Rawlings redeemed soul of Ghana’s political system – Col. Festus Aboagye

Colonel Retired Festus Aboagye, the former ceremonial Aide-De-Camp to Former President Jerry John Rawlings, has described the late former president as a leader who came into politics to redeem the soul of Ghana’s political system.

He said this in an interview with Johnnie Hughes on TV3, in a tribute to the memory of the late former president Jerry John Rawlings, on Monday, January 25.

Col. Aboagye described Mr Rawlings as a very humble man, a leader who was endeared to the masses.

He also said Mr Rawlings was courageous, someone who paid attention to detail and also a non-conformist leader.

“For me what Rawlings sought to do was not to rebuild the economy, it was to redeem the soul of Ghana’s political system which had gone so low,” he explained.

He said his fondest moment was when he witnessed the late former president fly a bomber aircraft from Ghana to Liberia without bombing any targets there but to land in that country in order to ascertain the views of the ECOMOG troops there, in order to inform the Akosombo Peace process going on in 1993.

“There was another time, probably 1999 if I’m not mistaken, he returned a visit to the former president of the United States Clinton, and as part of the official program included a visit to a US air force base, that I cannot remember at the moment, and here was a foreign leader in a superpower country, who was allowed to go into one of the American jets to do his own acrobatics in the air. Till today I’ve been wondering how the United States of America would allow a foreign leader to fly some of their aircrafts and the kind of acrobatics that he did, you needed to be there to see exactly how it was,” he revealed.

Responding to the critics of the late former president Rawlings that he had regretted his actions that preceded his rise to power, Col. Aboagye charged that “my understanding of Rawlings’ regret, was not that he regretted what he did but he regretted that after all the troubles that all of us went through, that we should find ourselves at a place currently when we’ve gone back to do those things and even those worse things."

“That probably was the painful thing to the former president and if we want to remember him, we need to also remind ourselves that politics is not a joke”.