Jerry Rawlings

Jerry Rawlings seized power in Ghana twice, executed three former heads of state, and then governed for nineteen years and handed over to the opposition after losing an election. He was a half-Scottish air force flight lieutenant who led a failed mutiny in May 1979, was court-martialled, and was broken out of prison by junior ranks who put him at the head of a successful coup weeks later. The house-cleaning that followed shot eight senior officers including three former military rulers, which is the fact that hangs over everything afterwards. He then handed power to an elected civilian government, watched it for two years, and took it back on the last day of 1981. The second period began in Marxist rhetoric and people's defence committees and turned, under an empty treasury, into one of Africa's earliest and most thorough structural adjustment programmes: currency devalued, subsidies cut, cocoa prices raised for farmers, and growth that the international institutions advertised for years. He legalised parties in 1992, won two elections that observers accepted with reservations, was barred by term limits in 2000, and left when his party lost. That transfer is why Ghana is cited as a democratic example. He remained a loud critic of everyone who followed him until his death in 2020. He had a personal following that survived everything, based partly on a reputation for not stealing, which in the context was unusual enough to be political capital. The 1979 executions were never prosecuted and were covered by an indemnity clause written into the 1992 constitution. Ghana has since changed government by election three more times.

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