On Thursday, June 24, 2021, UTV showed an interaction with the boss of the Cocoa Processing Factory. In his responses to various questions, he clearly articulated the benefits of the crop, cocoa, which has been the mainstay of the motherland economy for aeons. For all those years, we seem to have limited our potential gain from the crop to the pittance of selling the raw beans, which take back-breaking effort to produce. We sell the raw beans to others who process them and sell that product back to us at cost multiple times what we sold the beans to them for.
It is a typical example of us not eating what we grow; not doing much about what nature has endowed us with, in terms of maximising benefits by adding value to the raw material. That is symptomatic of our attitude to life, hardly utilising what we have while craving for what we don’t have.
Yet, that was not the thinking of our founding leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He had established a cocoa processing factory to ensure we ate what we grew; reaping the benefits of cocoa, including its health enhancing ingredients. In that initiative, one finds the cocoa break.
Cocoa break was the mid-morning recess at teachers college when each student would be served a cup of hot sweet cocoa drink. One needed only sempoa (threepence) to buy one bofroot or togbɛɛ (doughnut); enough to carry one through the rest of the morning till the lunch drums would sound. The objective was to get students to cultivate a taste for cocoa to create a market for the product to sustain factory and jobs.
Mind you cocoa break cocoa drink was not cocoa-tea. Any hot beverage we took for breakfast was ‘tea.’ So, there was milo-tea or coffee-tea. At Amanfoɔ College Secondary School, the hot cocoa drink we took for Sunday dinner was cocoa-tea. Cocoa break cocoa was cocoa and not cocoa-tea because it was like a snack and not a meal. And so it couldn’t have been cocoa-tea break.
The abandonment of the cocoa consumption campaign then, is similar to today’s pulling down hospital buildings we spent several dollars to build without ever using them for the purpose for which the money on them was spent. The demolition was to give way to constructing same buildings again at prohibitive dollar cost. It is costing us hard currency to demolish so we can use more borrowed hard currency to rebuild to make them functional.
I am convinced it is wastage worry that should be top on our 2024 consideration in deciding whether the 1D1F factories that are being constructed to provide jobs for the youth should be abandoned. Or, for once, we would want positive continuity by allowing those building them to finish building them.
Regularly, of late, media houses, in extolling Nkrumah, have been showing projects under construction in his time that have been abandoned since his now almost universally condemned ouster. For eight years (2009-2016), a congress government built one factory with a loan. Even that, it was clear they just wanted their 10% loan cut, because they put up the building and bought machines to install in the building before thinking about the raw material to make the machines functional. If you add the 20 years (1981-1992) they run the economy, it makes 28 years of ONE factory that never produced anything.
So there’s no way they’ll ever complete uncompleted factories under construction. They would prefer to start their own which they might not finish based on their record in government of never building factories that work. Remember they never finished the Kufuor gang of four roads. And they collapsed every programme Kufuor introduced: capitation grant, NHIS, MMT, free bus ride for schoolchildren, regular funding of schools for children with disabilities, NIA, LEAP and others.
In a revived cocoa break, we would be trying to recreate, and reinvent the wheel of a strategy abandoned in 1966. It would be that strategy that would be promoting ‘eat and use what we produce;’ a development enabling approach that was completely abandoned and idled for the 20 years of P/NDC.
Eat what you grow, said the domestication man. We have been growing cocoa a lot and hardly eating any of it. That is despite that it is wholesome eating it processed as chocolate or licking the fresh bean like toffee. If one chooses to drink it, it comes as hot sweet chocolate or bitter medicinal (known to contain ingredients) that inoculate the consumer against the malaria parasite. For boozers, it has its hard liquor gin. In cosmetology, there’s the skin toning cocoa butter and other beauty enhancing similar products.
We haven’t done enough to exploit the job creation capacity of cocoa other than back-breaking farming its trees to bear the raw beans we export for pittance while others add value to it through processing, making huge profits. There are all kinds of institutions with a captive consumer base.
The education sector, health, prisons and so on, there is more than enough to revive the campaign of consume cocoa more, half a century after abandoning it. I am desperately looking for the step up measures to add the multiple varieties to the cocoa bean for export, to reduce the raw bean export to next to nothing. I know it’s doable so let’s do it.
In our student days of volunteering for the national cause, we offered free labour to harvest sugarcane and construct Ɔkyerɛko and Dawhenya dams, under the Acheampong military government. The regime had cancelled the student loan scheme Busia’s government had introduced.
Cocoa, though, was of such crucial significance to government earning that those students who came after us were forced by the PNDC military regime to go and carry cocoa beans from the bush so the government could take care of them. Sadly, that government would use the cocoa earnings on other things and rather asked the students to pay for their education. Let’s eat and drink cocoa into prosperity.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh