A few days ago, the Jubilee House official Facebook handle announced that President John Dramani Mahama joined the leadership of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to unveil a bust of the late former President, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, and officially rename the party’s national headquarters in his honour.
According to the post, President Mahama described Rawlings as a leader of courage, vision and discipline, a transformative figure whose commitment to public service helped shape Ghana’s democratic journey and political freedoms.
The President noted that the occasion was not merely a celebration of Rawlings’ contributions to party and country, but a reaffirmation of the values he championed – integrity, patriotism, sacrifice and service to the Ghanaian people. The ceremony formed part of activities commemorating what would have been the late statesman’s 79th birthday.
These remarks, however, The Chronicle observes, arrive at a particularly uncomfortable moment and the contradiction they present demands serious public scrutiny.
Earlier this year, during his State of the Nation Address, President Mahama addressed the longstanding debate over the naming of Kotoka International Airport. He argued that although the National Liberation Council Decree 309 contained a clause to rename the facility in honour of Lieutenant General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka, no subsequent government had ever operationalised that provision through the requisite legislative instrument.
In his view, matters concerning national symbols must be handled with due legal process, broad national consensus and careful parliamentary approval. He presented himself, in that moment, as a guardian of constitutional propriety.
The Chronicle does not dispute the President’s legal reasoning on that specific procedural point. What we dispute – and dispute strongly – is the inconsistency in the standard he applies when the subject changes.
Lieutenant General Kotoka was a principal figure in the coup of 24 February, 1966 which overthrew the constitutionally elected government of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
President Mahama’s administration has effectively used this coup with extra-constitutional power seizure to cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the airport naming. That position has been stated publicly and the nation has taken note.
Yet the same President now stands before cameras and describes Jerry John Rawlings, a man who staged not one, but two military coups in this republic, as a man of courage, vision and discipline.
Rawlings led the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council Uprising of 1979 and the December 31st coup of 1981, the latter of which abrogated a functioning constitutional government that Ghanaians had voted to install.
Under his watch, senior military officers, sitting judges and civilians were killed in circumstances that have never been fully accounted for before any credible judicial or truth-seeking process. The families of those victims have never received the justice they deserve.
The Chronicle must, therefore, ask plainly and directly: what manner of courage is President Mahama referring to? The courage to seize power? The courage to dissolve a constitutional order? The courage to order execution of military generals? These are not virtues to be commended from the highest office in the land. They are precisely the conduct the President implicitly censures when he questions the legacy of Kotoka.
We acknowledge that history is rarely simple. Rawlings is credited by some with laying institutional groundwork that preceded Ghana’s Fourth Republic. But that legacy is contested, not settled, and it is precisely because it is contested that a sitting president must exercise extraordinary care in the language he employs.
To describe a man who once overthrew a constitutional government as courageous and visionary, without qualification or context, is to do a disservice to the very democratic values the President claims to uphold.
President Mahama is a professed Christian and a committed member of the Assemblies of God Church. He will, therefore, be familiar with the words of Revelation 3:15-16, which says: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth.”
The rebuke is unambiguous. Moral inconsistency is not a posture that God or history will excuse. We urge the President to be straightforward with Ghanaians. He cannot condemn one coup maker on constitutional grounds and crown another with the language of heroism. That is not leadership. That is lukewarmness dressed in political clothing.
The Chronicle calls on President Mahama to clarify, with specificity, the moral and constitutional framework that guides his assessment of Ghana’s coup-era figures, all of them, not merely those whose memory is inconvenient to his political opponents.
He cannot hold Kotoka to one standard and Rawlings to another. Ghana’s democratic culture, hard-won and still fragile, deserves far better than selective historical conscience. The double standard is noted. God is watching. History is watching. And so are the Ghanaian people.
