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In an Al Jazeera report dated October 12, 2022, Cameroon and Nigeria were asked to join an Ivory Coast and Ghana initiative to withhold selling their Cocoa to Europe raw, but rather process some of it locally to add value and increase their net financial gain.
According to the article, “The initiative (called CIGCI- Côte d’Ivoire Ghana Cocoa Initiative) was set up after a 2018 declaration by Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s first and second-largest cocoa producers, on willingness to define a common sustainable cocoa strategy that would raise prices paid to farmers”.
I wrote this on the Ghana Leadership Union (GLU) platform and share it with the larger audience with small modifications, that’s an excellent initiative!
Wish we could create our own African cartels like the Arabs did in 1973 and hold on to some precious commodities and/or minerals the others desperately may need (Uranium, Cobalt, Lithium, etc) and we have to dominate output and control hand in negotiating!
The only hitch sometimes is the greed and selfishness of some of our own people in the leadership corridor!
In issues like this that affect the livelihood of most of our citizens, now some will agree on the need to bring back the death penalty for public officials who sell their country!
Nobody who cares and observers will argue that African leaders have sold their countries for pittances of gifts and bribes. These decisions have left the continent poor and our people sometimes starving to death due to poor wealth and infrastructure distribution.
Ghana for example has had her share of bogus contracts and deals that were simply insulting. We sold all our telecommunication Infrastructure and market to Vodafone for a mere $900 million, and the major carriers could care less about Quality. The parent company of MTN made a profit of more than 1$ billion in the first year of the early 2000s.
Poor decision-making by African leaders in the post-Nkrumah era has hurt millions of job creation and rendered opportunities for the youth almost vanish. The decision to put 200,000 University Graduates on the job training for 3 years, at a cost of $600 million, was perhaps one of the worst decision-making in a country where artisans and technicians cannot afford $100 power tools to do their work!
Other such decisions are what led Ghana’s economy to stall and the weak fundamentals exposed in 2022 (to use the words of VP Dr Bawumia). We do not have to expose all these weaknesses here but another major dangerous leadership decision-making was taking taxpayer funds to build a Cathedral for the Christian God of the President and some of us while children in schools in Ghana could not have roofs in buildings sometime and /or tables and chairs to sit on.
It is hoped President Akufo-Addo and his Minister of Finance Ken Ofori -Atta will focus and pay attention and exhibit concern for the core strategic interest of Ghana such as this Cocoa initiative, and cut out the elements of selfishness and greed.
The same Bible we all read says “A borrower is a servant to the lender”. For all the loans, let Ken Ofori Atta and the President and VP Dr Bawumia set up a payback- schedule and systems we can all see! It will help avoid default on loans by the nation and risk possibly losing our national sovereignty to some foreigners the government officials seem to have sold rights to our lands.
Let us learn to work together and learn global survival strategies from others!
Long live Ghana!