Thursday 1 September 2022

We must protect innovative local agrisector entrepreneurs from predatory foreign investors

As a wise and aspirational African people, if we are to have an agricultural sector that enables our nation's system, to  ensure year-round food security, at a time of global climate change, then we must have an agrisector regulatory framework, which protects innovative local farmers with cutting-edge climate-smart-farming ideas,  from predatory foreign investors.

At all costs, we must ensure that no greenwashing-carpetbaggers from outside our borders,  can come into Ghana, and use egregious unethical-tactics, to take over targeted succesful agrisector social impact   businesses.

Our system must always swing into action,  once local social impact businesses notice that foreign investors partnering them, are not guided by an ethical management-ethos, but are rather guided by a strategy that is totally  Machiavelian,  in its execution.

Such buccuneering greenwashers from outside our shores, regularly resort to end-justifies-the-means-criminality, such as communicating falsehood (in serial fashion), to Ghanaian officialdom, fogery and unlawful changes to company registration documents,  at the Registrar General's Department, to name a few of the many sins of their chicanery.

By definition, the company cultures of  genuine social impact investors are underpinned by a global ESG commitment  that makes them  operate ethically in all aspects of their local country operations, worldwide.

It is thus in light of all the above, that one urges the Ghana Bar Association, and other professional bodies,  to warn their memberships of the damage to our national economy, caused by lawyers, accountants,  etc., etc., who form part of the teams of the expensive-to-acquire professionals, who are the  frontline-enablers, leveraging influence-peddling, to navigate their way through the institutional-mazes that together make up our byzantine national  system.

With respect, does that not  amount to aiding and abetting crooked foreign investors to cheat their   local partners? That is  simply not cricket. Enough is enough. We must not allow it to go on. Period. Haaba.

Finally, if we are to have year-round food security, in an era of extreme weather,  then the time has definitely now come for the Ghanaian nation-state, to actively protect innovative local agrisector entrepreneurs, from predatory foreign investors, trying to hijack their businesses. Full stop. Case closed.

No comments: