Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

by Steven Wallace

  Well, that’s the thing … we have fifteen scheduled, but three are missing.

  DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR OF THE SBA:

  Fifteen?

  [Rifling through her briefing binder]

  I don’t think they have fifteen chairs onstage.

  UNDER-ASSISTANT:

  Not at the head table, but I think there are chairs behind the head table—not the head table chairs—but, you know, a second row behind the chairs that are behind the head table. In any case, we could add some chairs back behind the table.

  STATE DEPARTMENT SPECIAL ASSISTANT FOR PROTOCOL:

  Can’t go there. Ghana Protocol is responsible for the chairs.

  [Silence, as the full weight and foreboding implications of any involvement from Ghana Protocol is considered by all in the room]

  DEPUTY ASSISTANT UNDERSECRETARY’S ASSISTANT:

  Perhaps we sit with the audience in the front row? And then, Madame Deputy Administrator, you can call up each panel, one at a time …

  DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR OF THE SBA:

  Fine. I’d like everyone, once you finish with your speech, to move to the head table for the Q&A. The previous panelists will file off prior to this.

  UNDER-ASSISTANT:

  Ma’am, do you want the previous panelists to step down one at a time or en masse?

  [More silence as the logistical pitfalls begin their inexorable cascade. The young Under-Assistant mistakenly thinks it is her use of French that has prompted the awkward silence]

  That is, er … in a group?

  [It goes on like this, so help me, for an hour]

  DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR OF THE SBA NURSE RATCHED:

  Mr. Wallace, are you okay?

  STEVE WALLACE:

  [Daubing eyes with a paper napkin, tears running freely down his cheeks …]

  Just a dust mote in my eye …

  [Embarrassingly loud throat-clearing to mask spasms of laughter …]

  FIRST COMMERCIAL OFFICER, US EMBASSY-ACCRA:

  [Whispering to aide]

  Who is this guy again?

  STEVE WALLACE:

  I suggest, for what it’s worth, that we just sort of play it by ear. Because, whatever we decide, you can pretty much bet that the Government of Ghana will change things at the last possible minute, and we’ll be right back to where we started this meeting …

  [Wallace glances at his wristwatch for dramatic effect]

  … an hour ago.

  [Agonizing silence]

  It’s just a thought, really …

  DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR OF THE SBA NURSE RATCHED:

  Why, that’s an excellent suggestion, Steven.

  Secretly, deep down inside, I swelled with pride.

  * * *

  On the day of the big speech, I arrived at the Pink Palace at 7:30 a.m., over an hour early, as I needed to print out a reading copy of my speech. But I’d already been up for hours. To save money, I stayed at the Sunrise Hotel, a modest, locally owned hostel, instead of the official AGOA conference hotel, part of a multinational hospitality chain, where nearly every American visiting Ghana now stays. The business center at the Sunrise was cleverly called the “Brain Box,” but no one could figure out how to send a copy of my speech to the Brain Box printer. An earnest front desk clerk offered to print the speech on the hotel’s computer.

  “Please, sir. I shall go and come,” he said brightly, taking my writeable CD and repairing to a back room. He returned in a few moments with my printout, CD, and a forlorn look on his face. “Sir, I beg of you. Please, our printer cartridge is running too low on toner. Ah-haaaah.”

  The hard copy of my speech was unreadable, so badly streaked that it looked like a Giacometti monoprint. “How do you say verkakte in Twi?”

  “Please? I beg your pardon, sir?”

  I decided to go straight to the International Exhibition Center and see whether I’d have better luck there. Inside the lobby, the claustrophobia that beset me at the exact time I started Omanhene—a manifestation, I’m certain, of nagging economic insecurity and loss of control—caused a frisson of fear. I bypassed the elevator and climbed three flights of stairs to the conveniently located US Government Control Center, a special room where State Department staff furiously surfed the net, read e-mails, and studied memoranda and communiqués. There were several open computer terminals for the use of official guests, and I assumed that included me, since I was an invited speaker. In any case, no one thought to ask for my credentials. I sat down and was grateful that a neatly printed label on the monitor informed me that the log-on username was “Username” and the password was “Password.” After successfully printing my speech and reviewing my remarks, I allowed myself a rare bit of self-satisfaction—I was pleased with what I’d written. I headed back down the three flights of stairs to the VIP holding pen to await my entrance.

