Of cassava shortage and Muntaka’s ECG ‘Sabotage’
There is a brilliant piece in one of last Thursday’s newspapers in which the writer has done a comparative analysis of the oil palm production figures of Malaysia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Cote d’ivoire and Ghana. As I was writing my column, all I remembered about the article was that it is a must-read for everybody who has been associated with Ghana’s agriculture since Kwame Nkrumah – except, of course, Commissioners of State under the Acheampong rule between 1972 and 1978.
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Come to think of it, General (later Mr) Acheampong did not boast any high academic or intellectual capacities: not all his Commissioners (that’s how he called his ministers) had been to university. Yet, under him, Ghana achieved self-sufficiency in food production, to the point where, according to the facts, we became a net exporter of food.
(At an appropriate time, I will wonder aloud how far we have travelled as a country since we overthrew Kwame Nkrumah.)
I am going on and on like this because in this blessed year, 2016, a Deputy Minister of Agriculture (Crops),Dr Ahmed Yakubu Alhassan, comes on air to lament why there is not enough cassava on the market – leading to high prices. As far as his ministry is concerned, “there is no shortage of cassava on the market”. He is saying that if cassava is not getting to the market, we should blame the following:
1.The remoteness of the production centres (farms) from the markets
2.Transportation
3.Infrastructural bottlenecks
Who does not know these? I humbly submit that no one needs to be a minister of state to know or say all of the above. There is not a single day, since 1957, that all of the above factors have not been at play.
In what appears to be blame-shifting, the deputy minister is telling us that if anybody or institution is to blame, it certainly is not his ministry, emphatically pointing out that the Ministry of Agriculture is not responsible for roads.
Since when had this deputy agriculture minister known this? Recently? I wish to state that even if these bottlenecks were discovered within the period of Mahama’s government, they are of the type that a first year Agricultural Science student should be able to solve; indeed, one does not need a knowledge of agriculture to tackle and solve these particular problems.
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For a solution, the deputy minister kicked the ball into the court of the private sector. O my goodness!! Does the private sector build roads? Is the private sector in charge of infrastructure? This problem requires government policy – government direction. Full Stop.
The more I think of it, the more I begin to understand why Ghana today gazes in wonder at the magic of Malaysia in regard to how that country has so far handled oil palm production that 50 or so years after they came to acquire the knowledge of its production from Ghana, Malaysians call oil palm “the miracle crop” and “the Red Gold”.
Are we not becoming a nation whose elected or appointed officers of state have become talkers and blame-shifters? Is this why we pay them in excess of GH¢7, 200.00, chauffeur them around in air-conditioned comfort (the unspoken argument being that the more one sweats, the less he/she is likely to think straight – so we need to put our ministers in ACs!)
Do the Malaysian and Singaporean successes have something to do with the colour of their skin – being lighter-skinned? What a question in a country that gave birth to Dr Victor Lawrence, a black-skinned full-blooded Ghanaian who has recently been inducted into America’s National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of signal processing in telecommunications.
My humble submission is this: President Mahama needs to kick a few …. or put fire on the seat of some of his lieutenants. To ask the private sector for a solution is not the way a minister approaches a policy problem.
Can I talk about ECG?
I did not need the company’s Public Affairs person to tell me this truth that ECG was not sabotaging government. “It is not possible that the whole workers of ECG are in bed with somebody planning a sabotage,” he said, on Class FM.
He was responding to allegations by the Majority Chief Whip, Mohammed Muntaka Mubarak, who accused the ECG of undermining President Mahama’s quest to end dumsor.
Speaking on the floor of Parliament, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Asawase said: “Errors in the billing of the newly installed pre-paid meters are due to administrative lapses as a result of poor supervision of technical officers and their superiors; deliberate efforts by some unscrupulous ECG officials to take advantage of the new billing arrangement for personal gains; and overestimation of bills by consumers on postpaid meters, have all conspired to culminate in the current billing anomalies.”
I like the way the PRO put his reply. He says: “Overbilling has been with us all these years that the ECG has been in existence.”
As a Ghanaian who has been groaning under the burden of magically high bills for some time now, I side with those who ask the question: “What would ECG gain by sabotaging the government?” Is the MD of ECG a relation of Paa Kwesi Nduom or Kobina Greenstreet or Nana Akufo Addo?
I am sure the Honourable MP for Asawase forgot for a moment about taxes approved by Parliament in recent past. The end result is what we are seeing. It’s as inevitable as putting cassava sticks in the earth and expecting a cassava harvest.