Last year, I wrote an article calling Ghana’s seed associations nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.

The backlash was swift. I was insulted, mocked, and told I didn’t understand the sector. Some accused me of being paid to attack “hardworking” seed groups. I took the insults in stride, because I trusted the numbers and the pattern more than the noise. Today, the truth is standing exactly where I left it — and it has brought receipts.

Not long ago, these same seed associations marched to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture with a complaint: they could not sell their seeds. Stock was piling up. Sales were stalling. On the surface, this looked like a straightforward market problem — one you’d expect a serious association to solve by improving quality, marketing better, or pricing competitively.

Instead of addressing why their seeds weren’t moving, they pivoted. They asked the Ministry for 12,000 bags of fertilizer. The Ministry approved 5,000 bags.
Pause on that for a second.

An association that admits it cannot sell its core product — seeds — walks away from that meeting not with a plan to fix its sales problem, but with thousands of bags of free fertilizer, paid for entirely by the Ghanaian taxpayer.

Nobody stopped to ask the obvious question: what does a struggling seed association need with 12,000 bags of fertilizer in the first place?
Here is where the story turns from bad business into outright scandal.

These 5,000 bags of fertilizer — subsidized, funded, and gifted by Ghanaian taxpayers so that farmers could benefit — are now being sold. Not distributed. Not given to smallholder farmers who need it most. Sold, for GHS 100 a bag.

This is public money, meant for public benefit, quietly converted into private revenue. It is not mismanagement. It is not inefficiency. It is broad daylight robbery, dressed up in the language of “farmer support.”

Do the arithmetic with me: 5,000 bags at GHS 100 each comes to GHS 500,000 in revenue — extracted from a resource that cost these associations nothing, built entirely on the back of taxpayers who will never see a cedi of that money again, and who will likely never even see an account of where it went.
If this were an isolated incident, we might call it a lapse in oversight. It isn’t.

Not long ago, these same associations received GHS 2.8 billion — more than $200 million — from the Ghanaian taxpayer, under the banner of providing quality seeds to farmers nationwide. It was meant to be a landmark investment in food security.

What did Ghanaians get in return? By most honest accounts, very little. What we do know is where a good chunk of that money seems to have gone: brand-new V8 SUVs, luxury trips to Dubai, and — reportedly — additional wives funded off the back of a program that was supposed to feed the nation.

Let that sink in. Money meant for seeds became money for showroom cars, first-class holidays, and lavish personal lifestyles, while the farmers this program was designed to serve were left exactly where they started — struggling, underserved, and still short on seeds.

At what point do we stop calling these entities “associations” and start calling them what they actually resemble: organized rackets operating with the protective cover of official recognition?

An association exists to serve its members and, by extension, the public good it claims to represent. What we are watching instead is a well-rehearsed playbook — take public funds meant for farmers, deliver little to nothing, and walk away enriched, again and again, without consequence.
The fertilizer scandal isn’t a new scheme. It’s the same scheme, wearing a different outfit.

This is the question that should be keeping every policymaker, journalist, and taxpayer in Ghana awake at night: who exactly are these seed associations accountable to?
Not the farmers, who are still buying fertilizer they were supposed to receive for free.

Not the Ministry, which seems content to approve requests without demanding a full account of previous funds. Not the Ghanaian public, who funded all of it and have received neither transparency nor results.
GHS 2.8 billion vanished with little to show for it.

Now an additional GHS 500,000 has been quietly pocketed from the resale of fertilizer that was never supposed to be sold at all. If this is allowed to continue unchecked, it will not be the last time — it will simply be the next line item in a very long, very expensive pattern.

I said it last year, and I’ll say it again, louder this time: this is not agricultural support. This is a Ponzi scheme with a farming logo stitched onto it. The only question left is whether anyone in a position of power is finally ready to demand an answer.

By: Rutherford Azinu PhD