Let Rawlings Be Pianim’s Messiah!

I read the news article titled “JJ was a Messiah” (Ghanaweb.com 8/5/08) with quite an amused bewilderment. In the article, the quite renowned Ghanaian economist Mr. Kwame Pianim, also a former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the erstwhile Cocoa-Marketing Board (CMB), was reported to be claiming that in the early 1990s he, Mr. Pianim, was singularly instrumental in prevailing upon then-President Jeremiah John Rawlings to raise the producer price of Ghana's staple cash crop from Gp 1,925 to GH ¢ 4.50, as farmers found themselves in dire economic straits and their efforts appeared to be woefully under-appreciated by the Government. And here, we also need to remind our audience that it was the same Mr. Rawlings who raised the price of cutlass, or machete, from ¢ 19.50 under Dr. Hilla Limann's People's National Party (PNP) government to ¢ 50.00, while also vitriolically accusing the NPP of having been the most reprehensible administration in postcolonial Ghanaian history, as well as having made life utterly unbearable for the average Ghanaian farmer.

Well, those of us avid observers of the postcolonial Ghanaian political landscape remember matters quite remarkably differently. And needless to say, the clamoring for better and livable producer prices for cocoa by Ghanaian farmers is a perennial struggle that far predates the early 1990s, as Mr. Pianim would have his compatriots believe. Nonetheless, we understand precisely what the former CEO of the CMB is pathetically trying to achieve with his preceding observation, and we also recognize the fact that it is his individual human right to attempt to make himself centrally significant and relevant to both Ghanaian history as well as the history of the development of the cocoa industry.

Still, those of us who have been trained in the discipline of history, and who have been avid and first-hand observers of the history of Ghana's cocoa industry, have a bounden obligation to put matters in objective and verifiable historical light or perspective. First of all, about the only person who can singularly and incontestably lay claim to having facilitated the development and growth of Ghana's cocoa industry is Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, and definitely not either Mr. Kwame Pianim or ex-Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings. And that was as early as 1937, when Dr. Danquah led Ghanaian cocoa farmers across the cocoa-producing regions of the erstwhile Gold Coast to set tons of cocoa beans alight in protest against the slavish prices then paid Ghanaian farmers by the British colonial regime. Dr. Danquah, who was also singularly instrumental in the establishment of the Ghana Cocoa-Marketing Board, of whose Chief Executive Officer Mr. Pianim would proudly become in the 1990s, would be duly crowned “Akuafo Kanea” (or the Ghanaian Farmer's Beacon of Light) at Nsawam by the leading cocoa farmers' association of the time (see L. H. Ofosu-Appiah's The Life and Times of Dr. J. B. Danquah.

Then, in the wake of the unconstitutional overthrow of Dr. Hilla Limann's People National Party (PNP), on December 31, 1981, the first major Ghanaian leader to seriously threaten the Government with the promise of encouraging cocoa farmers to abandon the commercial production of the country's economic mainstay was Osagyefo Kuntunkununku II, the Okyenhene, and not Mr. Kwame Pianim. Back then, as this writer vividly recalls, the Okyenhene, known in his pre-monarchical life as Dr. Alex Fredua-Agyeman Okoampa, highlighted the Kafkaesque economic absurdity in which the diligent Ghanaian cocoa farmer found her-/himself. This writer is even quite certain of Mr. Rawlings being forced to promptly hike the producer price of cocoa back then.

Still, it is an unacceptably gross exaggeration for Mr. Pianim to claim that the mere hiking of the producer price of cocoa from 1,925 Gp to GH ¢ 4.50, whatever these temporally incongruous figures mean, in of itself, guaranteed the continued growth and development of Ghana's cocoa industry. And here, also, it bears reminding ourselves of the glaring historical fact that anytime that any Ghanaian government of the day has increased the producer price of cocoa, the prices of consumer products have almost invariably, automatically and immediately shot up which, in effect, has logically implied that the diligent but woefully underpaid and under-appreciated cocoa farmer's economic status has registered absolutely no remarkable improvement. Meanwhile, scholarship awards drawn from the funding reserves of the Cocoa-Marketing Board has disproportionately gone into supporting the education of the children and relatives of government officials as well as the children and relatives of senior staff members of the CMB. In sum, the continuous growth and development of Ghana's cocoa industry cannot be facilely explained away by Mr. Pianim's purported instrumentality in facilitating the hiking of the producer price of cocoa from 1,925 Gp to GH ¢ 4.50 just that one time in the early 1990s.

It is even more preposterous and outright blasphemous for the abortive, one-time presidential candidate of the now-ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) to attempt to create a “Messiah” out of Mr. Rawlings, merely because of that one “memorable” instance of the former Ghanaian strongman having raised the producer price of cocoa. After all, hasn't Ghana, since 1987, been woefully lagging behind the Ivory Coast in cocoa production?

Indeed, it may be that as a sometime political prisoner of Mr. Rawlings' so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC), during the 1980s, Mr. Pianim and others had been convicted of attempting to overthrow the PNDC, the former CMB-CEO now feels a modicum of gratefulness over the fact of Mr. Rawlings having spared the life of Mr. Pianim. And, by all means, the former CEO of the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has every right to be grateful to Mr. Rawlings for having spared his life; still, this should in no way occasion Mr. Pianim's flagrant attempt to thoroughly distort postcolonial Ghanaian history as well as seek to apotheosize Mr. Rawlings in this very ungodly process, particularly in a landmark election year when Ghanaians are vigorously seeking to put the bloody years of the P/NDC's political “culture of silence” behind them.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005) and “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].