The day I met Agambire

By Paa Kwasi Ackuaku

In one of my routine scan through the happenings around the globe recently, I came across a story on the Bloomberg website which excited me. The caption was “White House turns to an entrepreneur to save Healthcare.gov”. In the story itself, we are told of how an entrepreneur, Jeffrey D. Zients who once warned the US President that the government does not get it when it comes to technology has been offered the job of fixing the health care website. I was particularly thrilled because two days earlier, I had read elsewhere that as the world economy continues to work its way out of the effects of a global economic crisis, countries of all sizes are turning to entrepreneurship to help drive their recovery. The simple reason is that those countries who have embraced their entrepreneurs see them as significant drivers of economic activity and growth.

In the very early stages of our time, the realisation was that the economy which was made up of the traditional timber, gold and cocoa was not going to take the country anywhere. Like the public or civil service, it had a limit how much employment it could create. Individuals were therefore encouraged to do things on their own. Even at that time, the cliché that the private sector is the engine of growth had not become so routine in daily public discourse. In the 50 year plus history of Ghana, many emerged as business as businessmen and a number of them proved pretty successful. They created businesses, brought in machinery and equipment and generated employment and profit after fulfilling statutory obligations such as payment of substantial taxes to the government of the day.

Not too long however, we allowed petty sentiments including those of religion, tribal, political and envy to influence the general attitude towards those businessmen and their businesses. We worked hard to ensure their businesses collapsed and the owners themselves left paupers. This is the reason why in Ghana today, we cannot boost of an indigenous, individual owned company that is more than 60 years and has run uninterrupted, untouched. I do have the names of industrialists like Akenten Appiah Menka and BA Mensah in mind my narration.

Many Ghanaians have fallen in love with Samsung, a Korean a company that makes everything from dishwashers to smartphones, has become one the most powerful and recognizable names in technology. Samsung was founded by Byung-Chull Lee in 1938 in Taegu, Korea. The company started as a food exporter in Korea and shipped items like dried fish and flour to China. Take note: Lee was only 28 years old when he founded Samsung. In most of the research materials I came by, we told that any history of Samsung should mention the power of the chaebol to coerce government support and as Reuters put it, "With a mix of threats and inducements for the top chaebol bosses, the founders of Samsung and Hyundai emerged from the ruins of the 1950-53 Korean War to help build a modern industrial state that has been dubbed "The Miracle on the Han". At one stage, Park the father threatened to imprison Lee Byung-chull, the founder of Samsung." They say "Park the father" because the daughter of the military ruler Park Jung-Hee was just elected President in December.

In political economics, we are told that entrepreneurship is a process of identifying and starting a business venture, sourcing and organizing the required resources and taking both the risks and rewards associated with the venture. As a journalist, I had this in mind, but I still did not understand why businessmen and entrepreneurs in Ghana had been subjected to too much vilification, insult and name-calling until I met Roland Agambire, one of the most vilified entrepreneurs in Ghana. He was jovial, friendly and accommodating contrary to what I had heard that he was snobbish and disrespectful. His posture and demeanour was of a person more than determined to take advantage of the very least of opportunities to “run with it”.

“If I were you I would have shut down my operations and finds somewhere quiet to sit, somewhere Ghanaians will not see me and will therefore spare me the daily insults” was my first reaction after his beaming smile welcoming me to his office and the answer was least expected. “Many people think I woke up one day to millions of cedis from the government to set up my business. It’s a misconception and it is also the basis for all there is that I am believed to have done. At age 6, I was trading, helping my father who had a big provision shop and sold other wares. Long before I opened an internet café which metamorphosed into Roagam Links and now Rlg and like Samsung, I exported artefacts, leather and baskets to the Americas and Europe and I made good money out of it. I started training people in ICT before the NPP government started NYEP now GYEEDA but they found me efficient, reliable and serious and that’s why they worked with me on that particular module. I take up a task and do it diligently and I make enemies for myself”.

His sincere admission that all has not been well softened my heart. “Once we are humans, we are bound to err. Even in advanced environments, businesses, their owners make mistakes. The important thing is for one to learn from it and ensure re-occurrence is prevented. I won’t give up until my mission of creating an economically fulfilled life for young people in Africa is achieved. Samsung is where they are due to what we generally known as protectionism. It happened to businesses in Europe and America as well. Why can’t it occur in Africa, in Ghana? ”

Am thinking that perhaps it is about time government make it a policy to protect indigenous business, after all, what is wrong if a local company is insulated from international competition. In Ghana today, all the telecom firms are foreign owned. In the mining and extractive sector, foreigners dominate and the situation is no different in our banking sector where almost all national banks are being sold to foreigners. My greatest fear is that going by our way of doing things, we will force successful companies such as Rlg, UT Banks, Fidelity Banks etc and the rest to collapse, just as we did to the Apino soap and others. This is not the Ghana Kwame Nkrumah envisaged. We owe our entrepreneurs better treatment. The question is can we as a country also run to our entrepreneurs as it is happening elsewhere in times of difficulty? We have rising stars in Ghana. Let us rethink.