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27.07.2022 Feature Article

It Is Edudzi Tamakloe Rather Whose Kernel Was Cracked for Him by Chairman Rawlings

It Is Edudzi Tamakloe Rather Whose Kernel Was Cracked for Him by Chairman Rawlings
27.07.2022 LISTEN

It was the line that Lawyer Godwin Edudzi Tamakloe shamelessly plagiarized from my old, immortalized and globally renowned and celebrated English Literature Professor, Mr. Chinua Achebe, that got me interested in commenting on the recent amateurish attempt by the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority to preempt the implementation of the Electronic Transactional Levy or E-Levy Act, in particular the legal fracas and tussle that erupted between Lawyer Tamakloe and Attorney-General Godfred Yeboah-Dame. Mr. Tamakloe, who was at the Supreme Court of Ghana (SCOG) to represent the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority, rather than the long-term and general interest of the nation at large, virulently accused the Attorney-General, who also doubles as the Minister of Justice, of playing the partisan political role of a New Patriotic Party (NPP) propagandist, rather than a politically neutral Chief Attorney of the Akufo-Addo-led New Patriotic Party-sponsored government (See “I Prefer Being an ‘Embarrassment’ of a Lawyer to a ‘Dishonest,’ ‘NPP Propagandist’ of an AG – Edudzi Tamakloe to Godfred Dame” 5/6/22).

Now, I find Mr. Tamakloe’s characterization of the inimitably skillful role played by the Attorney-General in the afore-referenced case as that of an “NPP Propagandist” to be rather ironic, because it was Mr. Tamakloe who had actually played the strategically peevish and nuisance role of a political propagandist for the operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), for the plain and simple reason that the E-Levy Act or Law had already been legitimately passed by a Full-House of Parliament when a characteristically cynically disgruntled National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority decided to grieve the same before the Apex Court, on the patently frivolous and downright specious grounds that the E-Levy Act or Law had been passed without the requisite parliamentary quorum in Ghana’s National Assembly.

Now, this ratiocinative tack or trend of logical reasoning, on the part of Mr. Tamakloe, that is, was blatantly and egregiously antithetical to common sense because, indeed, there had been a quorum, or at least something very close to it, when the E-Levy Bill was finally unfurled before a plenary session of Parliament for a vote. What a clearly disadvantaged and losing National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority had done was to characteristically and scandalously take to its heels or boyishly and cantankerously boycott the proceedings of the august House, a process to which absolutely no Honorable Member therein had been barred or prejudicially precluded. What had actually happened was that a remarkable percentage of the NDC’s Parliamentary Minority Membership had flatly and deliberately refused to show up in the Chamber of the august floor of the House in order to cast their ballot, per the express instruction of the leadership of the Parliamentary Minority, naively hoping that such patently infantile behavior would be lunatically rewarded with the failure of the passage of the E-Levy Bill.

But, of course, in so unwisely resorting to a strategic sabotaging of the passage of the E-Levy Bill, the Haruna Iddrisu Gang had actually auspiciously played themselves into the hands of their main rivals and political protagonists. They had, in effect, put themselves exactly and precisely where the Mensah-Bonsu Gang needed them to be. But the real question of Mr. Tamakloe’s having royally embarrassed himself or literally screwed up, in mainstream American slang, as Attorney-General Yeboah-Dame sought to explain to the media, was the glaring fact that counsel for the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Minority had royally and epically failed to prove that, indeed, the E-Levy Act or Law had been illegitimately passed on the blindside of the NDC’s Parliamentary Minority and therefore its implementation deserved to be promptly aborted.

Now, the jejune attempt by NDC-MPs like Mr. Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor to dust and gussy up the indelibly amateurish performance of Lawyer Tamakloe before the Apex Court actually vindicates Attorney-General Yeboah-Dame’s observation that Lawyer Tamakloe had needly and unwisely embarrassed himself by allowing his morbidly partisan interests to cloud his common sense and judgment. And it is this egregious faux pas that makes Mr. Tamakloe’s rather quaint riposte that the “Attorney-General’s childhood kernel [had] been cracked for him,” in unmistakable Achebeian parlance, all the more absurd and inescapably ironic. You see, the fact of the matter is that it was Lawyer Godwin Edudzi Tamakloe who was once literally led by the hand of the late President Jeremiah “Jerry” John Rawlings to literally twist the arms of some lily-livered members of the Apex Court in favor of the shameless extortion of the Klottey-Korle Parliamentary Seat for Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, a case in which the eldest Rawlingses daughter had absolutely no standing.

To be certain, among the very first columns which I had intended to compose and publish in the wake of the epochal passing of Chairman Rawlings but had never quite got it was to have been titled “When Rawlings Died, He also Died with Edudzi-Tamakloe’s Legal Practice Mojo.” That was precisely what the Attorney-General meant, when Mr. Yeboah-Dame aptly and recently described Lawyer Edudzi-Tamakloe’s legal practice and performance skills as a withering embarrassment of the highest order.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

July 23, 2022

E-mail: [email protected]

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