Mrs RAWLINGS is at it again. This time, she has accused the President and his Ministers of stealing. Speaking with Peter Clottey of the Voice of America (VOA) in an interview aired on Monday, April 2, 2007, the former Ghanaian First Lady minced no words when it came to the man she now loves to hate most: President John Agyekum Kufuor. “While he’s calling somebody a thief, they are busy stealing, while they are talking about somebody's wrong, they are doing worse. Is that the kind of person that should be running Ghana today after where we reached? We should have taken off in a positive direction instead of moving backwards before we start paddling forward again,” the VOA quoted Mrs Rawlings as saying. Mrs Rawlings was answering a question on a recent report by the Gye Nyame Concord newspaper which reported her as having said that President Kufuor is a crafty dictator. Though Mrs Rawlings denied using the exact phrase in her interview broadcast on Monday, she made it clear she is convinced the phrase befits the president and that she would gladly use it the next time around, subsequently justifying the description, while pouring more venom on the nation’s leader. “I didn't say that, but I think that it’s a nice phrase, and I would like to use it the next time. You have a situation where you have a president who is always talking about the rule of law and yet from what is going on, it’s a complete misrule of law.” Concord’s initial report of the former first lady description of Kufuor as a crafty dictator was based on a news report filed by Moyiga Nduru from Johannesburg, South Africa, following an interview Mrs Rawlings granted IPS, an African news wire service. In that interview, she stated that Ghanaians “…have a subtle dictator in Ghana. (President John) Kufuor's party, for example, doesn’t provide airtime on TV and radio to the opposition. Government agents constantly harass the opposition. There’s no level playing field in Ghana.” The report, titled “Africa: Democracy Takes Root in Some Countries, Falters in Others”, also suggested that Mrs Rawlings believes Ghana's democracy is on a downslide, despite global, appraisal that the country is one of the few states with a thriving democracy on the African continent. In her interview with the VOA on Monday, however, Mrs Rawlings rejected claims that her husband and immediate past President, Jerry John Rawlings, was a dictator. According to her, Rawlings did a lot for the average Ghanaian; something Kufuor has failed to do. “I think that my husband as a former president runs parallel with the current President Kufuor, they will never meet because my husband believes in the empowerment of the people ... he did not work to make himself rich or own properties ... on the other hand, Mr. Kufuor wants property owning democracy, and in his attempt to achieve that, there is a lot of corruption going on. Even his own party chairman told the whole country that, that is what was going on. So that is the basic difference between them.” Mrs Rawlings further defended her claim that Ghana’s democracy is on a downslide, citing her own media index to back her case. “If you look at the national newspapers for example, the NDC and other political parties are almost black out. .. it’s like the national media is a network for the ruling government. And yet it wasn’t like that when my husband was in power. When he was in office, the opposition NPP (New Patriotic Party) were not discriminated against, but today when the opposition holds any demonstration against the government, you would never see it on GBC (Ghana Broadcasting Co-operation),” she pointed out. She further repeated her pet concern that the Kufuor administration was witch-hunting her and her family. “Our life would have been okay for me if the political vindictiveness of this government were to stop. Because I was really looking forward to intensifying my work with the movement (31st December Women’s Movement) because I wouldn’t be a first lady anymore ... but it hasn’t been so because from 2001, we have had nothing but political harassment from the Kufuor administration,” she noted. “It started with the head of security at that time, who was General Hamidu who wrote a letter to the movement to declare our assets to him and so on. And we had to explain to him that we are an NGO, so we don’t have to declare our assets to him because we already did that with the Social Welfare. So, life has not been as smooth as one had wanted it to be because of political harassment and the lack of justice in the country for us”, she said. Source; Gye Nyame Concord