No Thanks, NPA

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

Dec. 31, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The decision by the National Petroleum Authority (NPA) to reduce gas prices at the pump, or the retail-market level, by 10-percent, though laudable, comes rather belatedly, if also because the dramatic fall in the price of a barrel of crude oil on the global market from $100 to below $70 (U.S. Dollars) has remained for quite a remarkable while now. And it was only fair for prices at the gas pump to have been promptly adjusted downwards to synch with the dictates of the global market (See "Fuel Prices Reduced By 10%" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 12/31/14).

The sort of communistic - President Mahama prefers to call it "social-democratic" - policy gimmickry being doggedly pursued by the Mahama government, presently, was actually pioneered by the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party (CPP); and it was mischievously used to deny our cocoa farmers their just deserts, in terms of the dictates of the world market. The idea then was that the humongous income deliberately denied our cocoa and other cash-crop farmers was to be reserved and spent on our collective national development. The reality, however, as it came to light during investigations by the landmark Jibowu Commission, for just one salient example, clearly indicated that the CPP regime had unduly and illegitimately played partisan politics with monetary wealth generated by our hardworking and patriotic cocoa farmers.

Nkrumah would found the infamous Cocoa-Purchasing Company (CPC), to be distinguished from the Danquah-inspired Cocoa-Marketing Board, now weirdly renamed COCOBOD. Nkrumah would use the CPC as a parallel agency in faux-competition with the CMB's own Produce-Buying Agency (PBA), and private cooperative associations established by big cocoa farmers and entrepreneurs as local produce-buying agencies, to systematically undermine cocoa farmers and other large producers who did not endorse his command economic policies. For instance, the CPC would offer higher producer prices to farmers officially registered with the Appiah-Dankwa-led Ghana Farmers' Council, a veritable propaganda front of the CPP. Of course, the British colonial regime was complicit in such deleterious gimmickry.

Playing Santa Claus - or Father Christmas - with the collective wealth of the people, as the National Petroleum Authority has sought to do, ought to be roundly condemned in no uncertain terms. The Botchwey Group has absolutely no right to saddle Ghanaians with debts incurred by its own gross administrative incompetence. That was why I found it very offensive when the NPA sought to cavalierly explain off its initial adamant refusal to reduce prices at the gas pump to synch with prevailing global market prices in the following statement: "This decision takes a balance[d] position of continues [sic] efforts to reduce outstanding under-recoveries and at the same time reflect fallen prices of petroleum products on the world market."

Needless to say, it would have been far more "balanced" if the corporate executives of the NPA had also taken the time to explain precisely how these "outstanding under-recoveries" were incurred, and precisely whose fault it was; and also why the NPA felt so strongly that the average Ghanaian consumer had absolutely no right to the enjoyment of reasonable prices at the gas pump, while their counterparts in other countries enjoyed commensurate downward price-adjustment at the gas pump. Indeed, for true economic justice to prevail, the reduction in retail gas prices ought to be made automatically adjustable as dictated on the global market on a daily basis, and not capriciously as the executives at the NPA decide at whim.

Nobody ought to be fooled by the fact that the politically expedient decision by the NPA to downwardly adjust fuel prices was very likely a tactical attempt to parry off Dr. Charles Wereko Brobby's decision to judicially force the NPA operatives to reasonably respond to the exigencies of the global market. This, apparently, is the only language which the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress fully appreciates, particularly when one reckons the fact that "Tarzan's" judicial threat came on the heels of repeated calls from the leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the nation's largest association of public employees, for the NPA and the government to align gas prices at the pump with prevailing global-market trends.

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