They Promised You GH₵6,500. They’re Paying You GH₵2,587. And Now the NPP Wants to Lead Your March

The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the Accra Free Press Club and do not represent the position of any political party or institution. Accra Evening News is committed to independent, evidence-based commentary on matters of national importance.

 The cocoa price cut has gifted the opposition its most potent weapon in recent times. But don’t be fooled — Bawumia’s NPP is playing a far longer game than a farmers’ strike. 

Let us start with a number that every cocoa farmer in Ghana’s Western North, Ashanti and Central Regions now knows by heart: GH₵2,587. That is what a bag of cocoa fetches today, following the government’s mid-season price cut of 28.6 per cent announced on 12 February. For many farmers, it is a bag they planted, fermented, dried and bagged in good faith months ago — and some have not yet been paid even that.

Now consider a second number: GH₵6,500. That is the price the NDC promised farmers during the 2024 election campaign. They won those votes. They won the election. And this week, they delivered a price that is not merely lower than their promise — it is lower than the price the ‘heartless’ NPP was paying when it left office.

You do not need a calculator to see the politics in this. And you can be very sure the New Patriotic Party does not need one either.

“They promised the moon on a cocoa bag. They are delivering less than the government they spent years calling an enemy of farmers.”

Within hours of the Finance Minister’s announcement, the NPP Minority Caucus was at the microphone, condemning what it called an ‘unprecedented betrayal.’ Ranking Member Dr Eric Yaw Opoku called the cut something that had ‘never ever happened’ in Ghana’s history. Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the MP for Ofoase-Ayirebi, called it a haircut on one million farmers’ livelihoods. And the Minority declared, with careful phrasing that deserves attention, that it ‘would not hesitate to join farmers if they decided to protest.’

Mark that language. Not ‘we will lead a strike.’ Not ‘we are calling farmers to the streets.’ They will join. If farmers decide. There is a political science textbook’s worth of calculation packed into those eleven words.

The NPP wants you to believe it is the natural champion of the cocoa farmer. But the ghosts of the party’s own cocoa record are rattling loudly in the background, and any honest accounting of this crisis must reckon with them. It was under the NPP’s watch that Ghana’s 32-year syndicated financing model for COCOBOD collapsed for the first time, in 2023. It was the NPP that projected production of 800,000 tonnes for the 2023/24 season and harvested barely 432,000. It was NPP-era COCOBOD that rolled over 333,767 tonnes of contracts at losses that, by some estimates, now exceed one billion US dollars. The current GH₵32.9 billion debt hanging over COCOBOD did not materialise from thin air — it accumulated across administrations, and the NPP was the most recent author of a significant portion of it.

The Alliance for Cocoa Farmers and Development said as much publicly, accusing the NPP of mismanaging Chinese loans and warning the opposition against attempting to ‘speak on behalf of cocoa farmers’ without that record being interrogated. Some farmer groups have actively commended the NDC’s reform package, however imperfect. This is not a united front against the government, and the NPP knows it.

“The most dangerous opposition is not the one that burns things down. It is the one that ensures you cannot rebuild your credibility before the next election comes around.”

Which brings us to Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, freshly re-confirmed as NPP flagbearer with 56.48 per cent of the party’s internal vote. His post-primary message has been disciplined and revealing: end the internal attacks, fix the party’s cracks, rebuild credibility. He has explicitly acknowledged that the NPP lost 2.1 million of its own voters in 2024 — not to the NDC, but to abstention and disillusionment. His first priority is not leading a march down the Accra-Cape Coast road. It is making sure those voters have a reason to come back in 2028.

Bawumia is, by instinct and training, a technocrat rather than a populist. His weapons are press conferences, parliamentary committees and forensic data presentations — not megaphones and placards. He can legitimately attack the NDC’s management of COCOBOD, the timing of its forward sales strategy, and the painful irony of a price that falls below what the ‘wicked NPP’ used to pay. But he will be careful not to overreach. He knows, as an economist, that a 70 per cent collapse in global cocoa prices would test any government. He cannot pretend otherwise without losing the credibility he is trying so carefully to rebuild.

So what will actually happen? Expect a sustained, media-heavy parliamentary campaign. Expect demands for the CEO of COCOBOD to appear before committee. Expect weekly reminders of the GH₵6,500 promise and the GH₵2,587 reality. Expect the NPP to amplify and legitimise any grassroots protests that emerge organically from the cocoa belt — and they very well might, given that thousands of farmers have gone unpaid since November. But a formal, NPP-organised national strike? That would require a credibility the party does not currently have in farming associations, and a risk appetite that Bawumia’s current internal message actively discourages.

This is a party playing, very deliberately, for 2028 — not for next month.

For the NDC government, the discomfort of this moment cannot be overstated. The cocoa sector restructuring package announced alongside the price cut — cocoa bonds, a 70 per cent FOB price guarantee in proposed new legislation, a traceability programme, the commitment to 50 per cent local processing by 2026/27 — is not without genuine merit. Some of these reforms were overdue and represent serious policy thinking. But they landed in the same breath as a cut that farmers will feel immediately and personally. Reform is cold comfort when your bag of cocoa fetches less than you expected.

The government will need to do considerably more to demonstrate it is managing this crisis for farmers’ benefit, not merely managing the optics. Arrears owed to Licensed Buying Companies must be cleared urgently and transparently. The new pricing legislation must reach Parliament, be debated openly and passed before the next main crop season. And the Finance Minister would do well to stand before farming communities — not just before the press — and explain, plainly, what happened and what comes next.

As for the NPP: their outrage is partially legitimate and substantially opportunistic, as opposition parties’ outrage tends to be. The suffering of cocoa farmers is real. The broken promise is real. The institutional dysfunction is real. But the party that presided over COCOBOD’s near-collapse must not be permitted to offer itself as the saviour of an institution it helped to weaken, without that record being placed squarely on the table.

Ghana’s cocoa farmers deserve better than to become props in a political theatre that serves neither party’s farmers’ welfare agenda, but both parties’ electoral calculations. They deserve a permanent, legislated price floor. They deserve prompt payment. They deserve a COCOBOD that is governed transparently, financed sustainably and insulated from the kind of short-term political price-setting that has now, twice in three years, left the sector in crisis.

What they will get, at least for now, is two parties pointing fingers at each other across a cocoa bag that is worth less than it should be.

The farmers, as always, will be waiting.