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Reports that the Chief Executive of the COCOBOD has packed out of the corridors of the strategic institution is refreshing. That’s the way to go for every CEO of our State Enterprises. He has shown the way, and the rest should responsibly follow.
Wisdom obligates such appointees by December ending, to be writing their handover notes – without being told by anybody to do so. After eights years for most of them, including Ministers and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs), the normal and healthy thing to do is prepare to exit unless, for some reason, the incoming administration decides to allow you to sit in.
Even in the developed economies and political cultures, that is the unwritten arrangement. So, accomplished or decadent, the appointee must go. I recall that the last time the exited President met the CEOs of SoEs, together with the finance minister, the message to them was deliver or be pushed out.
At the time, about 50 percent of the SoEs were not profit-making. Not the state and some of the GIHOC subsidiaries…Intriguingly, these CEOs were not pushed out as threatened. But that is Africa and Ghana – from Kwame Nkrumah to Rawlings and successive administrations. That’s why I adulate personages such as Ato Ahwoi, Kwesi Botchwey and the late cadre CEO of Korle Bu and the STC Company before communications maestro, Nana Akomea took over as CEO of the reputable state transport entity on the West African coast.
Cronyism
Why do we allow people who have been appointed to deliver a mandate remain in their positions as if they are indispensable? Unless there is personal or crony benefit to the appointing authorities. And we don’t run states or nations that way.
I first heard the word cronyism from the lips of Kutu Acheampong when I was at Secondary School, then Kutu Acheampong. As for Lt. General FWK Akuffo, as head of the Supreme Military Council 11, he was wearing beads till the time the AFRC junta fingerlings dragged him screaming to the Teshie Firing Range. But that was yesterday. I know Roger Felli’s residence at Navrongo and REA Kotei’s at Cantonments, close to Soul Clinic Church and preparatory school. Nothing smelled of cronyism.
The military is the most sincere and honest of political administrators – not the civilian. But that is a different story in Nigeria, where the IBBs and General Gowon as well as the Sanni Abatchas, always wanted more oil money. Thank God, the oil resources will deplete and together, their ailing crop and livestock industry assailed by extremist activity.
So eight years is good enough time for a CEO to deliver or exit honourably or in disgrace as some of the CEOs have shown – with the Executive looking the other way and party chiefs who advocated more engagement with the Executive have equally shown. In our part of the world, politics have no space for sincerity and honesty; morality and virtue, or purity and conscience. That’s why COCOBOD Chief Executive must be commended for resigning before the ORAL pushed him to the precipice.
Enhanced Cocoa prices
I heard an announcement – still verifying it at the time I was producing this piece – that the Mahama administration has given Cocoa farmers a better deal. That’s refreshing news. Cocoa employs massive numbers of Ghanaians, impacts massive numbers of families and dependants and a veritable golden goose. Cote d’Ivoire noticed that and they have never fooled in managing that natural endowment.
It is the same story other states producing cocoa. They never allowed galamsey or poor sanitation and degradation of natural resources to disrupt the weal of the strategic sector.
That cocoa has recently been seen as a source of another important product is a reason why the potential for it to create more and more jobs from the peels is enhanced and paying more for producers is reasonable. We commend government for that.
But the story must not end there – with the conversation on galamsey getting quieter and numbed; muted and clouded. .
Ashanti Regional Minister
I also read about the garbage the Ashanti Regional Minister wrote as rejoinder to allegations about poor management of state infrastructure, including regional office and residences. Not only poorly written but also lacking credibility. That’s why we do not have to wait for an ORAL to fight corruption. But that is also why the politicians must not wait till a government is exiting before searching their luggage.
It is not only barbarian and illiterate but cowardly. If we want to be vigilant, let us get the system to work collectively, bipartisan manner and managed by men like Gyeke-Darko in the days of KA Busia and Kutu Acheampong.
I don’t know if a reporter from The Chronicle was there. In the days when The Chronicle was the most independent paper by light years, sea miles and notches, the Regional Minister would have developed heartache next day after the press release that exposed rather than excused him.
But the current apes of reporters would simply report – without analysing his statement and still have the paper reviewed, without the story again being analysed for its true value or obscenity. The whole political space is becoming a circus of clowns and masquerades that offend our collective sensibilities, and yet we don’t even notice we are being led like sheep to slaughter.
Ghana; One Big Elephant Meat
I shudder to think that the nation called Ghana is turning one big elephant meat that the strong, connected and crafty surreptitiously attack and slice of a piece of the voluptuous meat and bolts with it. Delegates and polling agents, constituency executives, hangers-on on the corridors of some state institutions and veranda boys at the residences and offices of our Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives as well as the Jubilee House enjoying while us donkeys work our arses out living on kenkey and waakye the whole week.
That is the cycle of governance the two political parties treat us to daily. And when we wait for four or eight years for a change, the change never comes.
That is because democracy is not made for the African. The military appears the alternative after such frustrations, though we have seen the military and it wasn’t similarly sustainable.
We are between the Devil and the deep blue sea. It is getting unbearable. Is there hope? I don’t know – unless I engineer myself and move on, independently, dogged and courageously. God help us.
