Kpebu Says NPP’s Withheld Beans Claim on COCOBOD Insults Public Intelligence

Private legal practitioner Martin Kpebu has pushed back sharply against the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) latest attempt to pin the origins of Ghana’s cocoa crisis on the current administration, describing the opposition’s narrative as an exercise in political blame-shifting that asks Ghanaians to ignore a well-documented record of mismanagement.

The NPP has argued that a key driver of the current crisis is COCOBOD’s alleged decision to hold back cocoa beans in anticipation of higher international prices, a gamble they claim was made on the current administration’s watch. Kpebu rejected that framing outright. “Credit us with a modicum of intelligence. The previous government locked in cocoa at about two thousand six hundred dollars per metric ton. This is a huge problem. Now, they are trying to shift the blame, saying go take a loan. They are looking to put pressure, just like they shamefully had to go back to the International Monetary Fund (IMF),” he said on TV3’s Key Points programme.

The legal practitioner’s remarks land in the middle of one of the most contested political arguments Ghana has seen in recent years. On one side, the NPP insists that election campaign promises of higher producer prices, combined with a decision to delay bean sales at peak prices, caused the financial crisis now gripping COCOBOD. On the other side, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government maintains that every challenge facing the Board today traces back to financial mismanagement inherited at the end of 2024.

The factual record on both sides is complex. An independent assessment noted that COCOBOD’s failure to sell cocoa beans when international prices stood at approximately USD 8,000 per tonne was indeed a contributing factor to the crisis, suggesting the decision may have been made in anticipation of further price increases that never materialised. That observation does not align neatly with either party’s preferred narrative.

What the NDC’s own ministers have put on record is substantial. Agriculture Minister Eric Opoku has stated that the previous NPP administration engaged in forward sales of approximately 700,000 tonnes of cocoa that went undelivered, creating a rollover debt of 330,000 tonnes, while GH¢8.1 billion borrowed from commercial banks through cocoa bills could not be repaid and was absorbed into the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP). Sagnarigu Member of Parliament (MP) Attah Issah has placed COCOBOD’s total loan liability inherited in January 2025 at approximately GH¢17.8 billion, with the government having paid GH¢3.4 billion of that sum since taking office.

NPP General Secretary Justin Frimpong Kodua has contested that account, arguing that when his party left office it was paying farmers GH¢3,100 per bag, well above the current reduced price of GH¢2,587, and that the NDC’s own election promises on cocoa pricing are at the root of the current credibility crisis.

For cocoa farmers, the political debate remains secondary to a more immediate reality. Ghana National Association of Cocoa Farmers President Stephenson Anane Boateng confirmed that despite the government’s directive on February 12, 2026 for immediate payment of all outstanding arrears, many farmers had still not received funds days later. “They assured us that payment would begin immediately, but we have not received any money so far,” he said.