The Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD) has dismissed allegations made by Dennis Miracles Aboagye, Director of Communications for the Bawumia 2024 campaign, claiming that CEO Dr Randy Abbey was seen carrying a leather chair during farm tours.
Mr. Aboagye criticized Dr Abbey, accusing him of complaining rather than delivering on promises.
According to him, the new CEO has been spending time moving from one cocoa farm to another, lamenting challenges inherited from his predecessors instead of fulfilling the NDC’s campaign promise to cocoa farmers.
Speaking in an interview on Accra-based Channel One on Wednesday, May 7, Mr. Aboagye questioned the basis on which the NDC promised to increase the producer price of cocoa—a promise they are now failing to fulfill.
“So you listen to the COCOBOD CEO, who is moving from one cocoa farm to another with this leather chair, and the farmers tell him, ‘You promised us that cocoa should be GHC6,000 per bag and not GHC3,000. Why haven’t you done it?’ And then he says, ‘Since we came, we realized there’s a lot of mess in COCOBOD, and the way things are, it will be difficult for us to increase prices,’” he said.
However, in an interview with Channel One TV, the Head of Corporate Communications at COCOBOD, Sam Jerome, refuted the allegation, describing it as an outright lie and urging the public to treat it with the contempt it deserves.
He added that the CEO is a humble servant who respects those he works with and would never lord over them.
“…Why on earth would anyone accuse someone like Dr. Randy Abbey of trying to lord over farmers? That is simply not the case. You can go to all six regions we have visited—only one remains—and speak to the people there. Ask them if we even carried a plastic chair. We never did anything like that. We saw the story in the media, and it was fabricated. But for it to come from someone like Miracles Aboagye, I thought it was beneath him to engage in such falsehoods.”
He urged the NPP to use their platform to respond to the exposés the CEO has been revealing, rather than trying to discredit him.
“I expected that, when given the opportunity, they would respond to the revelations the CEO is making—things Ghanaians were previously unaware of. That is what we should be discussing so we can have a meaningful debate or conversation that benefits the Ghanaian farmer. Not this baseless claim about him carrying a chair, which never happened. The CEO is not a relative of former President Akufo-Addo to be inheriting any tradition of carrying chairs around.”
Discussion about this post