  Yes, I was happy with my speech. I looked at it again. Speech? At five minutes, my speech barely qualified as “brief remarks.” I was working on it until 1:00 a.m., paring it down from its original twenty to just five minutes in length, as Ghana Protocol had insisted on adding various last-minute speakers to the agenda, and ordered the US participants to trim their presentations accordingly.

  The plenary was supposed to start at 8:30 a.m., but the plenary chair, Ghana’s Minister of Trade and Industry, Moses Atta-Marfo, arrived fully forty-five minutes late for the second day in a row. It took another half-hour to begin, as there seemed to be some further heated discussions amongst the respective staffs of the US delegation and the Government of Ghana.

  During this delay, the Deputy Administrator of the SBA wanted to review quickly the choreography for this morning’s performance. I pushed through the mismatched chairs, confidently taking a seat in the innermost ring—as if this were a favorite undergraduate seminar, Current Topics in Recombinant Fiction and Pataphysics. I searched for a welcoming face amongst my fellow presenters. I saw none.

  Our little theatrical continued:

  DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR OF THE SBA:

  Thank you for your attention. Once the Minister introduces me, we all file up onstage and take our seats.

  SPECIAL ASSISTANT FOR TRADE:

  As a group or one at a time?

  DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR OF THE SBA:

  By the way, I will do a greeting on behalf of the whole group, “Honorable Minister, Deputy Secretary, your Excellencies, and Honored Guests.”

  SPECIAL ASSISTANT FOR TRADE:

  Madam Administrator, I beg your pardon, you should add, “All Protocols Preserved.” It means that if you forgot someone’s title, it is presumed to be included.

  I rose on the pretense of having to use the bathroom; I grimaced and patted my stomach, reprising my long-running Sunyani mime performance, only this time it was to hide the fact that I had developed another ill-timed fit of laughter.

  Even with such a late start, the convention hall filled up slowly, the audience no doubt having taken its cue from the late start the previous day. I was embarrassed for the Government of Ghana and upset that they had squandered this opportunity to dispel the stereotype that everything in West Africa runs woefully behind schedule. Many of the Government of Ghana junior staff—including Ghana Protocol—felt likewise; I could see it in their pained expressions. It was as if punctuality were the single most important thing they could do to demonstrate to the world that, here in Ghana, despite our many challenges and shortcomings, we start on time. And they likely would have, but for one rogue minister with his own political agenda. Ghana was poised for success. So very, very close. Alas.

  And so, the attendees—senior ministers from across the entire continent—assumed it no longer made sense to get up early just to hear Mr. Steven Wallace of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, share his learned reflections on African economic development.

  Minister Atta-Marfo, who could barely conceal his own presidential ambitions, decided just that morning to add two Ghanaian investment bankers—probably big donors to his campaign—as a prelude to our pane
l. This rogue decision upset many:

  1. The US State Department, which had worked on the AGOA agenda for fully eleven months and did not do well with last-minute surprises—they did not do well, at-TAAAALL!

  2. The delegations from the more than three dozen other African countries, who themselves were jockeying for representation on these high-profile panels, regarded this eleventh-hour addition as “stacking the deck” unfairly in favor of host country Ghana.

  3. The Deputy Administrator of the SBA, who expected this panel, like her dozens of 747 jumbo jets, tens of thousands of UPS trucks, and a hundred thousand bandy-legged UPS drivers wearing brown shorts and matching knee socks, to run on time and keep to the effing schedule, goddammit!

