COCOBOB CEO Dr Opuni was a Misfit and a Nation Wrecker

Was Dr Opuni not once the head of the Foods and Drugs Authority who allegedly maliciously collapsed the herbal medicine business of one late renowned herbalist and gospel musician Ellen Adjoa Amoakoa Acheampong, popularly known as Maame Semenhyia? Did the woman whose husband, Mr Stephen Semenhyia, shot himself dead not accuse Dr Opuni of seeking to have extra marital affairs with her and when she rejected his advances, he ordered her business to be closed down? Had other people not accused him of collapsing their businesses simply for being members of, or sympathisers of, the opposition parties other than the then ruling NDC government and party?

I am at the moment less interested in what he did when he was the boss at the Foods and Drugs Authority. I am more concerned about what Dr Opuni did at the COCOBOD as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

About a little over two years ago, I read in the Financial Times that Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board now called COCOBOD owed its international creditors and companies arrears of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cocoa. This is because COCOBOD takes advance payments from international companies interested in purchasing or being supplied with Ghana cocoa before the cocoa season, thus, ahead of the cocoa trees going into fruition and harvest. I am sure Ghana as I write still owes some foreign companies tonnes of cocoa that we have already accepted payments and squandered the money.

For all these years that Ghana had/has been the world’s first or second producer of cocoa, we still take advance payments from foreign companies before COCOBOD can purchase cocoa from the Ghanaian farmers. If this is not shameful and nonsensical, self-underrating of intelligence of course, then I do not know what that is.

Upon all our inability to have money of our own handy to purchase cocoa beans from the farmers during the cocoa season, here we are having the CEO of COCOBOD, Dr Stephen Opuni, awarding to himself a fat monthly salary within the region of GHS70, 000 to GHS75, 000 with additional allowances, the hearing of which figures, could send a fainthearted person into instant coma.

What infuriates me most are the revelations by Adom FM programme presenter Captain Smart, about the neglect and total annihilation of Tetteh Quarshie’s museum and a factory that former President Kufuor had intended for processing cocoa beans into semi-finished or finished products to add more value to our cocoa raw material to earn the nation more money from our cocoa product.

I shall entreat the public to listen to what Captain Smart has to say as posted on the YouTube via the underlying link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSKx_mZh39s
Dr Stephen Opuni has caused financial loss to the State looking from every facade of his public services. He allowed his absurd political affiliation with National Democratic Congress and former President Mahama, another myopic and overwhelmingly corrupt leader, to cloud his sense of reasoning. He involved himself in reprehensible acts bordering on corruption, stupidity and sheer wickedness.

When Nana Akufo Addo and NPP had won the election and were in transition, Dr Opuni still had the shameless unethical audacity to continue to sign contracts to NDC people worth about GHS500 million, I should think.

Dr Opuni does not know his limit when it comes to corrupting himself. While our poor cocoa farmers are suffering and could at times not get drugs to spray their cocoa farms or get paid their bonuses or their money for the purchase of their cocoa beans, Dr Opuni has money to fool about with, and to construct the most expensive tomb for his mother at Bibianiha in the Brong-Ahafo.

( http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/Dr-Opuni-s-mother-s-tomb-shocks-and-surprises-549850 )

Opuni must be dealt with and he should count himself lucky that his absurdities and corruptions were not committed during the Rawlings’ Armed Forces Revolutionary Council era or else, he would have been executed by firing squad by the then populist “Abongo boys”.

Rockson Adofo
(Written on Tuesday, 20 June 2017)