....BOAKYE DJAN IS NO HERO
- I created him
Ex-President Jerry John Rawlings has finally spoken. He says Major (rtd) Boakye Djan is not a hero of June 4 but rather a coward who proved to be dummy by running into hiding at his wife’s residence at Achimota School when the guns began smoking on that fateful day.

“Look, the man is useless, I created him and gave him political life by naming him into the Council. He is simply a coward. He is claiming to be a hero now because his name was the first I mentioned in the radio announcement. On that day, everything was hot, I was only mentioning the names of people I knew and because he was a friend his name readily came to mind. I had to call the names of all the soldiers both senior and junior. I remember as I was mentioning the names, somebody was also writing more on a piece of paper,” he said.

Mr. Rawlings, who was speaking in an interview with The Chronicle in Accra, said but for the cowardice and procrastination of the likes of Boakye Djan, the rage and anger of the soldiers would not have reached such heights and cost the lives of “so many of our generals. Had we moved in 77 or even 78 as urged by some of us the explosion would have been much better managed.”

“Boakye was wasting time and he lost all his friends as a result of his cowardice. The first time we wanted to move he said ‘No! No! No! you should wait.’ The second time he said we should allow him to move from the Directorate of Public Relations (DPR) to the Military Intelligence (MI).

“When he got there he said we should wait for him to move into a unit so that he can have combat troops so he again applied to move from MI to 5BN and still he could not do anything,” he said. The ex-President continued that, “Here I am, Boakye Djan is at 5BN. He said we should wait when he is on duty at Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). There we waited again, days, weeks no action. So I asked that we should move; then he said he didn’t have ammunition. He wanted everything to wait for him.”

Mr. Rawlings, however, said that they all tolerated Bokaye Djan’s procrastinations for a while because they knew that he was an intelligent soldier who could mobilize the soldiers for the action but because of his chronic cowardice he lost most of his friends, leaving me as his only sympathetic friend.

KONADU’S CONFIRMATION

The former First Lady, Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings, who appeared visibly shocked by some of the public pronouncements of Major Boakye Djan, said on the evening of the coup, she was at her mother’s house when a military vehicle pulled up.

“Larry Lee, Richard Fodjuor, Bannerman and, possibly, Opoku Lartey came out and asked me if I knew the house of Boakye Djan’s wife because they were looking for him and they understand he was at his wife’s house. I was a bit scared but Larry assured me that it wasn’t anything serious”- Konadu.

“I went with them to Achimota School, where I knew Opeibea (Boakye Djan’s wife) was living. They showed us the house and when Larry asked whether Boakye Djan was there, somebody said he was not there. Larry started shouting, you coward, come out, we know you are here, come out. There we heard a female voice inside saying, he is coming, he is dressing, Larry said, we have finished the fight, and come out too you are still hiding here”- Konadu.

The ex-first lady said at that juncture she drove off in her mum’s car and left them there.

According to Mr. Rawlings, the hero claims of Boakye Djan are absolutely hollow because the event of June 4 was brought about by hundreds of heroes all over the armed forces and that no single person could have brought it about.

“I played my part and so did hundreds of others, including officers and other ranks, even though the officers were the most threatened and that was why most of them escaped, notably Boakye Djan who, early that morning, sneaked through the bushes behind Burma Camp and went to Achimota School where he cowardly hid throughout the action.

“Though I respect heroic deeds, heroic claims are not my cup of tea,” Rawlings said.

Mr. Rawlings noted that while Boakye Djan’s cowardice was at its peak, the anger of the other ranks had also reached its zenith, adding that the command chain within the Armed Forces had broken down so much that there was a time when the other ranks were in charge of the country for two weeks.

He said when he could not wait any more he began scouting for people, adding that it was there that he spotted one Mensah Poku at the Mortar Unit.

The ex-President added that even senior officers in the Armed Forces knew that a coup could take place anytime. “I told them that they should just leave the keys of the Armory at a place where I could find them. I said this openly but nothing happened.” He said there were so many occasions that “we assembled for action but for one reason or the other somebody never showed up.”

