We’re all social democrats now

It is usually a pleasure to review a book by a sitting president of Africa. Fewer African politicians write about their experiences in and outside of government. South African and Nigerian politicians are an exception. A Zimbabwean proverb that my professor Norman Levy at Middlesex University in England used to quote goes: ‘Until lions learn how to write, the hunter would always have the last say’. Writing by politicians should be encouraged.

‘My First Coup d’ etat’ is an interesting and readable book that gives readers a series of snapshots of the life of Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama. It begins with the military coup by the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) and the Ghana Police Service (GPS) that removed the progressive government of Kwame Nkrumah. The author’s father Emmanuel A. Mahama was a minister in the Kwame Nkrumah government (1957-1966) and was detained for a year, and banned from holding any political appointment for ten years by the new military rulers who called themselves the ‘National Liberation Council’ (NLC). Subsequently, President Mahama’s father spent several years in exile in Ivory Coast, Nigeria and London away from the dictatorship of Flt Lt. John Jerry Rawlings (1982-1992).

Mahama was seven years old and at Achimota School when the coup took place in February 1966. Like thousands of students, he found it difficult to understand the French term ‘coup d’ etat’, the sudden overthrown of a government by the military. Coups and counter-coups reduced Ghana and much of West and Central Africa to banana republics and the consequence was a lost decade for Africa.

It was not until April 1966 when schools were closed for holidays that the meaning of the coup d’etat have an impact on the young boy. School closed and the elite came for their children. No one showed up to pick pupil Mahama. The seven-year-old slept a lone in the dormitory. He was only reunited with his family thanks to a maternal figure assigned to his dormitory, who took time to search for Mahama’s father. Upon reaching his father’s house in the then elite Kanda estate in Accra where Emmanuel A. Mahama lived, the maternal figure from Achimota school asked the unfriendly soldier on duty: ‘We are in search of Honourable E. A. Mahama.’ ‘He no longer lives here,’ replied the soldier.

Stop for a few seconds to digest the soldier’s answer and its impact on a seven-year-old. Fear! Mahama finally remembered his senior sister lived at Burma camp, the nation’s premier military camp. With the help of a telephone directory Rose Mahama who worked with Ghana Airway was located, thus ending the first lessons of ‘My first coup d’etat’. This aspect of the story is common to thousands of families across the country and Africa in general, as one military regime took over from a civilian regime with brute force.

President Mahama, like his friend President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia was noted earlier in life to have the potential to be great as Johnson-Sirleaf documents in her book ‘This Child Will Be Great’ (2009). The observation by the headmistress of the Ringway estate nursery (Accra) of the young Mahama to his father is important. ‘This young boy Dramani I think has the potential to make you really proud.’ Mahama’s political journey’s began as member of a study group in Tamale, then he became a member of parliament, cabinet minister, vice president and after the death of his ‘senior comrade’ Professor John Evens Atta Millis in July, he became president.

But, like most educated Ghanaians from the north in the 1940s and 1950s, District Commissioners and the British colonial administrator who was first based in Gambaga and later relocated to Tamale encouraged the sons of chiefs or elders to go to school. The chiefs did not take kindly the orders from the British colonial officers to send their loved children to school. This is how Emmanuel A. Mahama and other sons of the nobility from western Gonjaland went to school in Salaga, the famous slave market, 200 kilometers from Bole, on foot (guarded by the Gold Coast Constabulary). On one occasion walking to Salaga, they saw lions and had to sleep up on tall trees till the lions left the area. Emmanuel A. Mahama, a teacher by profession like the rest of the few educated people from northern Ghana, made it his duty to send his children to good schools such as Achimota. Mahama’s transfer from Achimota school to Ghana Secondary school in Tamale was to ground him in the culture of Gonja, Dagbon and Hausa in addition to that of Ga and Ashanti which he had picked up in Accra.

Decolonisation led to the radicalism of the African youth in the late 1960s and 1970s in politics and culture. Progressive music was to play a key role in modeling the future president. Throughout that period, spending time in Accra, Tamale and Damango was to make him cognizant of the extreme poverty in northern Ghana as he recalls visits to Busunu, a rural settlement on the Tamale -Damango road, where like in most places in rural Ghana, there is no running water, electricity or schools. This schooled him to be committed to rural development. It also taught him to be a believer in the culture of peaceful coexistence of Ghanaians as some members of his family are Muslims, Christians and traditionalists living in peace.

In the context of the ups and downs of post-Nkrumah’s Ghana, Mahama becomes a member of the Study Group in Tamale operated by the easy going, intelligent and devout Marxist scholar Niapa Wentum-Kitcher. ‘I had joined the group in October 1972 thanks to Kofi Mawulu Klu. He was an excellent networker. In late 1977 Klu played the key role in setting up Aluta, the central organ of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS), which became a thorn in the flesh of the military Supreme Military Council’s (SMC) bogus and fraudulent programme known as ‘Union-government’.’ It is no surprise that Mahama after undertaking his masters degree in Moscow during the period of glasnost, when ‘ism’ died, began to question some of the ABC of Marxism Wentum-Kitcher shared with the study group. Mahama drifted to social democracy, the natural political home of many ex-Marxists following the fall of the Soviet Union.

It is this complex, interesting personal and political processes that come through ‘My First Coup d’etat’. Mahama has brought us a brilliantly, simple, readable and inspiring story. He, unlike some powerful Ghanaian politicians, remembers those who helped and shared as he grew up. This makes Mahama stand(s) out clearly unlike Ghana’s populist demagogue Flt. Lt. John Jerry Rawlings, who for all intents and purposes has forgotten Captain Baah Acharmful, Paul Victor Obeng, Captain Kojo Tsikata, Kwasi Adu, Chris Atim, Ahmed Gariba Shaibu, Sergeant Alolga Akata-Poree, Nyeya Yemalugu Yen, Tata Ofosu Kwadjo, Eric Bortey, Zaya Yeebo, Amartey Kwei, Cpls Brimah, Eric Asare and Aliu, Staff Sergeant Mathew Awaal, Kwame Adjimah, Kwasi Kamassah and many thousands of Ghanaians who stood up and protected him and his wife Nana Agyeman Rawlings between 1979 and 1981.

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* Napoleon Abdulai is one of the nine students who founded the June 4 Movement in 1979.