Features
Farmers, fund and the mafia
The notion some people have about the Sikaman farmer can be amusing. It is the belief of some that immediately a struggling farmer manages to grab a loan, the first thing he does is to invite his abusua (kith and kin) home and abroad.
He organises a mini-festival using palm wine mixed with Guinness as the first course. There and then he announces that he is no longer a poor man; in effect he has ceased to be the close buddy of Mr John Poverty.
The ceremony will be consummated with singing and breakdance, a brief church service, drama and poetry recitals.
At least three bearded goats complete with moustache and four cockerels would be sacrificed in various recipes to celebrate the farmer’s broken alliance with poverty. Some would end up as fufu and light soup, grilled chicken, toasted mutton and smiling goat-head pepper soup. In short, the loan was well taken and well utilised.
The farmer’s prosperity begins right from the stomach. His idea is that if you don’t prosper in the stomach, there is no way you can prosper outside it.
Some farmer are ‘wiser’ though. When they get the loan, they promptly look for new wives. They can no longer continue enjoying one soup everyday like that. Variety is the spice of life! A new wife would bring new zest, new hope and heavenly glary into the farmer’s life. Most importantly the new wife would bring more action into his waist.
So the loan goes indirectly into promoting physical exercise for the human waist instead of the expansion of the farm, purchase of new equipment and improved seeds. Farmers of this nature are jokers, not farmers.
Is it probably because of these whimsical reasons that the banks are reluctant to grant loans to farmers? Obviously with the celebration of mini festivals and the installation of new wives, it is unlikely bank loans can ever be repaid. Of course, farmers who are more concerned about their libido can only be experts in re-scheduling loan payments and not in paying back loans.
Banks are very much concerned about getting their monies back with interest whenever they give out loans. So they demand collateral security as a requirement for the granting of loans. Some farmers actually don’t have anything they can put up as collateral except their hoes, cutlasses and wives. So they struggle through life, not going and not coming.
I do not blame the banks for not granting loans to those who cannot put up collateral. But what about those who are very serious farmers and can put up collateral. Should they also be denied?
Farming is seasonal and a farmer may need a loan only within a certain period to grow crops or breed birds. When the period elapses before the loans are granted, farmers are tempted to misapply the money because it lies idle. In fact, with idle money lying around, the farmer may be tempted to ‘purchase’ a new wife.
It goes without saying that farmers need money but for specific periods when the banks apparently do not take into consideration. Within three months in a year (main cropping season), a crop farmer must plant, nurture, harvest and sell. He applies for a loan and takes nine months or is not even granted. Meanwhile the money lies under his bed waiting to be enjoyed. Not all farmers are angels.
Now, If the government has seen and acknowledged the importance of farmers in national development and has instituted a Farmers’ Day which is a public holiday during which farmers are awarded, then government might as well also do something about funding for our serious farmers, at least the award winning ones to expand and grow since bank loans are not readily available.
Lama of Site 21, Tema, a man of great learning and of vision, has just been telling me that when a farmer gets an award, it means he knows his way about his job, is serious and diligent. According to him, most likely that such a person would also be investment-conscious and judicious in the use of his resources, and not interested in enstooling a new wife.
If government can set up a fund to assist, not with cash but by way of inputs, most of our farmers who have not had any assistance to propel themselves above sea level would be most thankful.
Interview a few award-winning farmers and they would tell you their palaver. The Overall Tema Municipal Farmer Mr Ellis Aferi and his wife Mrs Rosemary Aferi, began their Soka Farms Complex with ten fowls. The pig (a sow), was sent to a farm on a cart to be serviced and brought back breeding.
His piggery is now a real model of inspiration. “We started right from the scratch without any bank loan or financial assistance from any quarter. We placed our trust in labour, hard work and the advice of extension officers. Today we have a large piggery, poultry breeding house, mushroom and snail quarters, fishpond and beehives aside the rabbits we breed. All these without a penny from anywhere,” Mr Aferi told me just last week.
However, he bemoaned the current situation farmers are facing “We have exploited our creativity, our imagination and our muscles. There is a limit to productivity using only human labour and ingenuity. We now want to grow bigger but without funding there is little we can achieve in our bid to grow and develop.”
Mr Aferi like, his colleagues, uses about one ton of wheat bran to prepare feed for his birds, pigs, snails and fishes every week. When Food Complex was in operation, they had their wheat bran without problem. Today, there are mafia connections in the wheat bran trade.
According to all the livestock farmers I’ve spoken to, it is hard to get wheat bran from GAFCO or Irani Brothers directly. They allege that the companies prefer to sell to some wealthy women and top business-men who can buy wheat bran on conditional basis (that is together with flour and other products of the companies), than to farmers.
Then these women and businessmen through their agents resell the bran to the poor farmers at cut-throat prices. I don’t think the system is being fair to farmers. It is indeed a tragedy for the farmers who through their sweat and blood the nation is fed.
