Get Real, Henry Lartey

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 5, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The leader of the Nkrumaist splinter party called the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP) is not saying that the New Patriotic Party’s policy of building dams in every village in the northern-half of the country is not feasible. Just that these dams would breed mosquitoes, unless the rural farmers for whom these mini-dams are intended to help are actively engaged in the cultivation of food crops and other commercial-oriented commodities (See “Akufo-Addo’s 1 Village, 1 Dam [Policy] Will Breed Mosquitoes – Dr. Lartey” Rainbowradioonline.com / Modernghana.com 9/5/16).

But the fact of the matter is that it is precisely because of the woeful lack of access to abundant irrigable water supply that the farmers being targeted with the construction of these dams are not presently producing as abundantly as they could. I also agree with Dr. Henry Lartey, described in various news reports as an agronomist, that the exponential expansion of the capacity of these farmers to produce food crops and other primary commodities would equally necessitate enabling these farmers to secure “global gap certificates,” or whatever it is called, to enable them to export their produce outside the country. But this second stage of the productivity of these farmers need not occur immediately.

First, the local market ought to be adequately supplied, and then one can begin to talk about massive production for export. Much would also depend on what kinds of food crops and produce are targeted for export. And so, by all means, Dr. Lartey ought to allow these farmers to first learn to crawl, and then in due time they would be able to begin to walk and then run like Usain Bolt. We would also need to establish silage facilities at these food production centers as a means of significantly reducing the sort of produce rot that the GCPP leader is talking about. This stage of the agricultural development process would, of course, go hand-in-hand with the construction of good and well-maintained roadways. Up to this point, most of us are in perfect agreement with Dr. Lartey.

Where it gets a bit murky is this Leftist nonsense about the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) government’s not having put to maximum use economic relief provided by the UN-sponsored HIPC program. The GCPP leader is not the only Ghanaian politician given to vacuously reciting HIPC’s economic relief and development program. The leaders of the wasteful National Democratic Congress (NDC) are equally nauseatingly given to mouthing such crass and abject nonsensicalities. But the fact of the matter is that the HIPC program was in existence before President John Agyekum-Kufuor assumed the democratic reins of governance, together with his key associates of the New Patriotic Party, in 2000. HIPC was not a program that voluntarily dropped into the laps of Mr. Kufuor by osmosis, as these NDC apparatchiks would have Ghanaians believe.

It took great courage and creative leadership and dogged determination to accede to the fiscally stringent measures stipulated by the designers, managers and directors of HIPC. Chairman Jerry John Rawlings and his so-called National Democratic Congress had cynically refused to go down this veritable revolutionary road. Which, of course, makes a screaming mockery of their pretense to revolutionary progressivism. And so rather than laud the leaders of the New Patriotic Party for having expanded and developed Ghana’s postcolonial economy far better than any other government in the country’s Fourth Republic, Dr. Lartey seems to find it more convenient to victimize and demonize the NPP operatives for having been relatively so successful in significantly improving the living standards of Ghanaian citizens to levels that many experts believe make the tenure of the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) pale into abysmal insignificance.
Why do some Ghanaians find it so difficult to open their eyes and minds to the laudable achievements of their political opponents? Our elders of yore had a maxim that could not be even more relevant in our time. It goes like this: “You may hate the duiker, but at least be honest enough to praise its graceful gait.”

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