Jeremiah Rawlings John was born on June 22, 1947 in Accra. He was educated at Achimoto College, then at the Teshie Military Academy. Appointed second lieutenant in the Ghanaian air force in 1969, he was promoted to flight captain and became an excellent pilot. After an unsuccessful first attempt in May, Rawlings and several junior officers staged a successful military coup in June 1979. With the Armed Revolutionary Forces Council, of which he proclaimed himself president, he ruled the country for 112 days, during from which several leaders, including General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, were tried and executed. Rawlings then hands over power to a democratically elected civilian president, Hilla Limann. The latter quickly dismisses the aviation putschist.
Rawlings is nonetheless a popular figure. Faced with the incompetence of the new civilian regime, which was unable to stem the decline of the national economy, he decided, on December 31, 1981, to overthrow the government of Limann. Rawlings sets up a Provisional National Defense Council to replace the government and imprisons Limann and some 200 politicians. He creates popular defense committees in the neighborhoods, as well as workers' councils intended to control the production of the factories. When these structures and various other populist measures proved a failure in 1983, Rawlings reversed course and adopted a conservative economic policy edited by the IMF and the World Bank. He reduced subsidies and price controls in order to reduce inflation, privatized many public enterprises and devalued the currency in order to stimulate exports. This liberalization boosted the Ghanaian economy, which in the early 1990s posted one of the highest growth rates in Africa.
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Is Adult Product | |
Release Date | 2010-06-22T00:00:01Z |
Language | English |
Number Of Pages | 72 |
Publication Date | 2010-06-22T00:00:01Z |