GETFund Fraud Is Nothing New – Part 1

When the GETFund racket exposé broke the national news headlines and I had the chance to speak to one of my good friends and colleagues, Mr. Charles Owusu, from Asante-Effiduase and an alumnus of both the Kumasi-based Opoku Ware Senior High School and the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, recently retired from his post as a full-professor and a senior librarian at the college where I teach, we both agreed that there was absolutely nothing new here. We both vividly recalled how while we were in secondary school, presently called senior high school, at different times, of course, the Ghana Cocoa-Marketing Board-sponsored scholarships that were doled out, supposedly, on the basis of need, and officially targeted towards the children and grandchildren of cocoa farmers and other needy but academically talented pupils, the bulk of such disbursements, nevertheless, went to the children and the relatives of comfortably salaried powerful politicians and highly placed civil and public servants.

At the time, as I also believe happens to still be the case presently, the CMB Scholarships, as they were popularly known, were more readily accessible to the children and the relatives of top administrators at the Cocoa-Marketing Board, presently renamed COCOBOD, and highly placed government officials, in particular ministers of state and heads of departments of the civil and public service, before all else. Those of us whose grandparents and relatives actually possessed and worked on large cocoa farms and even plantations had to wistfully contend with some “Mickey Mouse” kind of dole-outs called “Bursaries.” In short, the overwhelming bulk of our school fees, those of us “Mmoborowas,” or the Wretched of the Earth, my profound apologies to the immortalized Dr. Frantz Fanon, had to be paid by the same parents and grandparents the humongous profits from whose sweat and toil had made possible the creation of these CMB Scholarships. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that the same regime prevails to this day.

We, that is, Mr. Owusu and yours truly, were therefore not the least bit flabbergasted by the fact that today, it is still the adult children of well-to-do Ghanaian entrepreneurs and prominent citizens like Ms. Sarah Adwoa Safo, the Dome-Kwabenya New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament, who also doubles as the Minister of Procurement and Deputy Parliamentary Leader, if memory serves yours truly accurately, and Dr. Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, the current Minister of Education, grandson of the legendary Asantehene, Otumfuo Nana Sir Osei Agyeman-Prempeh, II who have the easiest go at being awarded a CMB or GETFund Scholarship. We are also reliably informed that the name of Mr. Kennedy Osei Nyarko, Deputy Minister for Agriculture, also appears on the list of well-heeled beneficiaries of the GETFund largesse, although even as Mr. Kweku Baako, the Editor-Publisher of the New Crusading Guide, revealed just the other day, Mr. Osei Nyarko never really drew a pesewa from the Fund, because although he may have officially applied for some financial assistance, the applicant never either enrolled into the academic institution for which he had originally applied for such assistance or never even attended.

Now, there well appears to be two problems at issue here, namely, the question of eligibility and downright fraud on the part of the salaried administrators of the GETFund Scholarship Scheme; no pun is intended in the appropriation of the latter word, that is, “scheme,” but, of course, the quoted latter word clearly appears to have come into play here. There also well appears to have been the willful intent on the part of the GETFund administrators, at least quite a remarkable number of them, to defraud the hardworking and woefully underpaid Ghanaian cocoa farmer and the taxpayer as well, if also because an elaborate racket appears to have been established at the GETFund Headquarters whereby the largest beneficiaries were actually those who had been hired and contractually salaried and entrusted with the disbursement of these scholarship funds.

For example, we learn that though Ms. Adwoa Safo has her name marked down as having officially received the handsome payout sum of $ 12, 800 (USD), the extant candidate of the Fund actually received the relatively diddly sum of $ 6, 338 (USD), that is, barely half of the money officially recorded as having been doled out to the daughter of renowned auto manufacturer and Christian religious leader Apostle Kwadwo Safo (See “GETFund Saga: Fresh Documents from Kweku Baako Suggest Possible ‘Racket’” HpyerCitiGh.com 3/8/20).

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
March 8, 2020
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net