“We protest heart and soul,” one farmer yelled at me as if I was responsible for their plight. “How can I feed my birds and pigs satisfactorily if I cannot get wheat bran at the factory price? We disagree that because we are poor, things should be made difficult for us. The rich must not be allowed to exploit us like that.”
The proprietor of Soka Farms, Mr Aferi, for instance has risen from the discomfort of the dust and hardness of the earth to such an enviable height to be an award winner who now holds seminars for farmers, students and officials of organisations on his farm near the Ashiaman-Michel Camp barrier. He must be propped up, even if not with money with inputs on credit basis.
The government must think about setting up a special fund for such individual farmers to grow, while preventing them from cheats and those in the cloak of the mafia.
This article was first published on Saturday, September 21, 1996
THE journalist is a hunter. He goes after human rats and grasscutters personified, matters about whom he can salt and spice and present as news. The fatter and juicier the catch, the better, because sensation is essentially our cup of tea.
Our job is to sell news and sell it in grand style.
Because the journalist is a hunter and is created with a special kind of nose for sniffing out news, he is usually not welcome in many places. He is seen as someone who has been born to make people uncomfortable.
The problem is that some people don’t want things written about them even if it is promotional and favourable. When it entails publishing their pictures alongside the story, they are doubly scared.
“Please, don’t use my picture. People will think I’ve got money and come for loan,” someone told me.
Anyhow, journalists are seen as intruders, undesirables, born with plenty of okro in the mouth; maybe some also in the nose. Some of my friends are no longer too close because they fear I’d give them full coverage in the Sikaman Palava column. Ha ha ha! What a funny world!
Well, people like my Uncle, Sir Kofi Jogolo, my former classmate and born-mathematician, Kwame Korkorti, and ex-football star cum human-salamander Kofi Kokotako don’t mind featuring in the hilarious inches of this column. Kofi Owuo alias Death By Poverty is one personality who has to be mentioned in this palaver.
These are people who are going to live long, primarily because they see the world as one big ball of fun. When Kwame Korkorti was told that his dear mother was dead at home, he smiled and asked the bearer of the message whether his mother had cooked the afternoon meal before claiming she was dead. Until her death, Korkorti ate his lunch at his mother’s end.
When my Uncle Kofi Jogolo was picked and lost 1,500 dollars and a good amount of Sikaman currency, he didn’t lament the loss. Instead he was amused. In fact, he was almost glad about it, because he grinned from ear to ear, stroked his delicate moustache and congratulated the thief, adding that “He is smarter than I am.” Yeah, Jogolo is the man who employs a Swedish barber to trim his moustache.
And when Kofi Kokotako was unemployed and was nearly hit by an articulated truck, he called the driver a fool. “The idiot should have killed me,” he said to me. “Didn’t he know I was unemployed and suffering?”
Today, Kokotako is employed as a Reverend and is not doing badly at all. Thanks to the regular silver collection.
And what about Kofi Owuo, the celebrated poor man. His wife left him not because he was poor, but because he swore in front of her that he would never prosper.
The following dawn the wife packed bag and baggage and went back to her parents and told them all about her husband’s alliance with poverty. Her parents were bewildered and called the alliance unholy. They had no option than to send back Owuo’s drinks to end the marriage.
Kofi Owuo alias Death By Poverty did not contest the issue. He was more engrossed thinking about how to become poorer than to contest what he called a frivolous matter. The wife could go to hell, he said. These are people longevity smiles upon. Nothing worries them.
Getting back to talking about journalists. I’d say that anywhere there is journalism, the issue of press freedom is not too far away. Is the press free? That’s one question foreigners want answer to when they are on visit.
Well, journalists celebrate a yearly WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY to drum home the idea of press freedom as a very important thing in the practice of journalism.
This year’s was celebrated almost a fortnight ago but people didn’t see much of us because we are normally not good celebrants. We should have mounted a float to roam the entire capital, dancing asaboni to brass band music just like PTC did recently.
Although journalists are known to be very good dancers because they walk very much, on that day, they were all busy writing. It was the Minister of Information, Mr Kofi Totobi Quakyi who saved the day by addressing a forum organised to mark the day.
He is a man I’ve always admired since his radical university days. He spoke much on press freedom, cautioning the press not to abuse the freedom granted by the Fourth Republican constitution, but to use it for the progress of society.
Well, press freedom has been defined by many journalists as the freedom to ‘write nonsense’. This definition is not quite accurate. I asked one staff reporter to define press freedom. It took him fifteen minutes to put up something.
“Press freedom is the freedom that is enjoyed by the press that enables journalists to publish or broadcast any kind of material so long as it is absolutely true, is not libelous and slanderous, and is not against the national interest.”
I gave him eight out of 10, a straight A. I guess every journalist is old enough to know that certain things he or she writes is for or against the national interest. We certainly must guard against writing against the national interest; that is very important.
