Jerry Rawlings: An Officer, a Statesman, and a Pan-Africanist

Abstract

The assurance that good government proceeds from a competitive multiparty system combined with constitutionally protected rights, checks and balances is now in question. Competing forms of government, including social democracy as practiced in Scandinavian countries, single-party dominant bureaucratic varieties as practiced in many Asian countries, liberal one-party rule as in Japan, illiberal constitutional democracy as in Singapore, liberal constitutional non-democracy as in Hong Kong, hereditary monarchy as in Bhutan and strong-man government as tended toward Latin America, appear both popular and successful for different reasons. Fundamentally, though, an explanation worthy of attention is that the success of these alternatives can be traced not fundamentally to their success at tackling adequately a sufficient number of fundamental political concerns (e.g., oppression, tribalism, lack of physical security, lack of economic security), but to deeper underlying reasons for political attitudes, including the saliency of dangers to safety and survival (Napier et al., 2018) and ambiguity concerning which groups or circumstances are perceived to constitute a threat (Sapolsky, 2018). We are suggesting that a model of governance employing the insights of Machiavelli may be a sound alternative for certain African countries.

How Rawlings Did Good, and not Harm, to the Ghanaian Republic?

The Dictatorial Authority Did Good, and Not Harm, to the Roman Republic; and the Authorities Citizens Take for Themselves Are Pernicious to Civil Life

Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy