‘You Owe Us’: How Ghana’s President Turned a Farmer’s Viral Rebuke Into a Call to Transform Cocoa

It began as a protest cry, captured on a phone and shared until it became a nationwide refrain: “Mahama, wo de yɛ ka.” In Twi, it means “Mahama, you owe us a debt.”

The speaker was a cocoa farmer in Ghana’s Ashanti Region, his head wrapped in red cloth a symbol of resistance. Standing among aggrieved farmers during an engagement with the Minority Caucus in Parliament, he voiced what many in the cocoa heartlands were feeling.

Global cocoa prices had fallen sharply, and campaign promises to raise farmer incomes remained unfulfilled.

“Before the elections, we were receiving GH¢31 million, but Mahama, while in opposition, said the amount was too small,” the farmer said in the video that went viral across Ghana and beyond.

“He promised to raise it to about GH¢60 million. On that basis, we voted for him.”

This week, President John Dramani Mahama finally responded not with defensiveness, but with a moment of unscripted humor that has since sparked a wider conversation about Africa’s commodity trap.

Speaking at a separate event, Mahama playfully mimicked the farmer’s now-famous words: “wo de yɛ ka,” drawing laughter from the audience. But his tone quickly turned serious.

“The recent incident with cocoa, with the prices plummeting, and you see all the videos of ‘Mahama wo de yɛ ka’ of cocoa farmers protesting… is because for almost 70 years after we gained independence, we’re still exporting raw beans to the world,” he said.

For many across the continent, the scene struck a familiar chord. From Nigeria’s oil to Ivory Coast’s cocoa, the story of exporting raw commodities while importing finished goods is a shared frustration.

Mahama used the viral moment to announce a significant policy shift: Ghana would begin financing its own cocoa purchases rather than relying on external traders who take the beans as collateral.

“Now if we raise our money, we buy our own cocoa,” he said. “Our cocoa is not collateral to anybody, and so we can decide what to do with it. We’re going to allocate the bulk of our cocoa to local processors to process before we export it.”

The move, he argued, would allow Ghana to retain more value, buffer farmers against global price shocks, and finally begin breaking from a colonial-era export model.

Across social media, reactions have been mixed. Some praised the president’s humility in addressing the viral criticism head-on. Others noted that farmers will be watching closely to see if promises translate into higher prices at the farm gate. But for many global Africa readers—from the diaspora to the continent—the moment stood out as a rare case of a leader turning a viral rebuke into a policy reckoning.

In the end, it was the farmer’s words carried by smartphones and shared across borders that forced the conversation. And Mahama’s response, equal parts humor and structural ambition, offered a glimpse of what happens when African leaders are compelled to answer directly to those who grow the continent’s wealth.