Hoe and cutlass-farming 'insult to humanity' – Otabil

Relying on hoes and cutlasses for farming in this modern era is an insult to humanity, since machines have been designed to take up such arduous physical task, Pastor Mensa Otabil has said.

"If you are a great farmer but don't have understanding of farming, you just dig with the same hoe for the rest of your life [and] use the same cutlass for the rest of your life. It's an insult to go to modern farms in Ghana and you see people still using hoes and cutlasses. It's an insult to humanity because machines are doing those things. Machines are doing them and doing them far better," the founder of the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) told his congregation on Sunday, 2 October.

Teaching about identifying people's talent and making the best of it as part of his series on understanding the world system and being at the corridors of power, the motivational speaker said: "I don’t want to see a human being on the ground, hitting the ground. I want a machine to hit the ground for him," so that he can "now plan what to sow and how to market what to sow. That, a machine will not do for him. That is where he must use his brain, not hitting the ground [with hoes and cutlasses] and we call them our hard working farmers. No, we have cheapened human beings and we have reduced them and taken them out of the corridors of power."

Pastor Otabil also said he did not believe in the idea that the youth should go into farming.

"By no means am I saying that farming is not good, but most farmers are not farmers by choice in Ghana. Most African farmers are not farmers by choice; they are farmers by force because there is nothing to do," he said, adding: "I don’t believe in the youth going into farming."

Dr Otabil said he found it befuddling that a country like Ghana would be pushing young people into farming when already 70 per cent of Ghanaians are farmers.

"I believe that a nation should not be encouraging everybody to be farmers. I don't think we need more than 5% of Ghanaians as farmers. All we need to do is to do it well so a few people can produce for more than all of us,” he said.

"Less than three per cent of most developed nations are into agriculture. The whole agricultural industry, including those who produce, process and market and everything in the United States is just about 6%. Here [in Ghana] we have 70% [of people in farming] – not processing, but producing – and we can’t feed ourselves.

"It's not the number of people in farming, it's the quality of the farming and we shouldn't be pushing young bright people and say: 'Go to the land!'. That's not the way. I don't want to have people with talent reduced to farmers and miners and workers with their body. I want people to work with their brain, with their ideas."