Book Review: Never Say Die! The Autobiography Of A Ghanaian Statesman

Author: Dr. Nyaho-NyahoTamakloe And Dr. Felix Odartey-Wellington
365 pp., Ghana Universities Press

On the occasion of the re-launch of Never Say Die!, a delighted reader takes another look at the man Nyaho-Nyaho and the fine book he has so masterfully penned.

Genuine autobiographies–that is to say very few autobiographies–tell it as it is, affording the past a distinct otherness while allowing the chief characters some latitude to situate themselves in our world. As they struggle to gather together the pieces of their usually effortful and eventful lives, we hear two audible yet instructive voices talking through theirpersonas: There is the voice that drives the narrative, and the other voice lodged deep within that connects us to the events and the places. The rest is the story of the person we know, complete with all the details we didn't know.

Never Say Die!,NyahoNyaho-Tamakloe'sautobiography, is at once gripping and revealing, offering the reader a penetrating examination of the multi-ethnic political smorgasbord that is Ghana. He avoids what he calls “rhetorical semiotics”to advance the narrative; instead, he deploys confrontational honesty as a plot device to present Ghana in a style that is brutally frank and disarmingly true. He lifts off with a roar, asserting that ethnicity “cannot be divorced from the military-led coups that have characterised Ghana's political landscape, and by logical extension, politics in Ghana.”

Nyaho-Tamakloe is a medical doctor, diplomat and always a politician. This, the younger generation in Ghana, know. Well, he had also been in the 'firing line' of football administration in Ghana. This is also common knowledge. What the young reader may not know is that he had joined the military as a medical officer from Czechoslovakia, imprisoned for plotting a coup, and while in prison elevated topractice his craft on fellow inmates, in a classic case of professional misadventure. Nyaho Clinic came later.

As a soldier, he tells his mind in an almost no-nonsense fashion–from the perspective of a founding NPP member whose labour and ideas shaped big decisions, and also as an army captain who sought to torpedo the political process. So he knows coups happen because of “personal feelings of disgruntlement.” But he also believes that the command element is crucial in every coup. He joined the Minyillacoup because he was convinced a senior officer leading the action “would maintain command and discipline” to avoid bloodbath. The absence of the command element is what led to the June 4 brutalities, which Nyaho refuses to call an uprising or a revolution. He calls it an “orgy of violence and mean-spiritedness” marked by “entrepreneurial reticence.”

There have been compromises across the ideological political divides that do not divide us anymore. The Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition has formed alliances with parties with anNkrumahist orientation. The progressive Alliance and the Great Alliance speakto thecontention that both the NPP and the NDC are made up of people who think and act alike. If footsoldiers from the two parties “think they deserve a carte blanche to appropriate property and government institutions”, it is because of what Nyaho terms the “commoditization of our politics” where “political office can be bought and sold.”

Anyhow, Never Say Die! is the culmination of several ironies long conceived in the womb of time. If the pages turn seamlessly in silken prose, it is because every sentence has benefitted from the scholarship of a communications professor who coauthored the bookwith his doctor friend. Dr. Felix Odartey-Wellington plies his trade at Cape Bretton University in Canada, where he obliged to tend his side of what he calls a “telepathic relationship” that had bonded the two since the academic was a baby. Dr.Nyaho-Tamakloe had held baby Felix in his arms for treatment at the 37 Military Hospital.

There is a poignant irony you cannot miss: Felix's father, celebrated Major-GeneralNeville Odartey-Wellington, was a cabinet member of the SMC administration that Captain Nyaho-Tamakloe plotted to overthrow. With Nyaho in and out of prison in Ghana and Felix defending offenders from Akufo-Addo's chambers as a lawyer, and later as an academic in Canada, they did not anticipate that media ecologist Marshall McLuhan spoke for this book when he predicted a global village in 1962. And perhaps, it also serves their purposes that they have in a bold way actualisedVictor Owusu's advice when Nyahopaid him a visit many years ago. The veteran politician was working on a similar politician-academic autobiographical enterprise when he admonished young Tamakloe to also pen his experiences. Well, Never Say Die! is the product.

The two authors enjoy a good yarn, and it shows in the sequencing of events, which gives the reader the pleasure to blend in and also stand out like a vicarious participant. With the headlamps of a taxi cab as the only source of light, it is heartwarming to imagineDrNyaho-Tamakloe delivering a baby on a pavement floor in a street corner in Accra, cutting his umbilical cord, extracting the placenta and tying the ends with ordinary needle and black thread. He was in pajamas, all covered in blood. The description of this experience, as well as the gory scenes of prisoner treatment at Nsawam prisons, where inmates had become somnambulists who sleep on their feet, would make good reading for anybody who also enjoys a good yarn.

It is to Nyaho-Tamakloe's credit that Never Say Die!distances itself from the usual autobiographical format, by avoiding the temptation of creatingheroic transplants. In fact, there are no heroes in this book at all, real or imagined. The narrative motor is powered by a deliberate effort to project good institutions and clever leadership as solutions to our many political and social problems. In the end, he warns that “Should we continue to sow winds of ethnic propaganda, we will reap the whirlwind.” He calls for effective leadership to stamp out “ethno-political mobilization” and a deliberate effort to inject discipline into our politics. He signs off with a promise: “Ghana has the potential to succeed.” Never Say Die!

KwesiTawiah-Benjamin
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