One of the big disservices many of us did to Ghana was our failure to interrogate the infeasible slogans that were being peddled by this government while in opposition.
Today, not only have many of these slogans failed to generate the productivity and economic drive required to grow our economy, they have become a national drain and illegal outlets through which government appointees loot the state. We should not and will not repeat that mistake.
One person still living in the world of slogans is the Agriculture Minister. One would have thought that his persistent gaffing, coupled with his performance during his vetting would have alerted him to the need for him to study and understand the sector he is leading but no.
This is a Minister who said because of his policies, northerners were now building blockhouses. Not only was this palpable falsehood. It is obvious he didn’t know northern Ghana well before he was made Minister.
When farmers were struggling to find seed and fertilizers because of the racketeering in the subsidy system that he failed to notice and tackle, the Minister went about claiming subsided fertilizer was everywhere.
Today he claims to have received awards for tackling food security in Ghana. What a shame! Of course, from his high horse, it is not possible for him to see the suffering of the people and the anguish of farmers.
It is obvious the Minister failed to understand, maybe deliberate, that there are several dimensions to food security (availability, access and utilization, for want of time).
We are in March, and I can tell you for a fact that the food supply situation in Northern Ghana is under extreme stress. In the markets, not only are food prices extremely high, evidence of food shortage is palpable because the Minister failed to manage the buffer stock systems that were put in place by our visionary President Mahama, to mop up excess supply during the harvest season and ensure post-harvest losses were cut to the minimum while stabilizing prices for farmers. While food was going to waste because our storage and processing systems under the buffer stock were deteriorating under this Minister’s watch, he was going around claiming food is everywhere. Mr. Minister, at that time, the time you were taking your victory lap, farmers were crying and committing suicide. On the dimension of food availability, a generous Professor would rate D-.
Access to food is a serious problem even for the employed and middle class in Ghana today. While all Ghanaians are increasingly spending a higher proportion of their incomes on food, those living on the periphery have gone into destitution, with many begging for food. The litmus test for improving food access is when people progressively spend less proportion of their income on food. There is no Ghanaian today who has reached this point, except those of you who return home with several “Ghana Must Go” bags of money in your car booths. On food access, you score a terrible F.
I will not waste my readers’ time on the third dimension, utilization. So because the experts would tell you, and I am one, that when you struggle with the first two, it is unlikely you would achieve the third. Another F.
My final advice is that you check the direction of the cars loaded with food. Maybe use the google earth app on your android phone and it would clearly tell you those food trucks are headed for Ghana.
