Prof. Kwamena Ahwoi’s “Working With Rawlings” book has chronicled possible instances that led to the fall out between Jerry John Rawlings and his one-time “discovery” Vice President John Atta Mills.
He said that Rawlings’ wife, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings had a huge role to play in the ‘fight’.
According to Ludwig Hlodze, Special Assistant to President Mills and one-time National Youth Organizer of the NDC, the origin of the soured relationship between Rawlings and Mills started in the 2004 presidential election.
He said President Mills told him that at a one-on-one meeting with Nana Konadu, the latter had expressed interest in being his vice presidential candidate in that election. Mills had frankly and honestly told her that that was out of the question.
Ludwig suspects that Nana Konadu must have reported this to Rawlings and that must have fed into the already simmering tensions between the two of them.
John Henry Martey Newman, President Mills’ Chief of Staff and close personal friend traces the origin of the rift to Mills’ refusal to choose Nana Konadu as his running mate in the 2004 presidential election.
This was made worse in 2008 when Mills this time refused to accept Nana Konadu’s choice of a running mate for him in the person of Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, who was later Attorney General and Minister for Justice of Ghana in President Mills’ era.
The climax of the soured relationship, according to Nana Ato Dadzie, President Rawlings’ Chief of Staff was when Mills won the presidency and refused to order the prosecution of NPP officials who had served in President Kufuor’s Government and who, in his view, had committed crimes.