By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Don’t expect Ghana’s Minister for Agriculture to be talking about the Acheampong-minted Operation Feed Yourself (OFY) program anytime soon. And for those of our readers who may be unaware of OFY, it was, perhaps, the most successful agricultural program launched by any Ghanaian government during the past half-century of our country’s reassertion of her sovereignty from British colonial rule; and it was launched under the tenure of the so-called National Redemption Council (NRC).

Indeed, it was OFY that witnessed the development of the Dawhenya Irrigation Project (DIP). And although, predictably, like so many other projects of its kind initiated in the past, Operation Feed Yourself would be short-lived, while it lasted, it was unarguably the best of its kind. For the very first time in living memory, Ghana even began exporting foodstuffs, notably yams, to other nations in the West African sub-region.

But that the slain Gen. I. K. Acheampong’s Operation Feed Yourself program made Nkrumah’s “Work and Happiness” and “Workers’ Brigade” programs seem like an infantile make-believe is a story that has yet to be fully and truthfully told. Likewise, the fact that Gen. Acheampong claimed to be an Nkrumaist and, in fact, even misguidedly, attempted to return the deposed African Show Boy to power (but for the auspicious intervention of Providence), ought not to detract from the resounding success of the Trabuom-native’s Operation Feed Yourself program.

Needless to say, the program entailed far more than traditional landed-agriculture, or farming, as most Ghanaians know it. In the latter sense, therefore, OFY was quite comprehensive, for it also entailed aquaculture and/or sea-food farming, as then-Col. Bernasko, extant commissioner for Agriculture, would be all-too-eager to relate it.

Interestingly, in quite a curious sense, of course, when recently Dr. Jacque Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), visited Mr. Kwesi Ahwoi’s Accra office towards the end of April this year, it was only the possible revival of school farms that Ghana’s agriculture minister invoked as the foundation stone of his policy geared at boosting food production throughout the country (See “Revive the use of School farms” Ghanaweb.com 4/22/09).

Personally, I find any such policy as the preceding to be unpardonably effete, ersatz and outright bankrupt. But as to why Mr. Ahwoi would invoke it, rather than the epic success that was Gen. Acheampong’s Operation Feed Yourself program may, indeed, not be far-fetched at all. And here also, those of our readers who may have long forgotten or even been born after this historic era, ought to be promptly reminded that under then-Col. Acheampong’s National Redemption Council (NRC) junta, a massive and quite successful revival of school farms was made a part and parcel of the OFY program. And so by conveniently skirting around any mention of OFY, Mr. Ahwoi does not, in fact, wholly succeed in avoiding the tabooed, the tabooed in the psyche of many an NDC prime operative, that is.

In sum, in April when the Director-General of the FAO paid a working tour of Ghana, Mr. Ahwoi could not even half-allude to the resounding success that was Gen. Acheampong’s Operation Feed Yourself program because, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Ghana’s agriculture minister was morbidly afraid of being haunted by the lingering ghost of the at once most benign and inspiring dictator that Ghana ever had.

The preceding notwithstanding, what makes Mr. Ahwoi’s call for the revival of school farms a patently bankrupt idea, is that school farms were only a supplementary agricultural policy. What Ghana needs presently is a comprehensive, modern and revolutionary agricultural policy, one that involves our entire country at large.

What is more, school farms as a policy was never really successful, for the simple reason that pupils/students were never in school all-year-round. Secondly, as Dr. J. B. Danquah, the undisputed Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics observed some diamond years ago, Ghanaians, by our very nature, are a people who prefer to work for themselves, as amply evidenced by the epic and global success of the Ghana cocoa industry. Thus, the woeful lack of a critical sense of personal and private ownership that comes with being associated with a school farm has meant that this mode of food production would not be very successful. And, indeed, during the 1970s, most of the school farms inspired by the OFY program were not quite as successful as Ghana’s agriculture minister would have the FAO Secretary-General believe. The farms were not very successful partly because the detached and diffused proprietorship of the farms, as communal properties, made invested labor seem like slave-labor to those directly engaged.

Then there were also the greedy headmasters/head-teachers and their staffs that operated pretty much like capitalist cormorants by summarily alienating the primary producers (pupils/students) from the wealth of their very sweat and toil, and oftentimes even blood! More often than not at harvest time, as this author vividly recalls, student-farmers would be served one corn-cob or two for every sack-full that made its way onto the kitchen rafters of school “masters” and “mistresses,” who envisaged themselves as being professionally and legally entitled to such “forcibly free” labor.

And for those of us who grew up in the rural areas, the introduction of school farms almost invariably meant that a full-half, and sometimes even more, of teaching and studying time was allocated to farm work. The latter thus became a reasonable, and even legitimate, excuse for teachers to rampantly miss classes and instead engage themselves in private extracurricular activities – sometimes even entailing the liberal abuse of students as domestic servants and sexual quarry – for which these non-/under-performing teachers got fully paid by the Ministry of Education. Mind the reader, in those days, teachers more regularly received their paychecks than it is often the case these days.

In brief, rather than force school farms on students, across the board, what ought to be done is to encourage students with great interest and talent for agriculture – of various kinds – to take the relevant course combinations that would facilitate their smooth and successful entry into commercial farming. This, however, can only be successfully done when students are able to perceive government policies as being respectful of farming as an entrepreneurial venture. So far, government policy in this direction leaves too much to be desired. The rather stolid and outright primitive idea that farming is so basic as to be successfully engaged in by all Ghanaians is one that has to be discarded forthwith. For, needless to say, training to become a successful farmer is no easier than being trained to become a successful engineer or physician.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###