Misrepresenting occurrences and personalities in Ghana, 1979-1983: a comment on Frank Gerit's incorrect and misleading claims

Abstract

Frank Gerits’s article contains several misrepresentations and false claims about events and personalities in Ghana during the turbulent years of 1979 through 1983. The most serious of these are his treatments of Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings and Dr. Kwesi Botchwey. Gerits ignores Rawlings’s own explanations for his actions and misrepresents Botchwey’s arguments in two essays. The important lessons for economic policy formulation and governance in the Third World to be learned from the painful experiences Ghanaians went through in those years are distorted by Gerits’s attempting to craft an interpretive perspective he calls “anticolonial capitalism” or “anticolonial liberation.” My comment clarifies.