President's Special Cassava Initiative in danger!

President John Kufuor announced at his 3 October press conference that his government expects to derive $4bn from his cassava starch and textile garment initiatives and that this would help raise the per capita income of Ghanaians from the present $400 per annum to between $500 and $600 per annum within five years.

There is however, news for the President. His cassava initiative is in such grave danger that he will be lucky to even recover the cost of the billions of cedis and the millions of dollars that he has invested in the project.

Why? Because the whole project is being implemented backwards and instead of generating wealth, is likely to cause serious financial loss to the state.

The first thing that implementers of the project did was to get the farmers to plant the cassava- large tracts of it. Of course knowing the gestation period of cassava, it did not take eight months for the cassava to be ready for harvesting.

It was whilst the farmers were harvesting the cassava that the implementers imported the equipment and machinery for the processing from the Scandinavia. So of course, the farmers harvested the cassava and there was no market for it, because the processing equipment and machinery was not available.

The result? Total financial loss to the farmers, low morale, and abject frustration. Kofi Mensah, a native of Bawjiase who abandoned a lucrative clearing agency business in Tema to invest in the cassava project, was close to tears when Ghana Palaver spoke to him: “I was foolish to believe the propaganda of quick money from the cassava project. I put everything I had into planting the cassava. At the end of it, no one would buy the cassava. My lifetime investment is totally wiped out. I have only myself to blame,” he lamented.

So the first cassava-harvesting season has come and gone and the harvest has been lost. The equipment and machinery have now arrived but can you believe it? The buildings in which to install them are not yet ready! So the equipment and machinery remain in their containers, idle and abandoned whiles waiting for the buildings to be constructed.

It is while the buildings are being constructed that advertisements have been placed in the local newspapers for staff to be employed for the project. Knowing the time that recruitment processes take, we will not be surprised if by the time the buildings are completed, there will be no technicians to install the equipment and machinery and no staff to operate them.

So a project whose cycle should have been “building-equipment-staff-planting-harvesting” has ended up with a project implementation cycle of “planting-harvesting-equipment-building-staff.”

That is not all. Just as the implementation mess-up is about to be cleared, the greatest fear of the sceptics of the project all along has occurred- the price of cassava and industrial starch on the world market has plummeted! The Ghana Palaver is informed that at current prices, there is no way the project can recover the cost of investment.

Said one industry analyst who the paper spoke to: “Did the NPP government speak to Goosie Tanoh and Kyeretwie Opoku at all to learn from their experiences in this cassava business and how they got their fingers burnt?” Another stated: “We have another classic case of wilfully causing financial loss to the State staring us in the face.”