Another man “has a program with the radio and he has traveled,” she reported. “I can’t find him. But he’s not done yet”—meaning he has not formally canceled.
“Did anyone go on break this week?” Kevin asked.
“Dabi dabi!” No, no.
The boys at Ping-Pong reached an impasse over a play and were now arguing loudly, slamming fists on the table and threatening each other with the paddles. High in a papaya tree in the courtyard of a pale colonial government building, African pied crows—black with distinctive white breasts and shoulders—cawed aggressively as if mocking the Ping-Pong brawl below. Agnes finished her paperwork. She unknotted the waist wrap of her skirt and carefully pulled out her money, paying Kevin one cedi and fifty pesewa—about $1.20.
It would all make more sense if the agents were moving more product, but after four months it appeared that very few were able (or willing) to rent more than a hundred or so batteries per month. Agents made a fifteen-pesewa commission on each battery rental, and in theory it could be a relatively lucrative full-time job for an aggressive salesperson. But virtually all of the agents worked at other jobs. Some were schoolteachers; others were farmers, bar owners, tailors, even local politicians. Moreover, there did not seem to be a lot of aspiration to wealth in rural Ghana; people tended to work until they earned what they needed, then stop. They were not trying to “get ahead,” a Western notion of individualism that seems alien to the Ghanaian mind-set, at least outside of the capital. Africans are adept at making from scratch things that Westerners simply buy—homemade rat traps from inch-and-a-half-thick chunks of mahogany, bamboo flashlights, sandals from old tires that are sewn together at lightning speed by cottage tailors on almost every city block, to say nothing of the huts in which they live and the charcoal fires by which they cook. But for all their sense of invention, they seem to have no thought of reinventing themselves. This medieval acceptance of the status quo is the antithesis of the modern West. We need experts to build our homes, fix our cars, and grow our food, but we try on careers, religions, and identities as if they were new clothes. The Ghanaian sense of contentment is admirable, but also maddening in a modern business context.
3. Politicking
Harper and I went home at the end of January. Whit and I stayed in touch over the phone, by email, and on Twitter; Jan’s blog posts also kept me informed.
Movement came soon. Whit called to say that on February 23 he added seven new agents in one day. Best of all, their work would be coordinated by two new “team leaders”—which meant more sales and less reconciliation for Burro. The Avon model seemed to be panning out. “These guys are great,” said Whit, referring to the team leaders. “One is a man named Jonas who won Farmer of the Year for his district. The other, George, is a shopkeeper in a pretty big junction town.”
“How did you find them?”
“Both were recommended by a district assemblyman. We met the assemblyman at a meeting we had in the village of Korkorom; he was in the audience. He signed up for batteries and told us he could help us find agents in the other villages. The guy was amazing—he took a workday off and introduced us to chiefs and elders.”
“What’s in it for him?”
“He gets perceived as bringing services to the villages he represents. It’s a way for him to get visibility. So it’s politicking, plain and simple. The question is, can it be modeled? Gideon is also an assemblyman, but he’s taking a different approach; he wants to be an agent himself. Either way, we’re now seeing evidence that we can build some sort of dynamic relationship with civic-minded local assemblymen.”
“What’s the district assembly?”
“We don’t know exactly yet. It seems to be vaguely Napoleonic—an outreach of the executive branch, not legislative. Each region has fifteen to twenty districts, and each district has an assembly. Each assembly has fifteen or twenty-five smaller assembly areas, and an assemblyman represents that area, which is like eight to fifteen major villages or towns. They get paid a small stipend, basically expenses for when they go to meetings. We don’t have an electoral map, at least not one that’s up to date, but we’re trying to get one.”
“How long do they serve?”
“They stand for election every four years, and they are apparently nonpartisan. The district is managed by the district chief executive or DCE, who is appointed by the president. So individual assemblymen are nonpartisan and elected, but the DCE is appointed, although he must be approved by majority vote of the elected assembly. Meanwhile, each DCE reports to the regional minister—again, very Napoleonic.”
“If it’s not legislative, what can they do? Can they raise taxes?”
“Not really. Impose fees, perhaps, but apart from that one-shot chance to vote up or down the president’s choice of DCE, they seem to have virtually no substantive power. It seems mainly to be a bottom-up steam valve to vent local disputes and resolve grievances. For example, each village has a unit committee, which meets with the assemblyman. I went to one of these meetings with Hayford Tetteh, who translated.”
“I thought English was the language of government.”
“Not at this level. It’s in Twi. Anyway, the assemblyman was reading from this very official-looking document that obviously came from higher up the chain. These were his top-down notes for points he was supposed to be making. In this case there was a dispute between two youth sports leagues, two groups in two different villages including this one. Every time these kids got together they ended up in a brawl, so the DCE decided that sporting events were ‘rescinded’ between the two villages until the dispute was resolved. This is what the assemblyman was reading. One of the opinion leaders got up to speak. ‘The elders of both villages have met, and the issue has been resolved,’ he said. ‘There will be no more trouble.’ The assemblyman said, ‘Good, but I need the elders to draft a letter to show the DCE so that he will lift the ban.’ Case closed.”
“Man, I’d be careful getting involved in local politics.”
