The young lady recounts how her father died during the military era and relishes the former president who passed on hours ago should have suffered same fate before dying
It was a black Thursday, November 12, as former Ghana president Jerry John Rawlings was pronounced dead at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra.
According to reports, Rawlings died at the age of 73 after battling with Coronavirus disease but Serwaa Acheampong, daughter of statesman Kutu Acheampong insists his death should have been a painful one for him and his family.
Nana Serwaa Acheampong writes….
“Fmr. President J.J. Rawlings is dead said my visitor, I said it’s fake news! What’s the source I asked, Graphic online he said. Then it must be true. How? Was he sick? We hadn’t heard that he was sick. I checked my phone, loads of posts confirming that yes indeed he was dead!
When he was alive people often asked me how I felt about him. My response, nothing and it’s true, because if I had spent my life hating him for having killed my father, what a wasted life that would have been.
Now he’s dead, and somehow I feel robbed, cheated because unlike my father, Rawlings’ death was too easy, too comfortable probably. Death by firing squad, that’s how my father died, when I was just 6 years old.
At the time I didn’t understand, but as I grew up, it started to become clearer, I had no one to call father. Now I think, his children and I are the same fatherless! But at least they grew up knowing their father, they grew up being provided for and protected by their father. So no we are not the same. Rawlings took my father away from me by firing squad, leaving me with no father to provide for me or protect me.
Rawlings is dead and I feel cheated.
If there is an afterlife where you meet those who have gone before, I wonder what Rawlings will say to my father, who showed him kindness, and all the others he killed so ruthlessly. In this life, Rawlings never acknowledged the pain he caused so many of us, never said sorry for our loss or showed remorse.
Nothing! So Rawlings is dead, to me his death was too easy, too comfortable, unlike the death he gave my father and countless others. Aside from this I feel nothing about the man, except pity for his children who now know the pain of losing a father.
Thank you to all those reaching out to me at this moment.”