Former President John Mahama has warned that Ghana is likely to face famine next year because of the Akufo-Addo government’s messy handling of Agriculture.
In an interaction with the people of Dormaa in the Bono Region during his tour, Mr. Mahama reveals that the Planting for Food and Jobs program that the Akufo-Addo government flaunts is actually his idea.
He had started the implementation of the program without fanfare and with funding from the Canadian government when the NDC lost power in 2017, he claimed.
“…Before this government came in, we had an arrangement with Canada. They were giving us funding for agriculture because they had realised that it was the sector creating more jobs,” Mahama claimed in what has baffled many because the Planting For Food and Jobs (PFJ) is believed to be the brainchild of the Akufo Addo administration.
“When they came into office, they named it PFJ. It was originally a programme that we were working on. They just came and continued it Planting for Food and Jobs has failed. There will be famine in Ghana next year. The Canadian funding has been exhausted and we need to find alternative funding to sustain the programme but there is no money at the Ministry of Finance.
“Prices for food crops are going up astronomically,” Mahama added.
Mr. Mahama reveals farmers are complaining about the lack of fertilizers. “One of my siblings is a farmer. He is telling me this year there is no fertilizer. He had to buy his own fertilizer and a bag of fertilizer is expensive now. He normally cultivates 300 acres of maize but this year he had to reduce it to 80 acres. It shows that there is going to be hunger because the PFJ has failed,” he said.
It’s been five years since the Akufo-Addo government took over the massive agricultural programme and had run it aground Mahama argues.
This is one of many programs that John Mahama had started but had lamely ceded credit to President Akufo-Addo.
In the build-up to the 2020 elections, Mr. Mahama, similarly asserted a claim for the Free SHS program, something he was known to have started implementing as “progressively free SHS,” but had refused to trumpeted it like Akufo-Addo did his own.
His claim on Free SHS in 2020 had come four years after he had allowed the NPP to trumpet the program as their original brainchild.