Esther Odartey-Wellington has expressed her utter dismay in the fact that consequent governments, following the release of National Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations in 2005, have not finished the job of helping the nation heal fully from the June 4 Uprising and its bloody aftermath.

Speaking Friday, on JoyFM’s Super Morning Show, she asked, “why has it [government] not carried out the recommendations in full?” 

Her query comes in reaction to the recently aired JoyNews documentary, ‘Scars of the Revolution’. The documentary, which catalogues the ‘crimes that shook the nation’, is about the 1979 and 1981 revolutions masterminded by Ft. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings.

The Scars of the Revolution documentary revealed that recipients of monetary and material compensation were not satisfied because they think it did not measure up to the level of severity of the dreadful acts on humanity in that era of Ghana’s history.

Esther, whose father, Major General Neville Alexander Odartey-Wellington, was executed during the June 4 Uprising, said “the NRC has not finished its job.”

“People were put there because they were respectable and eminent; they knew what they were doing, they did all this work and nothing has come out of it,” she stressed.

The NRC was instituted in 2002 to establish an accurate, complete, and historical record of violations and abuses of human rights inflicted on people by holders of public office during the country’s tumultuous period of unconstitutional governments and to compensate victims and relatives of victims who had been greatly affected by those horrors per their petition.

In addition, Ms Odartey-Wellington also disclosed that the NRC’s recommendation that executed army officers during the June 4 Uprising should be honoured, has not been done by any government.

“It’s not one party’s business nor is it an individual’s political ideology,” she said. “It’s not a party issue, it’s not a political issue, it is a human issue.”

Ms Odartey-Wellington said that when a government decides to set up a truth and reconciliation commission, she expects subsequent governments to follow up on the recommendations and cannot understand why no government has continued the work of the Commission.

She insisted that the way forward following the revelations made by  ‘Scars of the Revolution’, is to confront the wrongs that occurred in Ghanaian history just like the Germans did with their awful historic events.

Referencing an excerpt from a speech made by former German President, Richard von Weizsäcker, she explained that everybody should reflect on what part they played in the events leading up to the uprisings and the aftermath so that Ghanaians can take lessons from the past.

She asks that the government, which has the power to continue fulfilling the recommendations of the NRC, should “for once, place themselves in the positions of the relatives of the victims,” to empathise their long-suffering and deep national wounds and to help them finish the work of the Commission.