Everyone called the Acting Chief Executive “Flight,” and surprisingly, I found myself addressing him that way, too. Flight was clearly my senior in age, experience, title, and rank. Titles speak volumes here. Flight had served in “Acting” status for several years now, and you might expect that the “Acting” would have been dropped from his title long ago. Why hadn’t it? As close to the Head of State as Flight must have been to have received this post in the first place, his “Acting” status was indicative of the way Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings ruled. Nobody should get too comfortable in office. Rawlings had staged two coups, after all. Following the first, in 1979, he handed over authority to a civilian government before disenchantment with its progress prompted him to take over the government again in 1981. This time he mercilessly cleaned house, removing what he saw as a corpulent and increasingly corrupt government. Rawlings had promised to hold constitutional elections, a promise he fulfilled in 1992, whereupon he won two full terms as a democratically elected president. At the end of his second term in office, in accordance with Ghana’s new constitutional term limit, Rawlings retired from elected political life, a gesture that caught many skeptics by surprise, for it was practically unprecedented on the African continent. It was a move certain to place Jerry Rawlings in the first tier of Ghana’s leaders decades from now, as the man who returned constitutional democracy to Ghana, notwithstanding that it took him two coups and some brutish tactics to accomplish this feat. Those who have not lived the journey take for granted how challenging it is to establish something as elusive—and fragile—as good government.
But in early 1992, both Ghana and the Ghana Cocoa Board were run by soldiers. I should not have been surprised that Flight agreed to meet with me. This administration was not given to wasting time on bureaucratic protocols. As they saw it, they needed to right the ship of state and return Ghana to democracy, if such a thing would take hold. Ghana might be the perfect terroir for growing cocoa, but democracy was likewise a delicate crop, susceptible to infestations and blights.
“Steven,” Flight said, “your proposal is most interesting. And it is something we have thought about for a long time.” I was encouraged, until he posed a confounding question: “The beans. From where will you … acquire your cocoa beans?”
Was this some sort of trick question? I looked out his window, ready to make a grand gesture, hoping the lush panorama of a cocoa plantation will magically appear, and with it, deliverance from his inexplicable question. Instead, I saw only spires of smoke rising lackadaisically from a thousand braziers and a kaleidoscope of rooftops all ajumble. No cocoa farms—not in Accra; the farms lie a province north.
Flight repeated his question in all earnestness. Like most Ghanaians, he pronounced “co-CO” with a hard emphasis on the second syllable, before trailing off into an almost sexual moan, “co-COooo.”
“Where will I get cocoa?” I was completely befuddled. Some sort of euphemism, perhaps? “I beg of you. You grow half a million metric tons of cocoa every year. What do you mean, ‘Where will I get cocoa?’ Right outside this window! Right here, in Ghana! You are the largest grower of cocoa beans in the world, right?”
“This year we are in second place, I’m afraid.”
I knew this fact, but didn’t want to offend.
“Surely you have tons of cocoa beans, and I thought you’d want to turn some of them into chocolate? You have nearly a million cocoa farmers,” I exaggerated a bit. More like 750,000.
Had he read my proposal? Had I somehow left out this most obvious of details?
“Steven, yes, of course we have cocoa beans. Many, many cocoa beans.” Flight laughed easily. I felt like a small boy. “But you must buy them from us, from Cocoa Board, from government. We have the monopoly on purchasing all the beans grown in Ghana and selling all the cocoa beans grown in Ghana. You can’t just come here and buy cocoa from our farmers.” He smiled kindly, steepling his hands. “Steven, if you want to make chocolate here, we will be your partner, ah-haaa … so you understand? You see?”
I was beginning to. I was welcome to build a chocolate factory in Ghana, but as for securing raw cocoa beans to push into the front end of the facility—that was a different story. Unless, of course, I agreed to work with the government. This probably explained why no one else had tried to build a chocolate factory in Ghana. Why would anyone invest in a factory here if the single resource you most needed, the resource that constituted Ghana’s competitive advantage—cocoa—was held by a monopolist who was under no obligation to sell to you? What would David Ricardo say? How could Ghana move up the cocoa value chain—from bean to bar—if it did not invest in the assets necessary to build a global brand?
