Cocoa Debt Crisis: No institutional memory at COCOBOD and CMC – Kwadwo Nsafoah Poku

February 18, 2026

Executive Director of the Institute for Energy Policies and Research (INSTEPR), Kwadwo Nsafoah Poku, has blamed the current cocoa debt crisis on the lack of institutional memory at both COCOBOD and the Cocoa Marketing Company (CMC).

According to him, the current leaderships of both COCOBOD and the CMC were appointed from outside the institutions without the “historical knowledge to navigate these complex market dynamics.”

“There is no institutional memory today in both COCOBOD and CMC. The CEO of COCOBOD is new, the CEO of CMC is new, in fact, the deputy chief executives in COCOBOD, all of them are new. Deputy CEO of Cocoa Marketing Company is new. None of them were even brought in from within. They were all brought from outside. So, when they sit to make decisions there’s no institutional memory,” he said on Joy News’ AM Show on Wednesday.

He further revealed that he had predicted the current crisis in May last year, attributing it in part to what he described as “artificial adjustment” of the local currency.

“I Kwadwo Poku wrote a paper last year May saying that we are heading for this problem. Reason being that we started with artificial adjustment of our currency where we were making the Cedi too strong and I said that this is going to affect the cocoa industry,” he explained.

“There are two variables that comes into selling cocoa. One, your price in your local currency because you sell your cocoa in dollars and when you repatriate the money back you need to get enough Cedis to beat your commitment,” he added

Kwadwo Poku argued that by “artificially stimulating” the cedi performance, the government created a situation where cocoa revenues will be inadequate to meet financial obligations when converted back to the local currency. This, he said, forced the government to announce the producer price cut.

“Let’s not lose sight of what brought us here. Everybody wants to do the plenty talk for Ghanaians to lose sight of how we got here. NDC is in their second year, not in their first year. Let’s put that in perspective,” he argued, noting that the current crisis is not sudden, as authorities should have seen it coming a year ago.

“They’ve enjoyed the beauty, the largess and all the things of that office for one year without any problem. They traveled around the world. They’ve done multiple trips, done board meetings in Ghana, UK, done all the things they need to do, enjoyed, bought multiple expensive cars, but they saw no problem here,” he added.

The INSTEPR Director warned that the lack of continuity at these two key institutions means that current decision-makers are “navigating complex market conditions without the benefit of historical context, previous crisis management experience, or understanding of how similar challenges were addressed in the past,” and maintained that the crisis was both predictable and preventable.