There is also the question of criticising government. The government can be criticized, so long as the criticisms are genuine and the President and his ministers are not insulted and called names. Let us criticize, but let us do it decently so that the journalistic profession can be revered, and its nobility acknowledged. We are not war mongers, are we?
One area in which journalists are not spoken well of is the complaint that they misquote people. Journalists sometimes misquote people, but in four out of five complaints it turns out that nobody is misquoted after all.
When we interview people they say things unreservedly and we publish unreservedly. When the publication is out and their friends or superiors read it and accuse them of having said too much to the press, then they start claiming they were misquoted.
We have encountered these ‘misquotation palaver’ every now and then and reporters are usually accused of this transgression. However, when they bring out their note-books or recorders, it is realised that they wrote nothing out of the way. “Book no lie”.
My advice to people who deal with the press is that if they do not want anything written, they shouldn’t say it. What they want to say is OFF-RECORD, then of course, there is no reason to say it. When you say it, you’re taking a risk. In that instance, you can’t also claim to have been misquoted or words put into your mouth.
And it isn’t every journalist who would be circumspect in matters that are supposed to be off-record, because journalists often want to be as sensational as possible to make their stories saleable. So say just what you want to see published and you won’t later regret it and claim you were misquoted.
Well, I’m not holding brief for journalists, because a few of us are notorious for colouring our reports sometimes sand-papering the words so much that they look very bright in front of readers.
As I once said, when the police tells one such notorious pressman that the thief stole a brown goat, the pressman would want to know whether the goat was bearded. Of course, the police would say ‘Yes’.
However, in the press report, it appears, “A gang of notorious goat-thieves were apprehended in the early hours of yesterday. In the car in which they were riding was a brownish-red goat having a long beard. Upon further examination, it was realised that the goat also had a greyish moustache.”
When the story appears, the police are naturally disturbed. A single thief turns out to be a gang of thieves. The goat also becomes a chameleon and changes colour to brownish-red. And a moustacheless goat overnight wears a greyish moustache whether you like it or not. Luckily the journalist does not add that the moustache was trimmed by a Swedish barber.
Yes, we have a few of such mischief-creating, chronically notorious journalists. But they are one in a hundred. In any case, we make the world. And we shall always do our best to make it a happy place to live in.
This article was first publish on Saturday, May, 20, 1995
When I hear of people who are of the opinion that they cannot make it in life unless they travel abroad, l become sad.
Whenever I see on TV, news of people, that is migrants who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, while attempting to cross to Europe, l become filled with sadness and then anger.
The underlying factor is desperation born out of loss of hope, in life. When an individual tends to believe that his only hope of making it in life is to travel abroad, the risk of dying at sea, does not deter him or her.
The role of some pastors on shaping the mindset of people, especially the youth, leaves much to be desired. You hear them declaring on various media platforms how they can pray for you to get a visa to travel abroad, instead of encouraging them to find something to do to improve their lives as the Bible teaches that God will bless the work of their hands.
The GREATER WORKS CONFERENCE is geared towards renewing the minds of people with a specific focus on people of African descent to rid themselves of the negative perception of lack of capacity to excel in life.
Pastor Mensa Otabil believes that every human being, no matter the skin colour, was created in the exact image of God and therefore has the capacity to do exploits.
The whiteman was not created in the image of God while the Blackman was created in the image of something other than God. The Black person therefore can achieve whatever the whiteman can achieve.
The development in terms of industrialisation that is lacking which has generated unemployment for the youth, is due to lack of effective leadership. The lack of moral integrity in society, is what is causing the lack of job opportunities, which is as a result of corrupt acts which drive away private investment.
A culture of inferiority complex exists which needs to be dealt with, so the African can develop the self worth necessary for personal development which can then result in capacity deployment to avhieve personal goals.
Success in life begins with the individual’s recognition that he or she is capable of achieving the dreams he or she has conceived in his or her mind. The Bible teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding according to Proverbs 9:10.
Christianity was the driving force behind the development of Europe because no society can sustain development without high moral values. GREATER WORKS therefore is a deliberate project to shape the minds of people, especially the youth, who will become the leaders of our future, to prioritise morality in their daily lives.
This is the only way to see a massive transformation in every aspect of our lives as Ghanaians and Africans in Ghana and the rest of the continent.
Since the inception of the GREATOR WORKS CONFERENCE, it has made a lot of impact in the lives of many people from the youth up to the senior citizens level. I recall the testimony of a church member who was motivated and pursued higher education and became one of the youngest Chartered Accountants in this country. Year after year, the impact of the conference has been enormous and lives in Ghana and across the continent, are being transformed.
Black people have started regaining their self confidence and the youth have started getting into areas that previously were considered out of bounds. At a personal level, certain ideas that some years ago, l would have not dreamt about suddenly has become realistic dreams.
The Christian lifestyle has impacted on my children and those close to me. Mindset change starts with one individual, then another and then gradually it spreads like a viral infection until a critical mass is attained and them a massive impact. There is hope for the future.
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