“We have a facility that I’d like you to visit. My colleague Dr. Sarpong is the MD,” Flight said, referring to the managing director. “Please see if you both can find a way to work together. I believe this will be the way forward.” In short order Flight gave me a letter allowing me access to, and permission to photograph, the country’s sole operational cocoa-processing factory, a facility owned entirely by the Ghana Cocoa Board and one that presumably enjoyed access to a portion of the treasure trove of Ghana’s cocoa beans not otherwise destined for sales to overseas processors.
Soon, I was on my way to Portem, an aging factory built in Tema by an Italian concern in the 1930s. The structure’s most notable feature was a massive, overwhelming cluster of ninety-six concrete silos, towering fifteen stories high, slowly moldering in the heat. They were remnants of an ambitious scheme hatched by Kwame Nkrumah to store Ghana’s cocoa beans and thus artificially starve the international market, producing a short-term shortage that would raise the world price for cocoa beans to the benefit of Ghana’s cocoa farmers. Nkrumah failed adequately to account for the fact that cocoa beans rot quickly when stored in humid climes, and the silos were quickly and quietly abandoned; they stand today as a legacy to grand vision and unintended consequence—which, it occurs to me, might be a fitting motto for much of the continent’s economic history—if not the world’s—during the 1960s and beyond.
The Portem factory was state-owned and engaged almost entirely in first-stage cocoa processing: roasting cocoa beans and pressing them into cocoa butter, cocoa liquor, and cocoa cake. These three items are industrial inputs used in both the confectionery and the cosmetics industries. Cake, butter, and liquor are unfamiliar to most consumers, so the marketing focus of Portem was business-to-business rather than business-to-consumer. The manufacture of chocolate had never been a priority at Portem; it accounted for something like 5 percent of total revenues, all of it derived from the domestic market. While the factory did some value-added processing, it did not focus on the uppermost tier of the cocoa value chain—the crafting of fine chocolate packaged for consumers in Europe, Asia, and the United States. And though the factory had just completed a renovation, the renovation was centered primarily on upgrading this first-stage processing equipment rather than the confectionery line.
My first visit, and every subsequent one, began with a formal meeting in the boardroom with the senior staff, led by Dr. Paul Sarpong, Portem’s managing director. Sarpong would offer me the customary glass of water and a warm welcome. A Pentecostal elder, he’d often begin with a prayer, his eyes tightly shut, half a dozen of his direct reports dutifully bowing their heads. By formal training a process engineer, Sarpong was a linear thinker, a literalist, and a man of deep faith who fancied himself sent by God to run this factory on behalf of the state. He also suffered, I think, from severe vocal cord scarring, an affliction that made him sound like Louis Armstrong. I understood maybe 65 percent of Sarpong’s rasping.
In time, I sensed that Sarpong perhaps viewed my plan to sell chocolate abroad as an indictment of his factory’s inability to secure export sales for their own domestic chocolate bars, branded as Golden Tree. These local chocolate bars were a rough-tasting concoction. I patiently tried to describe how I had developed recipes specifically tailored to offsh
ore markets such as the United States and was paying a small fortune to develop proper packaging for our bars, crucial if we planned on enticing some first-adapter consumer in San Francisco, New York, or Milwaukee to try a luxury food product manufactured in Ghana—a place, I assured them, that few Americans could find on a map.
“I beg of you,” I implored, using this peculiarly Ghanaian construction of speech, “no one in the US knows that Ghana grows the finest cocoa in the world.”
This was met with astonishment. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl in Ghana knows that Ghana grows the best cocoa on earth. I assured Sarpong and his team that this was not common knowledge in the United States. If I had not lived in Sunyani myself, then I, too, would be ignorant of Ghana’s cocoa legacy. I did not mean to insult them, only to explain that we—all of us together—faced a formidable marketing challenge. We had to convince people abroad that Ghana could indeed manufacture a luxury food product worthy of competing with the finest offerings of Switzerland, Belgium, and France. We had to rebut long-held US misperceptions about Africa, a task that would prove far more difficult than the actual production of chocolate in this inhospitable climate.
