting pattern had become entrenched and is likely to remain the case for many more decades to come. (Since Rawlings left the presidency, the NDC has never presented a presidential candidate from Volta, but the party has nevertheless won more than 80 percent of the votes in the region in every election since 2000.) People in Volta, who are largely ethnically Ewe, are generally bombarded with pro-NDC messaging, just as my Akan friends, from the Ashanti region, were largely fed arguments in favor of the NPP.
Consequently, the political parties, relying on ethnic allegiances, do little to raise the political consciousness of young people and instead exploit these ethnic alignments in their quest to win elections. The two major parties in Ghana seem to be committing the mistake Frantz Fanon warned of in The Wretched of the Earth: organizing along ethnic lines.