The 760 -page book Autobiography of a Ghanaian Statesman, Dr Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe has been republished a year after its first publication in May 2013.

The book titled: “Never Say Die,” was co-authored by Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe and Felix Odartey-Wellington.

Dr Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe is a medical doctor, ex-military officer, combative football administrator, hard talking politician and diplomat.

He is remembered for expelling top Hearts of Oak players for indiscipline during his brief term as the team’s boss in the 1980s.

He replaced them with untested young players like Shamo Quaye, Ablade Kumah, Ezekiel Alamu and Joe Addo, who soon became household names.

Many remember Nyaho-Tamakloe leading anti-governmental protests in the nineties in his all-white batakari, with his military shooting stick in hand.

He is also remembered for his fist-at a political rally in Tema and warning that Ghana would burn if his party, the New Patriotic Party (NPP), was robbed in the 1996 elections.This incident earned him the nickname “fire.”

In 2005, many greeted his appointment by John Agyekum Kufuor’s government as Ghana’s Ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro with astonishment.

The book includes in-depth details about chilling but sometimes humorous coup plots that the current generation might know little about, Nyaho-Tamakloe’s detention experiences, the origins of the NPP, backroom political intrigues and of course dramatic events in Ghana’s football history.

It was during his tenure as Chairman of Ghana Football Association (GFA) that the country successfully qualified for its first world cup debut.

He had resigned from his position as Chairman of GFA a few months before the Black Stars final qualifying match after raging conflicts with some stakeholders had made his position “untenable”.

Although the genre of Ghanaian political autobiographies is slowing picking up steam, “Never Say Die!” is unique because its subject has collaborated with an academia to develop the narrative and conduct supporting research.

Nyaho-Tamakloe co-author Dr Felix Odartey-Wellington is a lawyer and Cape Breton University Communication professor, who is himself no stranger to controversy.

He was purged as a presenter and news analyst on the popular GTV “Breakfast Show” and was reportedly locked up for making uncomplimentary remarks on air about President J.J Rawlings in 2000, an incident that Nyaho- Tamakloe recounts with some relish as “cementing the respect”he has for his co-author.

As Nyaho-Tamakloe explained last year at the well-attended launch of the book under the auspices of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Odartey-Wellington has been his long-time communication aids.

We also learned from the book that they are both dyed in the wool Hearts of Oak adherents. The synergy between them shows in the work.

The results of the collaboration are an enriched quality of narration that uses a direct writing style consistent with the desire to be a source of historical record.

The book is very well written and researched, and a real page turner: the reader is hard-pressed to put it down, that university libraries abroad including Stanford and the University of California, Los Angeles hold copies the first edition attests to the wealth of information in the book and its resonance beyond the shores of Ghana.

Never Say Die! Is organised into 11 chapters, together with a prologue and epilogue.

The epilogue allows the authors to project Nyaho-Tamakloe’s vision for Ghana. It projects what the preface describes as his social-practice oriented philosophical perspective on Ghanaian politics, which he complains is threatened by “commodification” as well as “Ethnocentric political mobilisation”.

The revisions to the book have introduced changes in form and substance. These include a larger reader-friendly font, as well as implications of the court settlement of the 2012 Presidential Elections among others.

While Never Say Die! is one of the most comprehensive of Ghanaian political memoirs in recent times, the voice we hear is more of Nyaho-Tamakloe the statesman or diplomat rather than Nyaho-Tamakloe the politician.Still, it is authentic Nyaho-Tamakloe.

He calls the killings of the eight senior military officers in 1979 by the AFRC “execution-style murders”.

The recent passing of prominent politicians like former Vice President Alhaji Aliu Mahama and former minister P.V. Obeng are sober reminders that Nyaho-Tamakloe is part of a disappearing generation of Ghanaian politicians, many of whom have not left memoirs from which future generations could learn from.

As Dr Odartey-Wellington notes in the preface, historically, western authors have written our history for us. We need to develop the culture of telling our own stories.