My marketing analysis was not what the Golden Tree team wanted to hear, at-TALL. Not at-TALL. Why couldn’t I just place a large export order for their Golden Tree chocolate bars and be done with it? They assured me that they had sold Golden Tree abroad. I later learned that they had indeed once sold a shipment of Golden Tree bars to Libya, a personal favor extended some years ago to coup leader Jerry Rawlings from Muammar Gaddafi. Hardly an arm’s-length sale.
“I don’t believe anyone in the US wants to buy your Golden Tree chocolate. You are free to try. But, in my view, the Golden Tree recipe is not tailored to the US market.” How to say this delicately? As a first principle, we Americans like our chocolate edible!
“Not only do we need to develop a new recipe, we need to alter the manufacturing process a little—lengthen the conching time, for example—but we also need a new brand name and new packaging. This is what I’m here to do. This is my job, my contribution. We can do this together.” I paused, warming to the task. Looking around the conference room table, I beheld seven faces, each regarding me with its own version of disbelief. What a complete waste of their time. Who is this obroni? How in heaven’s name did he talk his way in here?!
The meeting ended quickly. They refused to let me tour the facility and take pictures despite a written letter signed by Flight.
I left despondent.
I returned to Tema several more times, an exercise that was one part determination and one part humiliation. It was also expensive. My father helped pay for my airline ticket for my first trip back to Ghana in 1992, but I had been dipping into our savings ever since. Progress? Some, but not nearly enough. I could not afford any more trips to Ghana, nor could I afford to keep paying for package designs. I could not bear the guilt of trying to justify to myself and to my wife Linda why this was taking so long. I needed quickly to secure some sort of endorsement from the Ghana Cocoa Board or admit failure and get on with my life.
I took stock of how much I’d achieved. It wasn’t a lot. Sure, I had found my way around the myriad of ministries and had assembled an exaltation of deputy ministers and staffers enamored of the idea of introducing a Ghanaian chocolate bar to the world’s most demanding consumer markets. But even at this point, over three years since I’d first written to Ghana’s Embassy in New York, no one had offered any concrete help—and for me, concrete help meant money. Any entrepreneur will tell you that banks rarely lend to new ventures unless they obtain a personal guarantee and securitization that comfortably exceeds the value of the loan. I thought that the Ghana Cocoa Board, with its nearly $2 billion in annual cocoa revenues, was the most likely source of funds. What’s more, I thought, the Ghana Cocoa Board shared a long-term interest in value creation—and I assumed that building a global chocolate brand would take years, regardless of how well-funded we might be.
In my most despairing moments, I wanted to grab the entire Ghana Cocoa Board by its collective shoulders and plead, “As much as I love Ghana, it is not my country. It is yours. This marvelous cocoa legacy is not my legacy. It is yours. If this whole experiment fails, I can go back home to Wisconsin and become a tax lawyer again. You … cannot.”
So often it seemed that I was doing all the intellectual heavy lifting when it came to Ghana’s cocoa sector. Ghana had an entire Ministry devoted to cocoa, yet I could see no innovation. Ghana sat too comfortably at the bottom of the cocoa value chain, its national wealth disproportionately tied to the world price of cocoa—a price that was entirely beyond Ghana’s control—a price set by multinational corporations that had no intention of allowing Ghana to move up the value chain. Offshore buyers continually funded cocoa-growing initiatives in other tropical countries, precisely because they didn’t want to be forever reliant on Ghanaian cocoa. Inevitably, Ghana would lose market share. Why couldn’t the government take just one-half of 1 percent of its $2 billion in revenues and invest in some sort of downstream processing? Making chocolate—whether with Omanhene or with another company—was simply a risk-allocation strategy, an exercise in prudent asset diversification.
