When COCOBOD Ran Away from Me
Writing my LECIAD thesis, I made efforts to contact both COCOBOD and Ivory Coast’s Le Conseil du Café-Cacao (CCC) for an interview, but none of them responded to me. Regarding the CCC, I could not serve them directly with my letter requesting fo an interview. The Elubo border was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible fo me to go by road.
I tried sending it via air through DHL but the charge was exorbitantly high. Instead, I sent the letter in-person to the Ivorian Embassy in Accra and frequented there hoping they will link me up with someone at the CCC in Abidjan. It was to no avail. As for COCOBOD, I called and chased the former Head of Public Affairs, Fiifi Boafo, to grant me an interview but also to no avail. In the end, I interviewed anonymous sources.
How difficult was it for the Ghana Cocoa Board and Le Conseil du Café-Cacao to answer questions on a policy (the living income differential) that they claimed was to better the lives of cocoa farmers? Even those who then occupied positions as heads of the cocoa farmers’ associations all turned down my requests to speak to them on the Ghana-Ivory Coast floor price of cocoa policy.
From what I gathered in my cocoa research, I can say without a doubt that majority of our politicians and staffers in the cocoa sector care less about the plight of the poor farmer.
Greed & Self-Sabotage: The Jute Sack Mafia
In a TV3 interview with Keminni Amanor, published on May 26, 2025, the Chief Executive Officer of COCOBOD, Dr. Ransford Annetey Abbey, said that some 200 containers of jute sacks, as well as agrochemicals – for the cocoa sector – had gone missing before he assumed office. Did they ever find these containers? It’s amazing how shipping containers could go missing as if they were matchboxes! In the said interview, Dr. Abbey revealed that COCOBOD records showed that while the organisation had over 94,000 bales of jute sacks, it needlessly went ahead to procure 75,000 more.
The COCOBOD CEO, in a separate MyJoyOnline report, also made a shocking claim that: “They [COCOBOD under the Akufo-Addo administration] issued an irrevocable letter of credit, $48 million, in December of 2024, when the paper documents show that they had imported jute sacks and over 110,000 have not been cleared for over three years.”
Who are those behind this jute sacks criminality? Are the jute sacks procured directly by COCOBOD or through an entity or an individual? Certainly, those behind these evil procurements would kick against any move to see that the sacks are produced locally in Ghana. If that happens, how would they continue to make money at the expense of the state and the poor farmers? They will continue to import jute sacks from Bangladesh, India and China!
Why an American Rightly Insulted Ghanaians
In my research for my LECIAD thesis, I came across a very rich book on Ghana’s cocoa. A book that I have told a few close friends that if I had my way, I would make it a compulsory read for all Ghanaian students from the junior high school to the tertiary level irrespective of one’s course of study.
In the “Obroni and the Chocolate Factory,” Steven Wallace offers a good read. I was fascinated by the fact that he traced his knowledge of cocoa to Sunyani – my city! Moreover, what got me glued to Steven’s book is that he was brutally honest with whatever he wrote. In his quest to establish a chocolate factory in Ghana, Mr. Wallace – a lawyer– got in contact with his fellow American by name Michael J. “Cogs” Caughlin.
Cogs, who was based in Accra, worked as a staffer with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The American Embassy, in Ghana, had forwarded a letter Steven Wallace wrote them to Cogs. When Mr. Wallace and Cogs met, the latter commended the former for his move to establish a chocolate factory in Ghana but that commendation turned out to rather be a biting jab to Ghana. An insult that I honestly think we deserve and must learn from if we really want to change the story of our unending economic woes.
Cogs told Steven: “Your chocolate factory idea is just what these fuckers [Ghanaians] should have been doing for years. Just march straight up the value chain and leave the bean trading to the idiots in the Ivory Coast.” Knowing the big money chocolatiers are making from our cocoa by only processing the beans into finished products like chocolate and cocoa syrup, among others, Cogs was right. We need these hard knocks to bring us to our senses.