“Ask Boakye Djan, he can’t tell you anything he did. He ran away through the bush. He knows he is going to be exposed so he says his chief operative of the June 4 was Lt. Agyeman Bio. He uses Bio’s name because he is dead,” Rawlings said.

According to the ex-President, Lt. Bio died on June 4 and “he was shouting let’s save Rawlings! Let’s save Rawlings! He committed suicide long before the operation started.”

The ex-President charged that if Major Boakye Djan is the hero of June 4, as he is trumpeting, why was he not the chairman.

BOAKYE DJAN WALKS AWAY

Speaking to The Chronicle in his hotel room at Labone last Thursday, Major(rtd) Boakye Djan declined to discuss the specific issues raised by the ex-president, insisting that he was not prepared to answer such questions but wanted to tell his side of the story.

The Chronicle reminded him that he was being offered the best professional opportunity to respond to the specific issues raised by the ex-president. He got up from his seat at a point in the interview and said, “Listen, I don’t want to talk to you again, I say I want to tell my side of the story, I don’t want to talk to you.”

When he finally settled down to resume the interview, he told The Chronicle that he was the one who made Rawlings the chairman of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. “I put his name on the board at the Air Force station as the chairman,” he said.

On the role he played on June 4, Boakye Djan said that June 4 was planned in four phases and that he was involved in all the stages.

“Phase one was the preparatory stage, phase two was the firefight phase. Phase three was the administration phase and phase four was the handing over and post-handing over phase”

“So what role did you play in all the phases?” The Chronicle asked. “I was involved throughout the stages. It depends on the phase you are concerned with,” he answered.

The retired major said that he got involved in the preparatory stage soon after he joined the Armed Forces on October 31, 1970.

He continued: “Even though it was a civilian administration, what I heard and saw within Military circles was that our constitutional stability could not be taken for granted, even as a cadet. So immediately I passed out a few friends and I got together and discussed about the need to set up a conscious group within the Army to educate the soldiers about the need to sustain democracy in the country”

For this reason, Boakye Djan said he led his group to establish the Free Africa Movement within the Armed Forces, which he said operated underground because they could not go political in the Army.

When he was asked about the members of this group, he said he could not tell The Chronicle the names of the members because some are still serving officers in the Ghana Armed Forces, while others have passed away. The only member whose name he mentioned was one Lt. Bannerman of the Air Force.

He said his underground movement used the teaching of current affairs to organize and recruit officers because at that time they needed to pass their current affairs exams before they could be promoted and he was in charge of the teaching of current affairs.

Major Boakye Djan said the Free Africa Movement continued with its underground work until the 1972 coup, a situation that he said confirmed their fears that the country’s democracy was at risk.

“What even disturbed us most was when people like Col. Tachie-Menson used to throw their weight around that it would take them at least 20 years in government. That was very scary because they would have ended their rule in 1992,” he said.

Boakye Djan said the Free Africa Movement then began to shape their policies and responses to stop the Acheampong government from staying in power until 1992.

“So we (members of the group) came out with a cut-off point that if by 1984 they were still in power we would remove them because that would have been the rank where most of us would have been Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels and be in the position to move troops,” he said.

Boakye Djan said it was in that preparatory move that May 15 came and Rawlings, who was also espousing a similar policy as the Free Africa Movement, was picked and tried.

“So when it became clear that he was going to be executed, we took a position that the senior officers had no moral or legal basis to try him because they themselves were walking illegalities, because they had overthrown a constitutionally elected government.”

Boakye Djan said they overthrew the Akuffo regime because they wanted to hold the officers who overthrew the Busia government accountable for committing high treason.

The retired officer added that it was because Rawlings was espousing the same ideas that the Free Africa Movement had that they fought for his release, which also led to the June 4 uprising.

Boakye Djan said Rawlings is no longer his friend and that whether Bio committed suicide or not, is for the ex-President to prove because what he was told was that Bio died during the fighting.

He concluded that there were three reasons for the June 4 uprising — to remove the Akuffo regime from power, reconstruct the criminal justice system and handover to a civilian administration.

“This is exactly what we did,” he added.