Former President of Ghana, Jerry John Rawlings has died, Ghanaian media reported on Thursday.

Rawlings is suspected to have died from COVID-19 complications at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra. The development comes less than a month after he buried his mother.

His emergence on the Ghanaian political state was first through a bloody coup which he led as a flight lieutenant in the Ghana Air Force in 1979. Earlier, on May 15, 1979, just five weeks to scheduled general elections, he had attempted a coup against the military government of the time but failed.

His brutal cleaning of the country’s political stable, after the successful coup, involved  the killing of virtually all the prominent Ghanaian leaders including those who had been heads of state.

Even so, he was hailed as a revolutionary by the Ghanaian people. He is believed  to have eliminated corruption from the country’s political system and his years in power are known to have led to the country’s economic recovery.

In 1981, he transmuted into a civilian President having won the national election. In that capacity, he ruled Ghana until 2001 when he took a bow from the country’s political stage.

Until his death, Jerry John Rawlings was still highly regarded by most Ghanaians as the man who initiated the economic prosperity which the country enjoys today. To them, Rawlings was a hero.

He was until his death, the African Union’s envoy to Somalia.