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Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy
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Noble Kofi Nazzah

Jerry Rawlings Is Dead, but He Still Looms Large in Ghanaian Politics

Ghana's then-President John Dramani Mahama (L) talks with former President of Ghana Jerry Rawlings (R) at the Baba Yara stadium in Kumasi on Aug. 30, 2012.

Ask any Ghanaian to guess which political party I am likely to support and they will, without mincing words, tell you the National Democratic Congress (NDC). That assumption stems from the fact that my family comes from the Volta region of Ghana.

The founder of the NDC was Jerry John Rawlings, who ruled Ghana as a military dictator and as a democratically elected president from 1981 to 1992 and from 1993 to 2001, respectively, and who died last month in a state hospital in Accra. Rawlings’s father was Scottish and his mother was from the Volta region, which is why the party he founded still gets more than 80 percent of the votes there.

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