Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  Cogs had his hands on the porter’s shoulders and looked him straight in the eyes. “Now, Kwame,” Cogs said softly, like an avuncular junior varsity football coach, “I want you to bring me a bucket of ice, very full, very cold.” He turned and handed the porter an ice bucket. “Fill this to the brim. And some bottled water. No gas. Still. You’ve got this, right?”

  The porter looked overwhelmed.

  “And get me some limes. Six limes. That’s my good man!”

  Coming from anyone else, this pantomime would smack of the most wince-inducing sort of cultural insensitivity. But I would come to learn that Cogs loved—and that is not too strong a word for it—the people of Ghana like few foreigners I’ve ever met. Cogs pressed some filthy cedis—in 1992 all cedis bore the grime of innumerable hands and were soft as ring-spun cotton—into the porter’s hand.

  “Yes, sir!” Kwame saluted, deftly palming the notes as he bounded out the door.

  “Steven, enter!”

  Cogs stood before me, in a bathrobe, bare-legged and bare everything else underneath, I guessed. Somehow he had procured the presidential suite for himself, though his government per diem would barely cover the cost of a single room. No doubt he worked his charm with the desk clerk and likely everyone else at the hotel, including the porter who now served as his personal butler. On a small table sat a leather attaché case that in actuality was a travel bar, with compartments for a bottle of scotch and bottle of gin, a silver jigger, and a set of four cut-glass crystal tumblers. Cogs offered me a drink and beamed in a way that reminded me of Yaw Brobbey, offering me scotch first thing in the morning.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to the USAID office, but Daniel will be here shortly. He’s been setting up some meetings for you.” I brightened at the news.

  Finally, I thought, progress! I had arrived in Ghana with not much more than my enthusiasm and a fifty-seven-page Memorandum of Understanding, a carefully crafted document into which I poured every ounce of skill I had gleaned from my days at the law firm. I thought now would be a good time to pull out that prized document, in case Cogs wanted to go over details. He pushed the memo aside and put his tumbler on it, using it as a coaster.

  He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Your chocolate factory idea,” he whispered, choosing his words carefully, stroking his chin, “is just what these fuckers should have been doing for years. Just march straight up the value chain, and leave the bean trading to the idiots in the Ivory Coast.”

  Cogs loved almost everything about Africa—but he played favorites, and Ghana was at the top of his list, his haloed child. He saw something just a tad subversive about my nascent company, with its contrarian story that Ghana could be home to a luxury food product like chocolate. My idea presented a not-so-subtle challenge to the paternalistic marketing campaigns of many organizations that sought to portray Ghana as an economically poor country filled with sick people, deserving of charity. I counted myself lucky that my quirky, for-profit chocolate factory idea was now supported by USAID’s rogue staffer, who likewise wanted desperately to tell the story of a new, emergent, ascendant Ghana.

  Daniel arrived. He bore a striking resemblance to the actor Yaphet Kotto, and he glowed, as if whatever he’d been doing this morning had gone exceptionally well. I fought off the effects of jet lag and gin long enough to ask him what kinds of meetings he’d set up for me.

  “It’s time,” Cogs declared, pausing for effect, “to kiss some frogs.”

  Daniel nodded in agreement.

  “You gotta get out and pound the pavement. Meet every assistant deputy minister that will take a meeting, have a beer with all the bankers and the people here who make this town run. You gotta find your fairy princess. Pucker up. Daniel will help.”

  So started the first of many trips back to Ghana as I puckered up and started kissing frogs. Daniel set up a meeting with Prosper Opoku, a Ghanaian who had made his fortune first in the timber industry and then manufacturing cutlasses, the ubiquitous Ghanaian steel machetes used for everything from slicing pineapples to splitting cocoa pods. Opoku reputedly made a cedi on every single one. He wanted me to see his latest venture, a rehabilitation of an old Firestone rubber plantation at Cape Three Points, the southernmost tip of Ghana.

