Ghana THE PROVISIONAL NATIONAL DEFENCE COUNCIL
Unavailable
Figure 11. Structure of Provisional National Defence Council
(PNDC), 1982-88
Within thirty-five years of Ghana's becoming a sovereign state,
the country experienced, before its fourth return to multiparty
democratic government in January 1993, nine different types of
government (three civilian and six military), including a
Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, a socialist single-party
republic, and several military regimes following coups in 1966,
1972, 1979, and 1981
(see Independent Ghana;
The Fall of the Nkrumah Regime and Its Aftermath;
Ghana and the Rawlings Era
, ch. 1, and
Table 11, Appendix).
The new national leadership of postcolonial Ghana inherited
state machinery that had evolved under British rule and that
emphasized strong centralization of power and top-down decision
making. Kwame Nkrumah--prime minister, 1957-60; president, 1960-66-
-unsuccessfully attempted to create a socialist economy in the
early 1960s, but his effort merely served to compound the
inevitable problems and dangers of administrative centralization
and state intervention in the economy. These problems, which
survived Nkrumah, included political corruption, self-enrichment,
misuse of power, lack of public accountability, and economic
mismanagement, leading in turn to economic decline and stagnation
and to the rapid erosion of political legitimacy and attendant
coups d'état. Authoritarian or arbitrary styles of leadership that
limited genuine democratic participation and public debate on
policy as well as the lack of political vision of successive
postcolonial regimes (with the exception of Nkrumah's) contributed
greatly to political instability and to the rapid alternation of
civilian and military rule.
One of the changes in government came on June 4, 1979, when a
handful of junior officers seized power less than a month before
scheduled elections. An Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC)
was formed with the overriding objectives of ridding Ghana of
official corruption, indiscipline in public life, and economic
mismanagement before handing over power to a civilian government.
A relatively unknown twenty-nine-year-old air force flight
lieutenant, Jerry John Rawlings, emerged as the leader of the AFRC.
The so-called house-cleaning exercise embarked upon by the AFRC was
extended to a variety of civilian economic malpractices such as
hoarding, profiteering, and black-marketing.
Parliamentary elections were duly held on June 18, 1979, as
planned. A party of the Nkrumahist tradition, the People's National
Party (PNP), won a majority of the parliamentary seats, and its
leader, Hilla Limann, became president after a run-off election. On
September 24, 1979, the AFRC handed over government to the PNP. At
this time, Rawlings warned the PNP government that it was on
probation and admonished the incoming officials to put the interest
of the people first.
The PNP administration was short-lived. On December 31, 1981,
Rawlings returned to office for the second time as head of the
Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC). He insisted that the
31st December, 1981, Revolution was necessitated, among other
factors, by the failure of the PNP administration to provide
effective leadership and by the virtual collapse of the national
economy and of state services. Upon assuming power, Rawlings
immediately declared a "holy war" aimed at restructuring national
political institutions, establishing genuine democracy based on
Ghanaian ideals and traditions, and rehabilitating the economy.
Data as of November 1994
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