Akufo-Addo’s First Tribute Should Have Gone to Busia and Limann Before Rawlings and Tsikata

He is definitely on point, both practically and diplomatically, to laud his predecessors for their yeomanly contributions towards the discovery of petroleum in commercial quantities in the country’s territorial waters, especially the area bordering the Western Region (See “Akufo-Addo Praises Rawlings, Tsikata” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/20/17). But President Akufo-Addo, surprisingly and conspicuously, left out the names of Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia and President Hilla “Babini” Limann. He might have equally aptly added the name of his own father, to wit, President Edward Akufo-Addo, Prime Minister Busia’s right-hand man. For it was in 1970, during the short-lived tenure of Dr. Busia, that the very first serious prospecting for gas or petroleum began in the country, offshore from Saltpond. And the name of the first oil-prospecting company in the country was a subsidiary of the American-based Amoco group of companies.

Not surprisingly, not much has been told or is known about the offshore, Saltpond, Central Region, oil prospecting because the period between 1972 and 1992 was dominated by the rule of military juntas and leaders who were more fixated on power and the wanton pillaging of our national resources than being interested in the provision of any comprehensive agenda for the development of the country, although to a remarkable extent, Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong may be aptly deemed to have been the exception. Not much, however, is known or discussed about oil prospecting in the country between 1969 and 1972 but by 1980, under the Third-Republican tenure of President Limann, nearly every Ghanaian child of school-going age had gotten to know about the Canadian-based company called Agripetco that was prospecting for oil offshore of Saltpond. We got to know of Agripetco because this company’s name was constantly in the news. It was also the era of the Nigerian oil boom, which means that Ghanaians were eager to be counted among the filthy rich OPEC or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Of course, our dreams would be savagely mangled by the second “revolutionary” intervention of the Rawlings-led Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC).

What I really want to emphasize here, as a necessary means of setting the records straight, as well as to thoroughly disabuse the minds of our youths of any pretensions by the Trokosi Nationalists to the pioneering or midwifing of the oil industry in the country, as we presently know it, is the inescapable and indisputable fact that, indeed, it was the forebears of the much-maligned so-called Property-Owning Democrats who led the charge for the excruciatingly slow discovery of petroleum in commercial quantities in the country. It is ironic, but the Trokosi Nationalists have been fairly more successful in willfully falsifying the true history of oil finds in the country than one would have expected. But, of course, this is not wholly an accident. The Trokosi Nationalists had been able to use their long stay in power to deviously revise the postcolonial history of the country. And it is the godly obligation and duty of Ghanaian scholars and intellectuals like yours truly to set the records straight.

Crediting Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata for supposedly interpreting the available data on oil prospecting in the country, as President Akufo-Addo sought to do recently, may not be totally amiss; but it is unquestionably far more significant to equally observe that the existence of such data was made possible by giant political players whom the Trokosi Nationalists would rather have Ghanaians forget or mischievously deem to have never existed.

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 20, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]