  I was dressed as inappropriately as could be, in a navy suit and tie and a pair of Allen Edmonds wing tips, for a hike in the tropics. Prosper forbade me to dirty my shoes and insisted that his driver carry me piggyback for thirty-five minutes through the plantation, in what counts as one of my most humiliating experiences in Ghana—or anywhere, for that matter. Afterward, Opoku drove me to his house, where we took off our shoes, Japanese-style, and sat on pillows while a servant wheeled in a chrome bar cart stacked with Johnnie Walker Black, Courvoisier, Tanqueray, and a host of other top-shelf liquors from abroad—costing Prosper a small fortune, I surmised. We talked of spirituality: the living room featured a painting of a Tibetan mandala, a weaving of Jesus with arms outstretched, and, most prominently, a wall-sized painting of the Buddha framed in plastic roses.

  “You have a lovely home,” I said, as I sipped a Tanqueray and tonic.

  “Thank you, it actually belongs to one of my wives.”

  Welcome back to Ghana, I thought.

  Had I been away too long? Back at my hotel, I reached for my copy of Emmanuel Ekuban’s definitive Twi grammar. A slim volume, it nevertheless accommodates such curious phrases as “Lie supine on the floor.” I was not sure why I would need to say this, but Mr. Ekuban at least told me how to say it: “Da ayenya w fam h!” I also consulted C. A. Akrofi’s definitive modern collection of Twi Mmebusεm, or proverbs. “Proverbs play a very important part in the everyday language of Twi-speaking people,” Akrofi wrote. “Indeed, in Akan society, skill in the use of proverbs is a hallmark of good breeding.”

  Good breeding, yes, and the key to understanding how this culture operates on so many levels. My father had taught me always to prepare, and I knew I had homework to do.

  Later, I found myself walking the furrows of a cocoa farm for the first time since my days in Sunyani. Daniel had arranged for me to meet Ian Stoddard, an American who years ago had befriended the man who would later become head of state. Stoddard married a Ghanaian woman, and cultivated what was reputedly the largest single cocoa farm in all of Ghana.

  I also met Edmund “Kofi” van der Puije, the director of a small brokerage firm that would later expand to become the Dow Jones of Ghana; Dr. Clement Amega, the chief botanist with CRIG, the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana, the government-run agronomy station located in Tafo established back in colonial times; Paa Gyamfi Adu, the chief economist in Ghana’s Ministry of Finance; and Charity Lartey, a Baker Scholar from the Harvard Business School, recently returned to Ghana from a high-flying career with Goldman Sachs, now running her own investment firm, First African National Securities, Ltd. Making these appointments proved nearly impossible. It would be five years until mobile phones entered the market. Landline phones were unreliable, motorway traffic was oppressive, and if you were lucky enough to secure a meeting in advance, schedules often ran late. I refused to quit.

  So many meetings, so many frogs. But not one princess.

  * * *

  Then one day Daniel introduced me to a young Ghanaian, Kojo Quist Bamford, who was struggling to turn around his family’s aluminum fabrication business. Kojo’s company crafted doorframes and windows. He was Ghana-skinny and sported muttonchops and a wee beard. Impatient, he spoke of bold plans: factories and automation and remaking entirely the customer experience in Africa. Kojo was skeptical of Americans, and yet fascinated by them. He was ambitious in the best sense of the word, contemptuous of bureaucrats (though, ironically, his father was one of the highest-ranking bureaucrats in the old colonial administration). Above all, Kojo was undaunted by the challenge of building a business from the ground up.

  We met for drinks in the lobby bar of the Labadi Hotel. I confess the particulars of our first encounter remain vague. I don’t drin
k much, and the equatorial heat and oppressive humidity of the Accra Plain rendered alcohol even more potent. I recall we both postured a bit: Kojo demonstrating how well he knew Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, how he could both laugh and despair at Ghanaian culture with an expatriate’s ease. And yet there was a poignant pride. I countered with Sunyani stories, artfully (I hoped) dropping Twi phrases into the conversation.