Yet I couldn’t let my own sanctimony go unchecked. How dare I pass judgment on Ghana? Where was I—where was the United States—when the British played one ethnic group against another, fomenting domestic jealousy in order to maintain colonial power? Where was the United States when the human capital of Ghana was shipped abroad in chains, and its mineral and agricultural wealth extracted for meager recompense? My country had not tried even once to add some small value locally to Ghana’s gold, its diamonds, its timber, its cocoa. You don’t get to have it both ways, my friend. Shame, shame on you!
* * *
With the help of Daniel Gyimah, Cogs, and Kojo Bamford, I was kissing a great many frogs. I could see progress, but for most everyone else, they’d squint hard at my record and shake their heads. A venture capitalist would have fired me months ago. I could hardly justify another trip if I did not at least get some confirmation that we were ready to produce my recipe.
I shunted between Flight’s office and the factory, trying to find a way forward.
Dr. Sarpong seemed to grow more religious with every meeting. Some days, in frustration, I thought that I’d be better off if he’d just give way to his Pentecostal inclinations and speak in tongues. Our meetings at Portem certainly looked businesslike. We gathered in the sweltering boardroom around a long table, always with at least five or six of Dr. Sarpong’s staff in attendance.
“Where is the price report? Ei!” Dr. Sarpong looked at his Deputy Director for Finance and Administration.
“I shall go and come, sir. I must ask the accounting clerk.”
“I am waiting-o. Tsk, tsk.”
The deputy returned looking crestfallen.
“Where is it?”
“Aha … It is not here. I believe it is … umm … I think perhaps it is with Mr. Sampson. He is on leave this week, you remember, for his mum’s funeral. I think you had granted him permissi—”
“Ei! How many times? Eh? How many times? This is no game,” Sarpong chastised. I could see that he had no desire to lose face in front of this obroni. Sarpong was just warming up. “I am not happy. Not happy at-TALL, small boy,” he snapped, using the most cutting insult one can hurl at a grown man in Ghana.
Over time, I perceived that Sarpong was simply uninterested in product development, marketing, customer relations, and sales. It took me several more meetings to understand why. He was a process engineer, after all. Ninety-five percent of the factory’s revenues came from the sale of first-stage products manufactured from cocoa beans. Cocoa butter, cocoa liquor, and cocoa cake are all priced as commodities; the price is set abroad through the inscrutable, invisible hand of international commerce. If Sarpong could produce cocoa butter at one dollar less per ton than the world price in any given year, then customers would beat
a path to his door and he wouldn’t have to spend one cedi on marketing. On the other hand, if his costs of production were one dollar over the current world price per ton, then his former customers—who showed no vendor loyalty at all—would disappear and seek out a lower price for cocoa butter in Brazil, for example. Dr. Sarpong had a tiny, terribly unforgiving profit window; he regarded his marketing department as little more than an order-taking operation, and he saw no reason to cultivate customer relationships or to deliver a high level of customer experience when the only metric that mattered was: Can you meet or beat the current world price?
This is why selling a commodity item is so dispiriting. Your price is set entirely by the market, regardless of your own efforts, skill, or costs of production. Sarpong inhabited a binary existence: his factory operated in an all-or-nothing world. Ask any of his staff about him and they would tell you they stood in awe (and a bit of fear) of Sarpong’s ability to win more than he lost in this high-stakes game, year after year. It took me too long to realize that for Sarpong, manufacturing chocolate—and everything associated with the confectionery line—was but an afterthought to the entire operation. Making export-grade chocolate was, to this process engineer, a most unprofitable distraction that pulled focus away from the efficient running of his cocoa-butter and cocoa-liquor factory. In Sarpong’s perfect world, he would produce just enough chocolate to satisfy a cozy, protected domestic market and then be done with the exercise. Exporting chocolate to the US was a fanciful notion, and one fraught with cost and risk. Perhaps Sarpong understood this more profoundly than his politically motivated superiors at the Ghana Cocoa Board, who naively thought they might easily and cheaply capture market global market share from European confectioners, some of whom had been in business for nearly one hundred years.
Obroni and the Chocolate Factory Page 9