  It got worse. The two investment bankers were nowhere to be found; they were apparently stuck in Accra’s notorious traffic. Instead of moving on to the next speakers on the agenda—we were now fully two hours behind schedule—Minister Atta-Marfo decided incredibly, inexplicably, to wait until the bankers arrived. To fill the time, the Minister sidled up to the podium and spoke extemporaneously on the basics of project finance, an introductory-level lecture that fell embarrassingly flat before an audience comprised of trade and finance ministers, most of whom were educated at Harvard Business School, Wharton, or the London School of Economics. I whispered to my seatmate that someone should remind the Minister that the delegations of the thirty-six other African countries are not eligible to vote in Ghana’s upcoming presidential elections, so the impromptu campaign speech was unnecessary. Our panel chair, Madam UPS Secretary, must have been livid, but she was the consummate diplomat and betrayed nothing.

  My turn finally arrived. I made my way to the lectern, wondering how, in just five minutes, it was possible to make a favorable impression on this weary audience, subjected to two long days of bloviating. Best, I decided, to grab their attention. Without saying a word, I plunked down a tin of Omanhene hot cocoa and then, by contrast, carefully placed one of our deluxe gift boxes on the lectern, taking my time to adjust the angle so the full logo was in view. The audience seemed puzzled. They were wondering why I hadn’t started to speak, why I was futzing with box and tin, my impromptu product placement. Finally, I turned my attention away from my products, looked up, and smiled broadly to the audience.

  “Always be selling,” I quipped, deploying my favorite line from the play Glengarry Glen Ross.

  For the first time in two days, laughter filled the hall.

  Victory!

  Thank you, David Mamet.

  * * *

  I woke up early the morning after my speech. There was no electricity. No phone service. No air conditioning. As satisfying as it was to speak at the AGOA event, and to have marshaled high-level US government advocacy, I realized that my situation was dire. At the exact moment when I was ramping up sales, I might find myself without production capacity—a catastrophic outcome. I did a quick accounting. I totted up my victories: I’d survived threatened legal action over our flagship gift box, won an international design award for the selfsame gift box, secured sales from Japan to the Smithsonian Museum, and found a way to impress Starbucks store managers in a blind taste test. But I also had to tally losses in my ledger: Commerce Secretary Ron Brown was no more, V.S. Hope & Company was no more, Joseph Bonsu-Mensah was under investigation, and MacFinn wanted no more to do with me. The Omanhene factory was in limbo, awaiting a divestiture that only the World Bank seemed to welcome.

  I had clambered far out on a limb and could feel the bough beginning to sway. I had run out of options.

  Wnna a, wnso dae.

  If one does not slumber, one cannot dream.

  “If the circumstance does not call for a proverb, do not use one.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Back to the Basement

  Winter, 1997. The irony of my situation weighed on me. Most companies struggle to find customers and to generate sales. The most expensive and vexing challenge of any business is nearly always customer acquisition and retention. It’s no wonder that an active customer base is often the most highly valued of any company asset. By comparison, making chocolate is relatively easy, especially if you are provided with the recipes, the brand name, and the package design, and if you receive payment in advance via an irrevocable letter of credit. Thank you, Omanhene. I had hoped that our contributions to this effort would be properly valued, or at least better recognized, by my Ghanaian partners.

  For decades, Ghana had wanted to move up the cocoa value chain. They coveted the profits that accrued to European chocolatiers. Economic theory going back to David Ricardo provided a road map. Ghana grows some of the finest cocoa in the world. Ghana owns a freshness advantage—a comparative advantage—that no other European or North American chocolate-making country can match. And yet for decades Ghana failed to secure any sustained exports from their own timid attempts to produce finished chocolate. They failed in their effort to produce a product that customers wanted to buy. And then, out of the blue, I not only brought them first-world customers, but I paid Ghana in hard currency, US dollars. I did all of this for free; it hadn’t cost Portem or the Ghana Cocoa Board a single pesewa. To my view, Omanhene had done all the heavy lifting.

  I’d presented Portem with the most elusive asset of any business: repeat customers. All I needed was for Ghana simply to make Omanhene chocolate according to our recipe, and on a production schedule that served our growing customer base.