  Kojo told me that growing up, he had no Ghanaian entrepreneurial role models—no one at all like Yaw Brobbey. Really, Kojo said, among the older generation, the self-made, independent Yaw Brobbey was an outlier, a lone wolf, a survivor; he was an entrepreneur before that word held any currency at all. Even among Kojo’s contemporaries, most aspired to a comfortable sinecure in a sprawling government bureaucracy.

  So Kojo represented the first wave of Ghanaian entrepreneurs, many of whom founded and lost businesses during the lost decades when coup after coup betrayed the promise of Nkrumah’s Black Star of Africa. Nevertheless, Kojo displayed an implacability in the face of repeated disappointment and financial distress. Kojo’s generation of expatriate returnees gave up a life of ease in London or the US for a life of hardship in Accra—and did so when there was no assurance that things might improve politically or economically. It is no surprise that there were damn few willing to take this risk.

  As a result, Kojo had little patience with the latest wave of expatriate arrivistes. “They come here fresh from McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, and they expect modern Ghana to welcome them back with a high-profile consulting job, equity options, and the six-figure incomes they enjoyed in New York or London.” Kojo shook his head. “Steve, this place is hard. … Seriously. You better be prepared.”

  Kojo had an American wife, Janice, whom he had met in California. Kojo had a Golden Ticket—he could have, if he had chosen, become a US citizen and stayed in the US. But he never wanted that. He did enjoy the generosity of the US Embassy, at least for the annual Fourth of July reception at the Ambassador’s residence, and he made a habit of meeting Americans passing though Ghana, always in the hope that some business relationship might blossom. Kojo and I were about the same age and were the products of doting mothers who had high expectations for their first-born sons. In short, we sprang from the same fertile petri dish that has spawned so many entrepreneurs the world over.

  More meetings, more drinks. A lot more talk. Kojo took me under his wing, gave me the use of his car and driver, and helped set up meetings at the ministries, though it was difficult to discern what ministry was responsible for a private investment in the cocoa sector. The Ghana Cocoa Board? Certainly. The Ministry of Trade and Industry? Evidently, yes. The Ministry of Employment and Labor Relations? They wanted their say. The Ministry of Food and Agriculture? Arguably, yes. It was slow work.

  Why was it so hard to make progress within the ministries of Accra? Almost no one I met possessed anything like an entrepreneurial vision—which meant it was impossible for them to understand my own. A man like Yaw Brobbey would back my proposal, I thought. But how did Yaw Brobbey emerge as such a talented entrepreneur up in Sunyani, far from Ghana’s capital city? Was there some rural vs. urban divide at work?

  I believe there was. The fertile soil of rural Ghana gave rise not only to the propagation of premium cocoa, but also to generations of entrepreneurs, small stakeholder farmers who chose to grow a cash crop destined for export rather than a subsistence crop, like yams or cassava. These farmers understood both the precariousness and the opportunities inherent in serving a global supply chain. While Brong-Ahafo and the Central Region were home to such agricultural entrepreneurs, the cities were less fortunate and couldn’t offer comparable opportunities. Stroll down the smaller streets in urban Ghana, and you will find more storefront churches than merchants—more prayer than payroll. And as Kojo had already explained to me, the dearth of entrepreneurial role models like Yaw Brobbey had legacy consequences—which in turn had consequences for me.

  * * *

  I had plenty of time to consider my lack of progress, I tried to put myself in a Ghanaian deputy minister’s shoes. Government ministries are inherently risk-averse institutions. They need to be. They have a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard public resources; they certainly have no mandate to act as venture investors. Due to its colonial history, with a managed economy, Ghana remained a highly-regulated environment whose large public sector spread into many corners of daily life. Government was seemingly everywhere, and because of this broad reach it compelled private industry to cooperate. Here lay the irony: while Ghana’s government eagerly sought private investment, the long legacy of government intervention was hardly inviting to investors. If I wanted to work in the cocoa sector, I couldn’t ignore government. But I tried diligently to understand its point of view. Despite their advanced degrees from the London School of Economics, Oxford, or Wharton, no minister wanted anything to do with a new venture that carried with it even the remote possibility of failure. I knew start-up food businesses in the US had a failure rate of something like 90 percent. The odds in Ghana, I imagined, were even worse. It wasn’t a question if my chocolate factory might conceivably fail—my plan was almost certain to fail. Only I didn’t yet appreciate this fact. I could hardly blame people for avoiding me.

