A sequence of June 4, 1979 actions and their multiplying effects confirmed my suspicion things weren’t right.
Early that morning, I was in a taxi to the airport to fly back to continue my studies at the University of Lagos. My former roommate at the Commonwealth Hall was seeing me off.
Onto the Aburi road, a voice boomed from a passing car’s radio. ‘Sounds like Nkrumah speech,’ I said. As we approached the old airport roundabout, the driver of a taxi approaching from the opposite direction (Accra town) was waving and shouting frantically. We should turn back because there was a coup in town and people were being killed. I had spotted a helicopter hovering over the airport. We quickly turned back and were offloaded at the Commonwealth Hall Observatory. Vandals were gathered bewildered.
Speculations were flowing when Mr Professor, then a law lecturer and to-be chair of the notorious citizen vetting committee, showed up. The law place was a key action point, the brains behind the coup, where laws were written, judged at vetting committees or Kangaroo people’s court and executed at Gondar Barracks.
‘Things are a tossup but it appears the boys are winning,’ he said.
Moments later, troops showed up at the Observatory firing wildly into the air. Their leader, a certain captain managed to calm them down. ‘Things are tough,’ he complained in anxiety. ‘We desperately need your support. You students should go and demonstrate to support us.’ Students had demonstrated in support of coups in 1966 and 1972. So why not one more coup?
University buses were mobilised and students hit town. I joined one of them because I thought it would be a conveniently safe way of reaching my cousin’s house. He lived right across the police headquarters and it had been announced on radio that the place would be bombed because General Odartey-Wellington was holed in there.
I arrived to witness soldiers charging from behind the police headquarters building, shooting in our direction with bullets flying over our heads, us lying flat on the carpet.
Apparently, the general was rather at Nima Police station where we learned later he had been hunted down and killed. Lt Col A.A. Enningful heading the trial of Flt Lt Rawlings and his accomplices for a May 15, 1979 putsch and Major Samuel Boateng Okyere, a prosecution witness were also killed.
Airport closed, I eventually, had to cross the Aflao border through the bush and to Lagos by road to complete my studies at the University of Lagos. I had fled Acheampong following a brutal police beating on May 13, 1977 during a student demonstration.
I yearned, like many of my compatriots, for civilian rule. I had flown to cast one vote during the second round of the 1979 elections. Yet as I readied to return home in December 1981, June 4 returned in December 31, forcing me into a 12-year exile.
So the student support was choreographed. People say in 1966 support for the coup was spontaneous. It wasn’t and couldn’t. I have classmates, dead and alive, who would testify to a kind of blackmailing coercion to get us to march in favour of it. January 13, 1972, maybe.
Today if lawlessness is rife in the motherland, if mobs are forcibly freeing incarcerated suspects, if a political leadership was rotten corrupt the past eight years and before, if dirt and filth engulf the environment, they have roots in June 4, 1979. It is the second worst motherland’s day of shame after December 31, 1981 (the worst) and February 24, 1966 (the third worst).
Its symbolism is jailbreak, summary execution of people who had built careers without proof of charges; the beginning or justification for vigilantism. The ‘babies with sharp teeth’ of recent years are a throw-up of June 4, 1979 as aggravated by December 31, 1981.
The May 15, 1979 putsch was an insurrection. Add that to the June and December ones. Collectively, they were anti-lawfulness. The executed generals did nothing worse than the babies with sharp teeth. I don’t remember schools for children with disabilities being closed from 1972 to early 1979 as happened under the 2009-2016 administration.
Europe’s enlightened despots used the AFRC/PNDC brute force tactics to institutionalise discipline and lawfulness. AFRC/PNDC brute force has instituted vigilantism lawlessness (‘we no go sit down let them cheat us every day’). State sponsoring PDCs, WDCs, CDRs, CVCs, tribunals, cadre cropping in short, planted and nurtured the seeds of indiscipline the motherland has to endure today. State institutions must function as wings of the NDC but independently under NPP.
Let those who profited from June 4, 1979 celebrate. Those of us who feel victimised will mourn. That is the world I wish wasn’t but unfortunately is. Some people’s glorious day, my always remember doomsday.