General News of Friday, 27 February 2015
Source: The Informer
Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, a founding father of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), has dropped a bombshell, suggesting that his party’s 2016 Flagbearer, Mr. Williams Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, is not serious about winning the 2016 election to become President.
In an interview with Accra-based radio station, Starr 103.5 FM, Dr. Nyaho Tamakloe, not mincing words, pointed out that Nana Addo’s stony silence on Osafo Marfo’s alleged ethnically-divisive audio tape recording is not helping matters; and believes that Nana Addo is taking the NPP for granted.
He said, the party’s 2016 Flagbearer, who has made it his stock-in-trade not to condemn party members who claim to be working for him – of such pronouncements- should speak in order to save the party from its continuous stay in opposition.
“Nana Addo, to save this party of ours, must come down: either he distances himself from the statement of Yaw [Osafo-Maafo] or apologises to the people of this country…I personally think he is trying to take us for a ride,” the NPP founder-father is quoted to have said.
Though the former Finance/Youth and Sports Minister under John Agyekum Kufuor’s administration, in a press statement, claimed that the said tape recording has been falsified, Dr. Nyaho Tamakloe is of the strongest conviction that the comments alleged to have been made by his colleague could become a hindrance to the electoral fortunes of the party come next year.
“In [the] 2012 elections, we nearly won power, but for some of these statements. We would have won power, [but] similar statements were made by certain people just before the elections and that cost us a lot,” worried Nyaho Tamakloe pointed out.
A voice resembling that of Mr. Yaw Osafo Marfo, during a gathering of party members at Koforidua in the Eastern region, the former Finance and Economic Planning and also former Youth and Sports Minister, was heard saying: “…You have all the resources, but you have no say in the management of your resources, and that is what is happening. Your development depends on the one who has no resources.”
“You can’t say this openly,” he cautioned the Council members of the party’s Eastern regional branch when he met them; but added that they are at liberty to talk about it among Asantes.
“We should protect ourselves, we should protect our income. No one, who is the source of income, the source of revenue, the source of resources, allows another person without those resources the chance [to rule over them].
“It’s never done anywhere in the world. In the world over, it is the group with the most resources that rules and not the other way around.”
However, Yaw Osafo Marfo is accusing those behind the leaked audio tape of scheming (leaking the tape) to destroy his political career – and in all for monetary gains.
“There may be two reasons for anyone to secretly record me: one is to sell the tape for money and two, to mess me up…but of the two, I strongly suspect the monetary profit was the stronger motive,” he said, adding: “This shows how politics in Ghana is strongly coloured by money,” the embattled Osafo Marfo is on record to have said.
But political analysts hold the view that, Yaw Osafo Marfo will save himself from the huge embarrassment if he can produce the original tape recording of what he said exactly at the meeting, now that he wants the world to believe that the tape has been doctored.