"A monument has died out, it is a huge loss for Ghana," President Nana Akufo-Addo said in a statement on Thursday, November 12th.

At 73, former President Jerry John Rawlings died in a hospital in the capital Accra "after a short illness".

After a first coup in 1979, Jerry Rawlings - rugby player's build and piercing gaze - had managed to take the reins of the country during a second coup in 1981. He left power in 2000 after having been elected twice.

Flags will be half-masted across the country, for a national mourning that will begin Friday and last for seven days.

The campaign for the presidential election to be held in December is also suspended, said the head of state.

"A pillar of Pan-Africanism"

"I am announcing the suspension of our political campaign (...) after the news of the death of the founder of our party and former president of Ghana, Jerry John Rawlings" also affirmed John Mahama, main opposition candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in this election.

"May his soul rest in peace," added the former president of Ghana.

"Africa has lost a pillar of Pan-Africanism and a charismatic statesman," reacted on Twitter the chairman of the African Union commission Moussa Faki Mahamat.

“I offer my sincere condolences to his family, the people and the government of Ghana,” he wrote.

It is with great sadness that I learn from the passing of former president Jerry Rawlings of Ghana.

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

- Moussa Faki Mahamat (@AUC_MoussaFaki) November 12, 2020

Born on June 22, 1947 in Accra of a Scottish father and a Ghanaian mother, he entered the military academy in 1967, which he left a year later to enter the Air Force, where he excels as a pilot.

He was first known for his image of a young "revolutionary with integrity", seizing power twice at the age of 32 and then 34, combining a physique à la Che Guevara with a national-populist discourse and a "progressive political lineage. ".

From 1981, he became head of the "Provisional National Defense Council" for eleven years and led a regime that did not concern itself with human rights, before having to give in at the beginning of the 1990s to the wave of multiparty politics. .

"Easy to take power" 

But enjoying a real aura, he was elected at the end of 1992 president of the Fourth Republic of Ghana, with more than 58% of the vote at the end of a democratic ballot, tarnished by accusations of fraud.

He was re-elected in 1996 in the first round, in an election considered transparent.

After 19 years and seven months in power, he bowed out in 2000 with the election of John Kufuor, the opposition party candidate at the time, as head of the former British colony.

"It is quite easy to take power, it is not very complicated to keep it, the most difficult is to leave it," he told AFP in 2007.

On the economic level, Rawlings the "revolutionary" had realized, from his arrival in power, that in order to revive his country, the Western "capitalists" offered him more guarantees than the "socialists" of the East towards whom his sympathies.

Application of his wife

In 1982, Ghana was thus the first African country to implement a structural adjustment plan.

But at the end of his mandate, the situation deteriorated sharply, and the monetary and social crisis contributed to the election, in 2000, as head of the country, of the opposition candidate John Kufuor.  

In 2011, his wife Nana Konadu Rawlings tried unsuccessfully to run for the NDC for the presidency that year.

This campaign fueled speculation around a possible desire by Mr. Rawlings to regain political influence in the country and within his party, which was then said to be waning.

However, he has always enjoyed immense respect within the NDC despite his icy relationship with John Mahama, who was President of Ghana from 2012 to 2017 and current presidential candidate in December.

With AFP

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