Cocoa was introduced by Tetteh Quarshie into our part of the world under strange circumstances.
It was used as a weapon during our independence struggle and has since been seen by modern day politicians as such. Otherwise why will opposition NDC last Wednesday mobilise over 50 radio and television stations to carry live its mischievous perspective on the latest unprecedented increase in the producer price of cocoa?
The intention of the NDC was to educate the farmers about the true state of cocoa, but they ended up messing up their narrative.
It was typical NDC hypocrisy which must be ignored with contempt. And trust the discerning minds of Ghanaians who will demonstrate another lack of confidence in them by retaining the NPP in power in 2024.
It is unfortunate that ever since the government announced the new producer price for the 2023/24 cocoa season, public reactions have been mixed.
One had expected that all stakeholders would salute the government for the new price described as unprecedented in the history of cocoa farming in Ghana.
When the President announced the new price in Tepa in the Ashanti Region, the farmers jumped into spontaneous jubilation, compelling the President to temporarily stop his address to them. Judging from the political gain from the new price announced by the government, the NDC led by their “serial” flagbearer set out to confuse the farmers with all kinds of calculations they did not apply before ignominiously losing the 2016 elections.
And before the farmers could end their song of praise, “atadwe yate d3 n3” of the government the NDC started screaming, “wait a minute you have been shortchanged.”
This is the type of politics that the NDC will always engage in to create the impression that they have the interest of farmers at heart. Let us assume without admitting that the NPP government has cheated the farmers, will the proceeds from the cocoa sales go into the pocket of President Akufo-Addo or to the state coffers? The Ghana Cocoa Board and the farmers have a mechanism to fix the producer price of cocoa, and some of the executive members who participated in the exercise in 2016 during the tenure of Mr Mahama are still around.
The Ghana Cocoa, Coffee and Sheanut Farmers Association has commended the government for its gesture, but the NDC will not relent in their Goebbelsian lies.
From time immemorial, the government has calculated the producer price on Free on Board (FoB), but the NDC says there is a different formula known only to them when they are in opposition.
If that formula is relevant now that they are in opposition, why did Mahama not apply it when he was in government? Governance, we are told, is a continuum and for which reason the philosophy of continuity applies when it comes to many of the policies of state.
We alert the opposition NDC that this time around, their Goebbelsian lies will not wash with majority of farmers, and they rather look for better messages to convince the people to vote for them.
Every now and then, Mahama is finding it difficult to come out with social intervention policies but always capitalising on our policy failures as his campaign platform.
He is at it again promising that when voted for in 2024, he will complete all abandoned projects, but here too the question is: did he do it when he had the privilege to rule from 2012 to January 2017? If the NDC thinks Ghanaians are still gullible, they better revise their notes as the people are more discerning and will evaluate policies that will impact them the more such as the free SHS and the unprecedented producer price.
The Akufo-Addo government should just be wary of the negative force called the NDC that is ready for the sake of politics to turn a period of jubilation and celebration as in the case of the new producer price into that of gloom and doom.
And a statesman like Mr Mahama has joined his colleagues in the NDC on this dangerous agenda by telling the farmers that the NPP government has been unfair to them. Be that as it may, can Mahama beat his chest and say proudly that he ever paid 70 percent of FoB price to cocoa farmers as Nana Akufo-Addo has done?
There are two things why the NDC is engaged in this enterprise of lying. In the first place, it is out of mischief and secondly they simply don’t understand the arithmetic, so as it said in Akan, “wonmu abon.”
We also know that the NDC is creative in negativity, for which reason they will set the wrong agenda. The NPP has to put its acts together to derail the forces of darkness that are on a “rescue mission” to derail our progress.
The NPP as the ruling government is better endowed to use the power of the state to explain to the farmers using simple data how the pricing of the cocoa was arrived at.
Government should therefore deploy the best communication strategy to nip in the bud negative plans of the NDC and their allies in the media, academia and civil society.