A founding father of the governing New Patriotic Party, Dr Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe, has advised the youth to have a profession to fall back on first before going into politics, as people with “good backgrounds make better politicians”.

The politician was speaking on Straight Talk on Class91.3FM with Felicity Naana Nelson on Thursday, 26 March 2020.

Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe, who is also a medical doctor by profession and was President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA) from 2004 to 2005, also bemoaned the trend of young people getting into politics with the perception that it is a money-making field.

He said: “Now there are lots of young people who think getting into politics will bring them to the fore as far as national politics is concerned and also unfortunate, they think it’s a money-making area; that’s totally wrong. I don’t know of elderly people who have probably gone into politics without objective... When I say young people, where we have instances, young men in tertiary education leaving university and then jumping straight in the political arena. I think that is wrong because most of the elderly people I know who got themselves involved in politics, they all had professions – all of them."

In his view, young people should not make politics their main stepping stone in life but rather ensure that they have a profession to stand on.

“When we were kids, most politicians were lawyers, almost all of them – lawyers or journalists...well, one can say the political arrangement then was quite different from what we have now. There’s no doubt about that but the point I’m saying now, for me personally is that I don’t think a young man in tertiary institutions should just leave university and then jump into the political arena, no. I’m not saying he shouldn’t do politics but he should set up his own base first because the way politics goes in this country, what I have seen so far, when Nkrumah was around, I was quite a juvenile, so, I can remember some of these things when the political position changes, and there you’ll see the need for somebody not to depend on somebody for a living.

"You can go into politics but don’t make it your main stepping stone. You should have your own profession; when we talk of a profession, I’m not talking about law, medicine, no, you can be a carpenter, if you have the interest to go into national politics, you have every right to do that but make sure you have something to stand on and many a time, people with good backgrounds make better politicians,” Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe stated.