  “Steven, don’t think too much about getting permission,” Kojo upbraided me after one meeting with a deputy minister. “Just make small progress. Ei! What do you want this gent to do? He is an old man, he is five years away from his pension! He is done. Finished! Finito! Do not expect him to embrace new ideas! You must know better.”

  Of course, ministerial bureaucrats were risk-averse. In Ghana in the early 1990s, the only viable employment was a government job. In 1992, some 85 percent of all Ghanaians worked for the government. Eighty-five percent! The Ghana Cocoa Board alone employed some 43,000 workers, and if you screwed up as Chief Executive of the Ghana Cocoa Board, 42,999 people were gunning for your job. The private sector was practically nonexistent. The pressure to conform to the ministerial status quo demanded that you avoid—at all costs—any decision that might bear even the faintest whiff of potential failure.

  I needed to kiss some more frogs.

  Still, I had learned two valuable lessons. First, when too many people are in charge, nobody is in charge. It’s not that every ministry wanted to take the lead on my project—just the opposite—for that would mean taking responsibility for potential failure, and for that reason alone, no ministry wanted to formally endorse the Omanhene project. But each ministry did want to be consulted, be included in the conversation, on the off chance that Omanhene might find success. Yet, within this passive-aggressive no-man’s-land, in those small interstices where the Ghana Cocoa Board brushed elbows with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, for example, I might find room enough to proceed. It’s not a blue-ocean strategy so much as it is a chocolate-sliver strategy. I didn’t need a lot of room to maneuver, just a little space where we might operate out of direct sight of the ministries and the multinationals that dominated the world of cocoa processing. “Don’t think too much about permission.” Kojo’s advice was beginning to make sense. I decided that we would proceed with or without signed permission, with or without my signed Memorandum of Understanding. I would bear full responsibility for the failure of the Omanhene project. And if we were to succeed, I recognized that I generously would have to share the success with every ministry where I had sat waiting for hours, for the simple courtesy of a meeting.

  The second lesson was, many senior Ghanaian officials, with the weight of a nation upon them—and the promise of a pension ahead of them—were risk-averse in the extreme. Long years of avoiding large strategic decisions with potentially painful consequences had rendered them impotent to make even small ones. It was a wonder they could decide between the meat or fish entree when flying business class on Ghana Airways.

  I shared this observation with Kojo’s wife, Janice. We were well into our second bottle of Rondebosch, a fine South African red, lyi
ng supine on their veranda, munching on fried plantains dipped in the salty shrimp sauce known locally as shito. Janice adored this image of government officials on the plane. She set down her glass, stood up, and swished about the couch, pretending to be a surly Ghana Airways flight attendant, barking orders at Kojo and me, her make-believe passengers.

  “Chicken or fish? Chicken or fish? Honorable, hurry up, please, I haven’t got all day! Can’t you see I’ve an entire DC-10 to serve? Ei! What is taking you so long? It is a simple question-o. Chicken or fish? Chicken or fish? What will it be, sir, what will it be?”

  Akkono de brε brε na εwe abε.

  Though the grub in the palm tree is tiny, it can devastate the tree.

  “However modest a person, great things can be achieved by perseverance and industry.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Waiting Game

  I lost count of how many hallways and outer offices I had seen on this trip. I took up the habit of driving to a ministry, any ministry, walking the tranquil terrazzo corridors until I found the office of the person I wanted to see, and then I just waited until they agreed to meet with me. This was often a humiliating exercise. Sometimes I sat for hour, only to be told at long last that there was someone else in another office or another ministry whom I needed to meet instead.

  One afternoon, the heat was rising in the anteroom of the office of the Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry. How did the British colonials survive this climate in the days before air conditioning?