Ghanaian leaders refuse to take criticism, Akufo-Addo not an exception – Nyaho-Tamakloe

Former Chairman of the Ghana Football Association, Dr. Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe has described as worrying, the refusal of Ghanaian leaders to accept criticism that comes from concerned citizens or personalities.

Speaking on the ’21 Minutes with KKB’ show, he bemoaned the situation where past and present leaders have outrightly rejected any form of criticism from persons they consider ‘opponents’ for reason that their censure may be mere ‘attacks’ on their administration or individual personalities.

“That has been the habit of most of our leaders, there’s no exception.”

“Our leaders right down from independence have been behaving the same way, they don’t want to be told, you are going wrong here, come this way, they get annoyed, right down from Nkrumah’s time.”.

“Kwame Nkrumah had a lot of advice how to handle certain things but he thought the people were against him and you see all these things are so clear that when people don’t see it, it worries me”, he said.

It is for this reason he says, many people have resorted to ‘sycophancy’ just to gain favor from the government in power at any given point in time, leaving the country to suffer dire consequences at the long run.

“We have always been pretending in this country, when the thing is bad, say it’s bad, we keep on pretending and by doing that, we fool our leaders, they think they are doing well”.

He also expressed disappointment about the suspension of some party executives under the NPP. President Akufo-Addo he believes, could have found a better way of handling the situation than he did.



“The only time I took a step back was after the Former party Chairman, Paul Afoko was suspended and also the suspension of Kwabena Agyapong and that also followed immediately with that of Sammy Crabbe. These are elected figures, people voted for them and I believe if you want to get rid of them, there’s a way you can, we have a constitution”.

“You’ll have to face facts, if it is wrong, it is wrong. Akufo-Addo was leader of the party then, if he didn’t find anything wrong with that, they wouldn’t have been dismissed.”