“Cogs loved almost everything about Africa but he played favourites, and Ghana was at the top of his list, his haloed child,” Steven Wallace noted. It is only sad that while many well-meaning people love and pity Ghana, the country herself barely and hardly shows that same compassion inward. If handlers of our cocoa sector loved the country as Cogs showed his affection, would we have seen the self-sabotage at the COCOBOD?
The Way Forward
When Steven Wallace returned to Ghana the second time in the early 1990s to establish his chocolate factory, he admits Ghana had attempted chocolate production. We were not producing gourmet chocolates, he argued. “To be precise, when I started my company in 1991, Ghana produced almost no finished chocolate. The chocolate that had been attempted in Ghana was roundly acknowledged as some of the world’s worst and had failed to sustain exports to any high-end consumer market. It was rumored to contain paraffin to keep it from melting in the Ghanaian heat,” he wrote.
What is interesting is that Ghana now produces high quality assorted products from its cocoa. In writing my thesis, I spent two days at the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG) at Tafo in the Eastern Region. Here, I saw the hard work our scientists have done in turning cocoa into chocolate, cocoa powders of various kinds and soaps, among others. While it is true that today we have perfected our trade and export our own manufactured chocolate like the Golden Tree to the international market, the volume of such exports compared with the export of raw beans is insignificant.
We must expand the market by making cocoa consumption a nationwide policy. From the primary school to the tertiary school, banks, government and corporate offices to churches and mosques, cocoa must be an everyday affair. For the schools (whether private or public), students must be billed either annually or per term. For instance, if per term, primary, junior high, senior high/vocational and tertiary students pay, say, GHC50, GHC100, GHC150 and GHC200, respectively, and they will have the privilege and the choice to choose a drink made from either Royale Natural Cocoa Powder (unsweetened) and Alltime Drinking Chocolate Powder (sweetened) at strategically positioned dispensers on their campuses.
We could decide to add slice of bread to their daily drinks. Also, we could add to the package, say, 10 pieces of the CRIG produced cocoa soaps per student so that instead of the students buying any other brand of soap, their first fixed-option becomes that supplied to them by the state. I must, however, point out that the soap addition to the students’ package must still be pegged at the same fee as aforementioned.
If we are to assume without admitting that the total number of senior high students in the country are 600,000, multiplying this number by GHC150 will give us GHC90 million every three to four months. How much is that in dollars? I have recently seen that this national cocoa consumption policy – which I espoused in my LECIAD thesis – is being piloted by John Dumelo, the Member of Parliament for the Ayawaso West Wuogon, as he gives free weekly cocoa drinks to selected pupils in his constituency.
This is very encouraging and he must be commended. Nonetheless, implementing this policy on a national scale should not be free. We may decide to make it free for the aged as we rope in the general public. If Japan, in 2022, launched a campaign dubbed Sake Viva to get its youth drink more alcohol so the National Tax Agency rakes in more cash, I do not think nationalizing cocoa consumption in Ghana is an extreme policy.
However, if this policy should work, it would depend on the political will of our politicians. They must be able to prosecute persons who would sabotage the policy in any way. Again, if the politicians and policymakers would heed the clarion call and implement the suggested policy, Ghanaians would in no time live as kings and queens that we ought to have lived all these years — without any right-thinking Ghanaian walking the desert to Libya to risk the Mediterranean to Europe for greener pastures when the pastures at home are greenest!
President John Dramani Mahama and Dr Randy Abbey must be advised not to implement any policy that is still tied to the apron strings of international cocoa processors and chocolatiers as such would not break the shackles we find ourselves in.
Our Independence, for 69 years now, has not really made sense. And it would, indeed, make no sense until we first make sense of our nearly 150 years of farming cocoa – counting from when Tetteh Quashie first planted the crop.
May God bless our homeland Ghana!
By Solomon Mensah
The writer is a freelance journalist and an International Affairs Analyst. The views expressed herein are solely his, and do not, in any way, reflect the editorial policy of this organisation.
Email: nehusthan4@yahoo.com
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