Here Comes Operation Feed Yourself Again

President Mahama is said to have said that, “Ghana is undergoing a painful shift that could drag on as its government looks to correct a decades-old dependency on imports.” "There must be an attitude change now in Ghana that we're not a nation of shop keepers," President Mahama is quoted to have said. He said, "It will yield dividends in the medium term. But certainly in the short term we need to continue to make these adjustments...and that is going to come with pain." All I could say was here we go again.

I still have the picture in my mind as Dr. Busia explained that his doctor gave him an injection where he hurt the most and he got better quicker and that his policies were going to hurt, but Ghana would heal quicker. Col. Acheampong had Operation Feed Yourself. Following that, imported goods disappeared from Ghana and never got back on shelves in Ghanaian markets while I lived in Ghana. Mr. Rawlings gave us the infamous “Rawlings Chain” and now President Mahama wants to do what? Ghanaians should reject this pain that President Mahama is about to inflict on us because these people do not know what they are doing and in the end, Ghana would have had the pain without the gain.

There are solutions to our problems but so far, I have not seen any sign that the government is capable of even thinking up the solutions let alone implementing them successfully. First of all, you don’t wait until the cedi is in free fall before you start thinking up solutions. If you do that, of course you think of stopping imports when you don’t have substitute for them.

When I was a young man, I worked for the Foreign Branch of Ghana Commercial Bank. On my first day on the job, I remember, the Manager, Mr. Badiako, came to give us a pep talk. He said the Foreign Branch was a window through which foreigners looked to see Ghana and through which Ghana looked to see the outside world. I never forgot this, and to go one up from that, our government is a window through which outsiders look at Ghana and through which Ghanaians look to see the outside world. Our government has closed the window so much so that when Ghanaians only have the “Burgers” to emulate.

Just about all the young people I saw in a walk through Accra Mall not only spoke English to each other, they seemed to be showing off the English that they spoke. I was amazed when I met a 7 year old girl who was born in Ghana and had at the time had not traveled outside Ghana who could not speak any Ghanaian language. I told them to just let the kid be a kid. On this, I remember someone introducing me to the child of a Ghanaian couple who was born in Ghana but did not grow up in Ghana. The bragging point that the person doing the introduction made sure I knew was that the boy, then just about an adult, did not speak any Ghanaian language. I thought at the time: since when did people brag about things they don’t know. Today in Ghana, we have newly minted Ghanaian celebrity class who think that all of Ghana was a stage and thus, they have to be in “character” wherever they are in Ghana. Our young have nothing else to emulate. How does the president propose to deal with this? You can’t be a celebrity and go and eat cassava and pepper can you?

I never liked cassava when I lived in Ghana. I had a cassava meal cooked by a Gambian and fell in love with cassava. The cassava was cut into little cubes different from the way we serve our cassava. I have come to believe that our cassava tastes a lot better than potatoes. I can’t but believe that mashed cassava with butter on it can compete well with mashed potato with butter on it. It is up to our government to not only bring this to our people as an alternative, it is up to our government to open the window and let the outside world see that we have cassava that competes well with potatoes. We can then slap tariff on importation of potato.

I know well that the president is not a cook, but the government can create an agency and employ a matron to look into ways to present our food. The president has ambassadors who can bring him ideas that they see around the world in their travels to help our celebrities to food that they can feel proud to eat.

We have students graduating from our universities with degrees in agriculture. In my experience, most of these people sought jobs at the banks. Sure the banks need people who understand agriculture if they are going to give loans to farmers, but won’t they serve the country better is they would be on the farms? Government can employ some of these people and send them out to hire their own crew to start farming. The government will have this person and his crew on government for a period of time and require them to produce food crops like rice and set a quota for them. If they meet the quota annually for a few years, the government will then guarantee a bank loan for these people to buy the farm from the government. It offers this person a chance to own his or her business with hard work and no capital and government gets produce that would otherwise not be there and have tax payers in the private sector. Something like this can be tried on a pilot basis and expanded if it is successful. If you are thinking of doing something like this, you don’t need to go around warning Ghanaians that there are hard times coming because if done successfully, there will be increased rice in the market before you slap tariff on rice. The consumer may not even notice.

The sad part of this whole thing is that our politicians will go ahead and inflict pain on Ghanaians with impunity. Ghanaian voters will not hold the politician responsible. They will call each other NDC or NPP or PPP or CPP and so on. Just like Ghanaian voters do, I expect some comments to my article dismissing me as an NDC or NPP etc rather than discuss the validity of the points I’ve made; like for instance the validity of our past experiences with governments telling us to endure pain for a gain that never came; the idea of a government employing a matron to explore ways to make our food more attractive to Ghanaians and foreigners alike, or the idea of creating a pilot program to put our agricultural students on farms to create a “pseudo” farm business. Whatever the comment, I put myself out and I will take it on the chin like always.

Tony Pobee-Mensah