Residents of Shama in the Western Region have appealed to the government to immortalise the legacies of late President Jerry John Rawlings to serve as a reference point for future generations.
They said late President Rawlings had fully paid his dues to the development of the country and, therefore, ensuring that his good legacies remained anchored in the country’s democratic dispensation would be a step in the right direction.
They stressed that the country needed people of his calibre with pleasant personality to move its strides for democratic rule forward.
“His death has been a terrible blow to the country. He had more to offer this country, but death has denied the country the opportunity to benefit fully from his rich and impeccable experience,” Mr Augustine Nyamekye, a teacher, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview.
Mrs. Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, wife of late former President Jerry John Rawlings, Wednesday, bid farewell to her husband at the Black Star Square in Accra. You were for Ghana and then for me, Mrs Agyeman-Rawlings stated in a tribute read on her behalf by one of their daughters, Amina Agyeman-Rawlings at a state funeral of the former President. We started on a journey. One that was free and easy in spirit. I was innocent and you were streetwise. There was so much I did not know and understand about real life outside the wings and home of Mr and Mrs J.O.T. Agyeman, since I had lived a protected life under their roof…very strict parents.
Many grieving residents clad in black are anxiously waiting along the principal streets of Accra to witness the final journey of former President Jerry John Rawlings.
The mortal remains of the former President will be paraded through the streets of Accra before interment at the Military cemetery at Burma Camp, Accra.
A trader at the Arts Centre who had abandoned his wares to join the many who waited on the John Evans Atta Mills High street said the: “Former President Jerry John Rawlings has always been his role model and his death came as a shock to me.”
Mr Eddie Ray said,”Rawlings was my role model because growing up, I wanted to be a military man and be like him. He had the country at heart and did everything he did for the interest of the country. So if today he’s no more, it’s the responsibility of us as Ghanaians to pay our last respect to him.”
By Tom Ikimi
High Chief Tom Ikimi, as Foreign Minister of Nigeria, meets with President Jerry John Rawlings in Accra in 1996
Jerry John Rawlings, the pride of Africa, and my own very dear friend was one of Africa’s most misunderstood statesmen. The reason for this is very clear: he was one African leader who never did the ordinary or the pedestrian, and who successfully broke with political convention.
Perhaps the most distinguished member of the second generation of African postcolonial political innovators, Rawlings would best be remembered for inaugurating the tradition of an enduring, well-structured continental democracy which emerges from the people’s experience and consciousness of who they are. If Ghana was one example, Rwanda is another.
Rawlings came through for me in my difficult moments as President – Akufo-Addo Listen to article
President Akufo-Addo has described the late former President Jerry John Rawlings as his “good friend and a repository of sound advice.”
According to Mr Akufo-Addo, in moments of difficulty in his presidency, he could count on Mr Rawlings’ considerable “wealth of experience and knowledge,” and “on those occasions, he came through for me.”
Nana Akufo-Addo said these in a tribute to Mr Rawlings during his final funeral rites at the Black Square in Accra on Wednesday, 27 January 2021.
The President admitted that although Mr Rawlings and himself were not the best of friends at a point, with time, things changed and they came to see value in each other.