"Great idea," declares Rev. Agbali in responding to the request to
evaluate Rawlings via some disciplinary boundaries (N. 933)

Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are excellent, but
it seems that the very segmentation and the specific disciplinary
spheres to provide answer to the Rawlings and other African leaders
are themselves too narrow and magisterially privileging some arena of
disciplinary constructs to the elimination of others. Can a farmer or
agriculturalist, an anthropologist, journalists, theologians, women
studies, human rights activists, and even non-scholar contribute
something worthwhile, appropriate and constructive toward a better
deconstruction- or demythologization- of Rawlings rather than these
specific disciplinary constructs- economics, sociology, political
science, etc- so well prescribed but still enormously privileged as
elitist in providing insights to the enigmas that people like
Rawlings, Babangida, and other African erstwhile leaders- including
some serving ones- have turn out to be? Or is this a pedantic
approach that eliminates other constructive disciplinary spheres that
can be equally meaningful in their contributions? I am actually
amazed that Sadiz left out even his own discipline of literature, yet
African and non-African literary scholars, through their intentional
focusing and inputs regarding the African political landscapes (Wole
Soyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Chinua Achebe among many others)
have vitally presented and represented the political landscape
fervently. Thus, even to ask further must valuable constructs
directed in such terms be actually scholarly, does it have to be, and
should it ought be?

Just some thoughts, though I agree with the tenor that a singular
perspective can never fully mythologize- or is it even mystify- or
achieve the opposite regarding people like Rawlings, whose embodiment
embellishes balloon different kind of pantrophic ideals, rhetorical
instincts, adjectival coloration, and nuanced perspectives, all
depending upon which angle of the mirror one is trudging in viewing
his three dimensional image.

In my mind, I suppose that great leaders, in spite of their flaws and
even frailty, are simply known and venerated, without much
dissension, but that those maybe great, but have not earned unanimous
lulations from the depth of the people's canonization process, have
another set of abjectival qualifications such as controversial,
failures, monsters, weaklings, and such.
Maybe Rawlings is such an enigmatic in-between that many Ghanaians
are yet to be decisive about the impact of his many years of
rulership and domination over their lives, thus they have decidedly
withheld their having to arbitrarily sing  him "Subito Sancto" just
yet. At least Rawlings need to wait for another era, presumably at
his death, or if he is lucky before then for those of us who will be
alive to really witness the stuff that he was for Ghana. Whether, he
was a force of blight or brightness?  What a fate! I guess, that all
things considered, Rawlings greatness as a leader, is for Ghanaians
to trumpet, sounding his own megaphone, seems to have minimized that,
and he seems that he strenously attempting to ensure enthroning his
tenure and era onto the golden tray of Ghana's history. As it is for
now there seems that there is no "golden stool" just yet for
Rawlings, and only history will tell when he would deserve such
stool. Let's see if Rawlings is the stuff of history!