Where is Your Basis of Comparison, Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe?

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

At the time of this writing (4/19/13), a prominent member of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and a former cabinet member of the Kufuor administration had e-mailed me to say that Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe's curiously critical attacks against the key operatives of the NPP, notably NPP parliamentarians, may well be due to the fact of Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe's having forged a purportedly unique and/or special relationship with the mother of President John Dramani Mahama.

The e-mail informant, who is also a former NPP-MP from the Central Region, shall remain anonymous because he volunteered his information and has not authorized me to publicly disclose his name. Anyway, my unsolicited informant further observed that it would be instructive for yours truly to explore this newsworthy angle vis-a-vis the recent curious and decidedly anti-NPP pronouncements of Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe.

Well, I promptly wrote back to inform my unsolicited informant that I am not currently resident in Ghana - and, in fact, have been out of the country for nearly three decades - and would, therefore, prefer that he afforded me the proverbial lowdown on whatever relationship that he knew Mr. Mahama's mother to be having with Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe, which may have over-determined the latter's rather curious pronouncements on the activities of the main opposition New Patriotic Party, of which latter political organization the subject of this write-up is a prominent member.

I also promptly added that while, indeed, I shared ideological inclination, or suasion, with members of the New Patriotic Party, I was not a card-carrying or registered member of the NPP and had, in fact, been summarily expelled from NPP-USA in 2008, primarily because I had dared to criticize the then-President Kufuor on a point of ideological principle. "The Edweso/Ejisu boys expelled me from NPP-USA," I informed my unsolicited informant, and also quickly added that I had absolutely no intention of rejoining the NPP as a card-carrying member, although I intended to continue to staunchly back its ideological principles and objectives.

Anyway, the point that I want to make here is that Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe cannot eat his proverbial cake and have it, too! For instance, the former ambassador to Eastern Europe is widely reported to have observed that key operatives of the NPP and the rump-Convention People's Party do Ghanaians a great disservice when they carp President Mahama for having achieved a piddling little in the three months or one-hundred days that he has been in office; and also that the NPP would have done no remarkably better, had Nana Akufo-Addo been declared winner of Election 2012 by Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan (See "I Don't Think NPP Would Have Done Better In Its First 100 Days - Nyaho-Tamakloe" MyJoyOnline.com 4/15/13).

The problem with this kind of largely emotive effusion is that the critic offers no discursively sustainable basis for comparison. For instance, Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe could have juxtaposed his memory of the first one-hundred days of the Kufuor administration with that of Mr. Mahama and drawn his conclusions objectively therefrom. Instead, the man has decided to just annoyingly blow hot air, as Americans are wont to say. For example, during his two-term presidency, did Mr. Kufuor appoint regional ministers only to reshuffle the same barely a month after the latter had assumed their respective posts?

You see, a man - and in this case - a veteran politician - who wants to be taken seriously argues on the basis of objective data or statistics, rather than visceral gratuitousness. On the one hand, Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe pleads for patience because after one-hundred days of his assumption of the august reins of governance, President Mahama is still in the process of putting his team of cabinet appointees together; while on the other hand claiming, rather mischievously, that, in fact, "President Mahama has been able to do all the principal things expected of him as a head of state within his first 100 days [in office] and thus the criticisms are 'unnecessary.'"

One thing I can say almost without the shadow of a doubt is that if Nana Akufo-Addo had been aptly, or legitimately, declared winner of Election 2012, one-and-half tons of gold would not have so criminally been airlifted to Iran in exchange for a two-day official visit to Ghana by President Ahmadinejad, under the specious guise of a non-aligned confabulation. President Obama must be ruing the day that he made Ghana the historic beach-head of his African development policy agenda.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
April 20, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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