When the Miracle Narrative Failed, the Farmer Became the Pulpit

Dennis Miracles Aboagye has now written a third rebuttal and, in doing so, confirmed what happens when a man loses the argument but refuses to leave the ring: he begins swinging at shadows.

After three responses and enough rhetorical gymnastics to qualify for the Commonwealth Games, he still has not rebutted the central subject of The COCOBOD Files. Not the debt growth. Not the overcommitments. Not the repayment cliffs. Not the procurement distortions. Not the funding gaps. Not the liabilities. Not the bond concentrations.

Instead, having failed to defend the record under scrutiny, he has reached for the oldest emergency exit in propaganda: deflect to something emotionally potent and hope nobody notices the dodge. In this case, the farmer price.

The obvious must be stated plainly. The farmer price debate is a legitimate policy debate. But it is not a rebuttal to the documented financial and procurement questions raised in this series. A man accused of wrecking the treasury does not become innocent because his successor later raises taxes. Those are separate issues.

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That is the deception Dennis hopes the unsuspecting reader will miss. He wants to merge two distinct arguments into one: whether the NPP‘s stewardship of COCOBOD created or worsened structural financial problems, and whether the current administration’s farmer pricing decisions are defensible. They are analytically distinct. The second does not erase the first.

Whatever criticisms may be levelled at the present administration, they do not answer why cocoa roads exposure ballooned, why obligations stacked into dangerous future concentrations, or why liabilities widened despite acknowledged fragility.

That Dennis keeps changing the subject is itself confession. Because men with answers answer the question asked. Men without answers change the exam.

Then comes his grand flourish: if awareness equals ownership for the NPP, then awareness equals ownership for the NDC. Correct. Entirely correct. If the current administration inherited a structurally weak COCOBOD and responds poorly, it too will own the consequences of its decisions. I have never argued otherwise.

My standard has never changed: whoever knows the problem and governs anyway owns the outcome. That applies to every government.

The difference is this: my present series is not about the current administration’s farmer price policy. It is about the documentary financial record of COCOBOD’s stewardship from 2017 to 2025. And Dennis knows this. He simply cannot survive within that frame.

So he keeps dragging the debate somewhere else like a man losing a boxing match who suddenly wants to discuss the referee’s shoes.

Still, his repeated retreat into farmer-price rhetoric deserves brief demolition. More so because he writes as though I have somehow avoided the pricing debate when I have already addressed it publicly, mathematically, and in detail.

I have shown in previous commentaries that the oft-cited GH¢6,000 campaign figure was derived from a 70 percent-of-world-price formula during an extraordinary global cocoa price spike, not a fixed permanent guarantee. Updated March 2026 market arithmetic shows that the strict 70 percent benchmark translates to approximately GH¢1,609 per 64kg bag, while the current farm-gate price of GH¢2,587 remains roughly GH¢978 above that benchmark.

Dennis is therefore not correcting silence. He is manufacturing one.

Even then, the real follow-up question remains: at what hidden cost?

If you maintain politically popular pricing while simultaneously stacking liabilities, deferring obligations, expanding commitments beyond funding, and worsening structural exposure, then the question is not whether you “protected” the farmer. The question is whether you merely deferred the pain while mortgaging the institution.

Deferring hard choices by pushing the bill into the future requires no particular genius. That is not stewardship. That is fiscal cosmetics. That is governing with a credit card and calling it compassion.

Dennis’s argument now reduces to this astonishing proposition: yes, perhaps the balance sheet worsened. Yes, perhaps the liabilities expanded. Yes, perhaps the institution became more structurally exposed. But at least the politically difficult correction was delayed until someone else had to do it.

That is not a defence. It is a confession trying to clap for itself.

He says history will remember who cut the farmer price. Perhaps. But history also remembers who left institutions so strained that painful decisions became unavoidable. It remembers who ignored the disease until surgery became necessary.

If Dennis wishes to argue that the NPP preserved farmer prices by refusing to confront structural imbalances while debt accumulated beneath the floorboards, then he is not defending stewardship. He is praising procrastination. He is celebrating deferred consequences. He is mistaking postponement for competence.

Dennis Miracles Aboagye has not rebutted The COCOBOD Files. His best defence is now this: yes, perhaps the structure worsened, but at least someone else had to make the painful decision later.

That is not a knockout rebuttal. That is a corner towel.

And when a man’s defence of eight years in power is reduced to arguing that the collapse should be judged by when the roof finally fell rather than by who weakened the beams, then the fight is over.

The judges have seen enough.