  To be sure, there were other things I would like Ghana to do. We could secure faster growth, for instance, if we could work together even more robustly, more strategically. Ultimately, though, the Omanhene enterprise itself had provided the missing link, solved the million-dollar question—a question that stretched back to the old TDA Pre-feasibility Study: Would Ghana be able to produce gourmet chocolate worthy of export markets?

  The answer remained muddled. Yes, Ghana could manufacture fine chocolate but, for today, on its own, Ghana was unable to acquire and retain customers for its chocolate. For better or worse, Omanhene needed Portem, and Portem needed Omanhene.

  I can’t really blame Ghana—for generations, the country never needed to develop marketing or sales skills; the old Gold Coast inhabitants almost certainly never articulated a value proposition or cultivated customers—they didn’t need to. Western colonial powers simply appeared, as if by magic, paid for local labor, and took what they wanted. Ghana’s colonial history reduced the country to a nation that sold its patrimony to foreign off-takers rather than to true customers. There’s an enormous difference. Off-takers dictate the price, they appear when the commodity conditions are favorable, and they depart the moment commodity conditions turn sour. By contrast, customers must be pursued and romanced, requiring all the elements that go into stating a value proposition (quality, service, durability, reliability, performance, price)—and if properly cultivated, customers will pay a premium for products and services such that you earn their loyalty over time.

  This lack of sales and marketing expertise is even more paradoxical because—and allow me to paint with a very broad brush here—Ghana is a nation brimming with what the Akan call the akwaaba spirit of hospitality, generosity, humor, and warmth. Yet, in so many business situations in modern Ghana, customer service skills are surprisingly low—at odds with the innate amicability of most Ghanaians. Why? Perhaps it is because for generations, colonial powers simply took all of Ghana’s cocoa, rubber, gold, and diamonds; hence, Ghana never needed to develop the soft skills necessary to entice and solicit customers. It seems like such a waste of Ghana’s most valuable natural resource: its people.

  One morning at three o’clock, I got a phone call from Joe Bimpong, the new head of Ghana’s Divestiture Implementation Committee. “Steven? No divestiture will take place,” he said.

  Sleepy, I found it hard to comprehend what he said. Even as he went on, I struggled to process the very first thing out of his mouth. Divestiture, Joe suggested, was never really a serious possibility. The Wor
ld Bank’s “conditionalities” notwithstanding, the Government of Ghana would never dream of relinquishing an asset as valuable as its first cocoa-processing factory.

  I was stunned. So, the outcome—after all the time, energy, effort, money, and anxiety I put into this—was no change at all? I was right back where I started?

  Joe must have guessed how his news affected me. At last he paused, and then, with audible insouciance, he said, “Ei, this is Ghana, Steven.”

  Just what did he mean, “This is Ghana?” That Ghana perennially finds a way to get what it wants from the donor/creditor community? That Ghana has perfected the fine art of inaction, happy to wallow in its tropical inertia? That the state apparatus windmills furiously without having to accept change, embrace something new, or risk anything at-TALL?

  Or perhaps Joe Bimpong was saying that Ghana—perhaps life, really—is one long frustration, a slow, smoldering burn, a supreme test of endurance and one not to be taken too seriously, lest you wilt in the torpor of the Mampong Hills.

  I hung up the phone. The call had awakened my infant son, Ben, and I tiptoed back to his room, rocking him desperately before he woke my wife. Tucking him back in his crib, I crept down to the basement as quietly as possible.

  For the rest of the night, I would be hard at work: hand-filling, sealing, and labeling tins of Omanhene hot cocoa mix. The corporate lights would burn steadily, if not brightly. The Omanhene ship of state would sail on, listing only slightly, as it steamed toward its uncertain future.

  Twenty years later, I’m still in business.

  Wo pusu nunum a, na wo te ne kankan

  If you shake the aromatic “nunum” bush, you perceive it’s scent.

  “The only way to know a person’s true character is to actually test them.”