….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.
Source: GhanaWeb
