The sages say necessity is the mother of invention and that is perfectly true. All things being equal, what happened yesterday can happen today.
When I was schooling in Takoradi during my salad years, General Acheampong was in power. After overthrowing the government of Professor K.A Busia, Chairman Acheampong, as he was popularly, called announced to the world that his government was not going to pay any foreign debt that Ghana owed to any country. “Yentua ka biara”, he said in plain Twi. That was why his government was nicknamed “Yentua Regime”. Acheampong will forever be remembered for interspersing the English language with Twi anytime he addressed the nation. Unlike Prime Minister Busia who had pleaded to our creditors to give Ghana a briefing space to pay our debt because according to the meek and mild Professor, “Okafuor didi” (The debtor must eat), General Acheampong threw diplomacy into the deep sea and refused to pay our foreign debt.
As a result, nations too refused to give Ghana any loan. In fact, General Acheampong’s regime was the only one which did not contract any foreign loan. Throughout the nearly seven years that he ruled the country, he travelled only once outside the country. He only went by road to Togo to meet with the late President Eyademah for only three hours and returned to Accra. Even though it was General Acheampong who bought our Presidential Jet, he never travelled in it until he was removed from office. It was Rawlings who used the jet until it was declared as a flying coffin and sold off.
In less than two years down the line, economic hardships started biting. We started experiencing a shortage of hard currencies to import commodities like wheat to feed the Takoradi Flour Mills and wheat flour became a scarce commodity. Bread too became scarce and the prices became unbearable to the consumer. Inflation hit the roof. That was when bakers started to bake cornbread. In the beginning, Acheampong during one of his broadcast to the nation encouraged Ghanaians to patronize cornbread because according to him ’panoo biara ye panoo’ (Every bread is bread).
At first consumers were reluctant to patronize cornbread but as time went on, cornbread became a delicacy and boarding schools in particular fed students with cornbread. Cornbread was heavier than wheat bread and one became very satisfied after consuming a few slices of cornbread. In no time, cornbread found its way into the hinterland and people could not distinguish between wheat bread and cornbread.
When General Acheampong introduced the Operation Feed Yourself programme, food became so abundant in Ghana that some rotted on the farms because farmers could not get buyers. Cocoa farmers got involved and the tonnage of cocoa produced in the country increased dramatically. Because of the rate at which we exported cocoa and other cash crops, our Balance of Payment appreciated considerably. The government had enough dollars and other hard currencies to import wheat and other essential commodities. The Takoradi Flour Mills produced flour enough to feed bakers and foolish as we were, our bakers stopped baking cornbread and went back to the baking of wheat bread. If we had concentrated on the baking of cornbread, the product would have been our national staple diet today. If China, a country of more than 1.4 billion, has rice as their staple food. I do not see why we cannot use maize as our national staple food. After all, Tuozaafi, Ga kenkey, Fante kenkey, Hausa koko, Fomfom, estew, mpampa, banku, apkele, nkyekyeraa, kaafaet are all made from maize.
Today, we have come face to face with a problem similar to what happened way back in the early seventies. Ukraine, the largest producer of wheat in particular and grains in general, is at war with Russia. For more than one and half years, a senseless war has been raging in Ukraine. Russia, the aggressor, has been blocking the black sea, a sea root where Ukraine uses to export its wheat and other grains. In fact, the black sea has been mined and cargo ships ply the route at their own peril. So now wheat is as precious as gold. India, another country that produces wheat, has refused to export its commodity to the outside world because the country has more than 1.2 billion souls to feed at hard times like this. So here we are again, struggling to get wheat flour to bake bread while our maize farmers continue to struggle to get buyers for their products. In fact, if they get buyers at all, the price is nothing good to write home about, considering the high cost of fertilizers and other farm inputs. We are sitting by the river but yet thirsty. Poor souls!!
The Russia/Ukraine war should teach us a lesson. General Acheampong said something which still rings in my already disturbed ears. He admonished Ghanaians to “grow what we eat and eat what we grow.” It was he who told us that the one who has eaten and is satisfied does not need milk (Nea wadidi amee nhia milk). That was when milk became scarce. We must revisit the production and consumption of cornbread.
The world is rich with independent creativity in thought and action. Nowadays we call it thinking outside the box although the term supposedly derives from a puzzle created by an early seventies British mathematician. Whatever you call it, it very often means going against the tide, which may not be the easiest way to go, anyway, but the moment you are able to face the tide and swim ahead, you subdue the waves.
My very dear and cherished reader, come along and travel with me down memory lane one more time. The only brand of rice that the country was importing was called Uncle Ben’s Rice from the UK, our colonial masters. That brand was consumed by the rich in society and we the common men and women consumed the locally produced paddy rice with joy. We had no choice. We did not care because as General Acheampong said “Panoo biara ye panoo”. In the early seventies we started producing rice in commercial quantities. The Nasia Rice fields in the Northern Region started producing rice in large quantities to supply the Ghanaian market. General Acheampong imported tractors, combined harvesters and other implements to promote the project. We were not importing rice anymore. As for the Aveyime Rice Project, it is a dream gone sour. The project produced only jailbirds like Kwame Pepra, Alhaji Ibrahim Adam, Victor Selomey etc.
Anytime I hear the amount of dollars we use to import so-called perfume rice into the country for consumption, I begin to think about what has gone wrong with us. We must pause to rethink. We must be self-reliant. Those who have ears must listen. This is my story. This is my song!!!
By Eric Bawah