The Problem of Cocoa-Industry Crisis Is Purely a Lack of Creative Diversification

Contrary to what the General-Secretary of Ghana’s presently main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr. Justin Frimpong Koduah, would have the country and the rest of the Global Ghanaian Community believe, the one and the most significant problem confronting the country’s cocoa industry is an abject and a scandalous lack of creative and an imaginative leadership initiative on the part of the leaderships of both of Ghana’s two major political parties, namely, the presently ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the latter political establishment’s main opponent and most formidable challenger and institutional and ideological alternative, the New Patriotic Party (See “Blame Cocoa Sector Crisis on Your Incompetence, Not NPP - Justin Koduah to NDC” Modernghana.com 2/13/26).

In reality, the current inability of the Mahama regime to pay a fair market price to Ghanaian cocoa farmers is wholly the problem of the abject lack of the ability of the country’s quack professional politicians and their allies in the various sectors of the country’s economy to facilitate the immediate multi-pronged industrialization of the cocoa-production sector. It is nothing short of heinous and an unpardonable criminality for any reasonably well-educated professional Ghanaian citizen to imagine the fact that nearly a century-and-half from the inception of the commercial cultivation of cocoa beans, Ghana, which until relatively recently was the largest global net exporter of the latter produce, continues to unwisely export raw cocoa beans as its most significant agricultural commodity.

Such complete lack of ingenuity and commonsense initiative has meant that Ghana and La Cote d’Ivoire (that is, The Ivory Coast), the current largest cocoa producer and exporter, are not able to significantly and economically creatively and viably tap into the Billion-Dollar Cocoa-product manufacturing industry that has for generations continued to be dominated by the erstwhile European suzerains or imperialist overlords. And to think of the fact that most of the primary cocoa producers, with the possible exception of Brazil, continue to function - or rather malfunction - as mere suppliers of raw cocoa beans to the Global Cocoa Marker, more than a protracted half-century past the euphoric attainment of geopolitical sovereignty, means that as a people, we have learned a diddly little to absolutely nothing from the excruciating pains of the untold horrors of European Colonial Imperialism (ECI).

Which is precisely what Monsieur Frimpong Koduah and his equally creatively and intellectually bankrupt counterparts of the country’s ruling National Democratic Congress ought to be presently discussing, and not the patently pedestrian and nauseatingly absurd fact of whether the long-gone or exited Akufo-Addo-led government of the two-term tenured New Patriotic Party offered a relatively better purchaser-dictated cocoa-producer price to Ghana’s diligent but slavishly underpaid cocoa farmers.

You see, the European-fangled idea and decision to establish the erstwhile British Colony of the Gold Coast as a single primary extractive commodity producer and supplier to the Metropolitan European Market simply meant the establishment of the effective continuation of standard and traditional colonialist regime into the cosmetically modified and refined mode of “Neocolonialism” which Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, President Kwame Nkrumah, promptly and perspicuously recognized on the eve of the declaration of Ghana as a nominal postcolonial sovereign state. It was primarily and wisely for the foregoing revelatory and morally instructive epiphany that President Nkrumah initiated the Rawlings and the P/NDC-collapsed industrial revolution that was boldly and fiercely launched under the aegis of the Ghana Industrial Holdings Corporation (GIHOC), whose Western-engineered collapse has also meant that the timely and the auspicious reignition of the Nkrumah Revolution would dauntingly become virtually a pipedream.

The preemptive design of the latter catastrophe has also meant that our creatively feckless leadership would greedily, jejunely and crudely resort to the sort of environmentally genocidal grips of Galamsey - or the so-called illegal small-scale mining industrial hazard - in which the country morbidly and effectively finds itself. So far, there does not seem to be any existentially sanguine way out of this Pandora’s Box of suicidal self-defeat created by our own nihilistic leaders, short of the miraculous and the merciful intervention by one of the relatively more benign global economic giants who presently constitute what has become known as the BRICS Countries or Economic Bloc of Counter-Western Nations.

Ultimately, it may still Yet Be Morning on Creation Day, in the prophetically resplendent and evergreen words of the immortalized Nigerian and Continental African Literary Giant and Icon, Professor Chinua Achebe. Except, of course, for the patently pedestrian fact that it seems to be taking too extremely long a time to get there.

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