Wasteful Purpose: Appointing Cabinet Ministers to Corporate Boards - Part 3 (Final)

During his ministerial-confirmation hearing in January or February, I forget precisely which - not that it really matters within the context of our present conversation - I had expected to hear and/or see the newly minted University of Ghana doctoral degree holder to lay out a comprehensive plan and agenda for the development of the cocoa industry, only to hear Cassiel Ato Kwamena Baah Forson bitterly and peevishly complain about the previous Akufo-Addo government’s having presided over a precipitous decline in the production and the exportation of raw cocoa beans.

And then just the other day, when the Mahama Government put out an announcement that Dr. Ato Forson had been appointed to the Board-of-Directors of the Ghana Cocoa-Marketing Board, the Finance Minister repeated the same downright bogus and neocolonialist mantra of being intent on and poised to acquiring some 200 hectares of land for the cultivation of “plantation farms” as part of efforts to support smallholder farmers and boost national cocoa production back to ONE-MILLION METRIC TONNES” (See Cassiel Ato Forson Appointed to COCOBOD, Vows to Revive Ghana’s Cocoa Sector” Modernghana.com 5/16/25).

Now, if one may humbly ask: What sort of madness is this? Which immediately recalls the legendary Professor Albert Einstein’s rather memorable and fantastic definition of “Madness” as “The process of doing and repeating the same things over and over again and expecting different results each time around.” Now, isn’t it obvious and crystal clear to intellectual and professional chuckleheads like Dr. Ato Kwamena Baah Forson that what our beloved Sovereign Democratic Republic of Ghana direly needs presently is a concrete and a socioeconomically progressive means of creating sustainable and livable jobs for the teeming battalions of the graduates of the Akufo-Addo-implemented Fee-Free Senior High School, who are easily among the best and the brightest of their kind anywhere around the world.

Which is not at all surprising, when one also reckons the fact that an extant President John “I Have No Classmates in Ghana” Dramani Mahama had originally vehemently pooh-poohed the fiscal feasibility of a Universally Fee-Free Senior High School System. The tragic irony here, though, is that unfortunately, the relatively more progressive alternative and the leadership of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) is pathologically too complacent and kleptocratically unambitious to be entrusted with the radically exponential development of the country. Which is why over the past 32 years, the country’s socioeconomic development has been effectively at a standstill, in the manner of that old Bob Marley song that talks about “Moving One Step Forward and Two Steps Backward.”

It absolutely cannot be gainsaid that during the 8 years that the Akufo-Addo-led government held the reins of governance, Ghana socioeconomically advanced in ways that could only be credibly compared to the 9-15 years of Ghana’s First Republic, depending on who is doing the temporal calculation, when the Kwame Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) wielded the reins of democratic governance. Since then, it has all been an uphill and a desperate struggle for survival in fits and starts for the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens, with one military coup and junta after another, until just the past 32 years when sanity prevailed, courtesy of the country’s foremost and most globally renowned statesman and diplomat, namely, Mr. Kofi “The Busumuru” Annan, the first Black African Secretary-General of the United Nations Organization (UN).

I have written about this umpteen times before that had it not been for the largely behind-the-scenes timely and opportune intervention of former US President William “Bill” Jefferson Blythe Clinton, at the express and the special request of Ghana’s sole Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the country would still be inextricably stuck in the Faux-Socialist Junta that was the Rawlings-Tsikata Tribal Diarchy of the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC). It is rather ironic that in the runup to the 2024 General Election, a presidentially fatigued 80-year-old Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo would so bizarrely and strangely hark back to the Rawlings-Tsikata Diarchy of the 1980s, when the former Flight-Lieutenant of the Ghana Airforce haughtily thumped his reasonably broad chest and shoulders and pontifically declared to the nation that absolutely nobody else was qualified to take over the reins of governance from the half-Scottish and half-Akan but “naturalized” ethnic Ewe.

I have said this innumerable times before and hereby reiterate the same, once again, that not only does Ghana direly need a fresh and a wholly new generation of radically, intellectually retooled and redesigned young men and women of the sort that was culled and meticulously cultivated by the immediate-past Minister of Education under the previous Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party. Which is why going into the 2028 Presidential Election, my safe and sure bet is smack on none other than Dr. Yaw Osei-Adutwum and absolutely no other candidate among the vanguard ranks of the New Patriotic Party.

You see, Ghanaians are presently looking for a leader who knows how to fight for a more progressive and a much better future for our children and grandchildren, and not merely one who is darn too morbidly and deathly afraid to dirty and bloody his hands doing the sort of heavy-lifting that the Presidency of our Galamsey-wracked country desires and more than deserves.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]