My First Coup d'Etat by John Dramani Mahama

Author:John Dramani Mahama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN MY FATHER WAS RELEASED from detention, his assets had been frozen. Although he had been able to purchase the plots he needed to build his house and start his farm due to the land tenure system in the north, which rested in the hands of the chiefs, getting his rice mill business off the ground was another matter altogether. He needed capital, and the only way he could get it was to secure a loan from a bank.

Dad formed a limited liability company. He asked two of his friends to help him out by signing the required forms. They were men who had their own lives and occupations. They had no interest at all in Dad’s business. Dad provided all the collateral and everything else that was needed for the loan to be approved and the business to take off. He would take care of the day-to-day management and whatever else was needed for the business to run. His friends, the two other shareholders, were, for all intents and purposes, ghosts, names on a sheet of paper.

During one of his visits to the north, Acheampong imposed a ban on the importation of rice in order to give the local farmers a chance. He asked the Bank of Ghana to give direct commodity loans to the rice mills so that they would be able to purchase rice from the local farmers. Since my father was a rice farmer and he also owned a rice mill, the ban and the Operation Feed Yourself programme were especially beneficial. With the state essentially funding the purchase of raw materials, Ghana’s rice industry was thoroughly revitalised.

Acheampong’s vision was becoming a reality. Insofar as food was concerned, within a short period of time, Ghana had become self-sufficient and was now even entering the export market to sell its surplus to other African nations.

Whenever Colonel Acheampong travelled to the north, he would stop by the house to personally greet my father. The two were not close friends, but they had a cordial relationship, one based on respect and necessity. Because of Operation Feed Yourself, my father’s rice mill was of strategic interest to the state.

My father, much to his own surprise, liked Acheampong. The colonel was a military man, a coup maker, and that alone could have easily kept him out of my father’s good graces. But Dad believed that Colonel Acheampong, despite the way he came into office, had Ghana’s best interests at heart. He was making improvements, effecting change.

Acheampong had switched Ghana’s system of measurement from the imperial to the metric. In 1974, through another of his programmes, Operation Keep Right, Ghana switched from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right. It was perhaps one of the most successful radio and television ad campaigns in the history of the nation. A taxi driver would blow his horn four times at another taxi driver—beep-beep, beep, beep. Then the first driver would lean out of his window and say the slogan: “Nifa, nifa, naa nyin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.