Corruption galore in the cocoa industry

... As 'chit for sale' system reigns supreme
... Gladys Asmah's Ministry leading the crusade "General" Kutu Acheampong's notorious "chit for sale" system gave birth to the Ghanaian addition to the international economic vocabulary "Kalabule".

Under that system, goods and services did not physically move, instead, chits for their sale moved in a long human chain from person to person with each person in the chain adding his or her own profit margin without adding any value to the goods or services for sale, until the final person who decided to move the goods then added the biggest profit of all.

It was like a modern day Value Added Tax (VAT), without any value being added, and with the tax going into individual pockets instead of to the state.

Well, "chit for sale", the beginning of "kalabule", are alive and well in J.A.Kufuor's Ghana, more specially in the cocoa industry, where New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters are making windfall profits where they have not invested a pesewa.

The first area of these corruption-ridden practice is the cocoa sacks business. After the cocoa beans meant for domestic processing have been purchased and the sacks emptied by the Cocoa Processing Company (CPC) factory at Tema, the empty cocoa bags are abandoned.

Under the NDC government, workers of COCOBOD and CPC were allowed to sell the empty cocoa sacks to onion, tomato, garden eggs, maize, charcoal and other sellers who needed them to bag their produce for sale. This was how some of the poor workers supplemented their incomes.

Come the NPP into power, and a letter issued from Gladys Asmah's Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs, instructing the CPC to reserve all the empty cocoa sacks for the Ministry. NPP supporters are then issued with "chits" to go and collect allocations of the empty sacks from the CPC.

Three million empty sacks were thus allocated during the last purchasing season. At the approved price of ?4,000 per empty sack, this works out to a cool ?12 billion.

Fifty per cent of this amount, or ?6 billion is supposed to go into the NPP's war chest for the 2004 elections, but the Wulensi bye-elections, if they do come on will provide an appropriate dress rehearsal.

Like in the "bad old days" of the Kurtu Acheampong regime, instead of the NPP women supporters going directly to collect the empty sacks themselves, they sell the "chits" to other women who resell them to yet other women, with each middle-woman adding her own profit margin, such that today, empty cocoa sacks that should have sold for ?4,000 per sack are going for between ?8,000-?10,000 per sack.

The extra costs, of course, are added to the retail prices of the vegetables and other items that are packed in the sacks, adding to their rising prices on the market.

Cocoa corruption Kutu Acheampong style, sector two, is in the area of cocoa haulage. Under the NDC, the same transporters who hauled the cocoa from the producing areas in the hinterland to the storage depots in Kumasi, also carted the cocoa from Kumasi to the ports at Tema.

That system has been changed by the NPP. During the last purchasing season, as many as 97 companies owned almost exclusively by NPP supporters and financiers were contracted to transport the cocoa from the Kumasi storage depots to the Tema port.

Reliable information available to the 'Ghana Palaver' show that more than 80 per cent of these companies did not have any trucks or articulators, so they sold their "chits" (contracts) to the traditional hauling companies who have large fleets of trucks and articulators.

These traditional haulage companies then transported the cocoa for the upstart pro-NPP companies for a fee, with the upstart companies coolly pocketing their commission for no work done.

All this is happening under a President who has declared that "from now on, people will no longer have to produce membership cards in this or that political party in order to enjoy the benefits of public policy" (page 5 of President Kufuor's 2001 "State of the Nation" address), and who has also declared a "zero tolerance for corruption" (never mind that phrase was plagiarized from a British female Minister and that her zero tolerance was declared for drug pushers and users and that it got her into big political trouble).