“We are definitely staying out of the politics, but this looks like a good way into the villages. And it gives us a fallback if an agent screws up; we can call the assemblyman. Anyway, business is growing by about a hundred and fifty batteries a day. There are plenty of scary details still, including the fact that we’ve got six thousand new batteries held up in customs in Durban, South Africa, which is bullshit because the batteries aren’t even landing in Durban; they’re en route from fucking China.”
On February 23, I emailed Whit: “What are the chances that this all goes belly-up?”
The next day, he called: “Best case? Our new model works. We solicit the support and cooperation of locally elected assemblymen. They go around with us in a single day to every one of their major off-grid villages and introduce us to the most trustworthy, hardworking agent candidates, with blessings and endorsements from elders, opinion leaders, and chiefs. We work out the kinks in our ‘group leader’ model so that we can aggregate all of these folks into one or two ‘super agents’ to reduce our reconciliation burden. This enables us to add the former equivalent of four to six agents a week to the model, with a management burden little more than one of our former agents. Each of these has the potential to grow within one month to a five-hundred-to thousand-battery business. This puts us on track to getting to full branch capacity in something like nine months. We build out a serious local corporate capability that allows us to staff, train, and manage branches autonomously. Koforidua turns profitable by August or September or October. We launch a second branch in July or August or September. We are able to raise prices while sustaining subscriptions. We add wildly well-received items for sale including improved lighting devices, better, cheaper phone chargers, low-power battery-operated televisions, etcetera. We evaluate self-funding versus seeking outside capital. We opt for ever more rapid growth and so create a compelling financing story and receive five million dollars in VC money. We accelerate local branch rollouts and by March 2010 have beg
un to establish two branches per month in Ghana with five already well established. We kick off operations in a neighboring francophone country, probably Burkina or Togo. I’m invited to speak at Davos.
“But there is potential downside here. We may be unable to resolve operational challenges related to efficient branch operation.”
“Speak English.”
“Management issues. It could be hard to recruit enough motivated agents to drive the business forward autonomously. There are technical concerns. Our batteries may all of a sudden collapse in month nine versus month thirty-six. Politics: sustained civil strife may break out across the country. I may chicken out before plowing in the three hundred to four hundred K to make the best-case happen. Lots of unknowns. It’s risky. It’s Africa. The reality will probably fall somewhere between best and worst case—much closer to best case because I am paying attention to things.”
On March 11, Jan left for Seattle. She had not been home in six months, and she was more than ready for a break. Whit called after taking her to the airport: “I am utterly terrified of leaving this business alone when I go home in May.”
“When’s Jan coming back?”
“Mid-June. I’m putting all my energy into recruiting some more bench depth here before I leave. There’s a great candidate I met at a job fair in Accra, a young woman who just graduated from Ashesi University College, a private college run by this Ghanaian former Microsoft manager named Patrick Awuah. She totally gets it and seems to want to work on a start-up, but it’s hard to know. Maybe she’s just looking for an air-conditioned office job in Accra like everybody else and we’re like her third or fourth choice. We’ll see.
“I’m also trying to design a computerized field management system that we can use with cheap netbooks. That should let us build a client-level database, and then we can create an output for agents—you know, ‘Kwame is overdue, he’s your number-one effort, dude. He doesn’t own a cell phone? Have you asked him lately? Maybe you should ask him right now.’
“Ultimately this will give us a direct-marketing database with half a million cell phone numbers. But in the near-term it’s all about helping agents do their job. They can’t track it all on paper.”
On April 16, Whit called with good news: “I hired Rose Dodd, the Ashesi grad.” She drove a hard bargain, demanding six hundred cedis a month—about four hundred dollars—a handsome salary for an entry-level worker in Ghana.
“My new accounting guy started last week,” Whit added, “and Kevin passed his written exam today and takes the driving test tomorrow. He’s still a little scary behind the wheel; he’s not a natural driver, and he’s pretty rough on the clutch. But man, I think I pulled it off; this place is actually going to be running itself when I’m gone.”
Other personnel issues appeared less sanguine. “Gideon is turning into a major flake,” Whit said. “It’s partly our fault; we let him get overextended. It doesn’t work for one guy to cover fifteen square kilometers. He had a bunch of personal issues. He crashed on his bicycle and injured himself. He had malaria or something for a while, and then things got really busy in the district assembly—like they had to do actual work. So he got completely distracted by all that. He just basically went missing on us. He lost his phone, he had to travel to Tema to visit his family, on and on. His business is a fraction of the size it was. I lent him a cell phone, but he never turned it on, so I still couldn’t reach him. Finally I said, ‘Dude, bring back my phone.’ He’s definitely not the superstar we thought at first. But he is very good at selling when he’s in front of somebody.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I like that guy.”
“We’ll see; maybe he can unwind it all. Our new superstar is Jonas, the Farmer of the Year. Get this: His wife is almost full-term and had a complicated labor last night. They lost the baby. So the guy’s up all night with his wife near death, loses his full-term baby, and he’s still fucking showing up at ten A.M. today to swap batteries with Burro. Can you imagine in America? He’d be out of pocket for a month.”
“And rightly so. That’s awful.”
“And that’s not all. Remember Agnes from Adawso?”
“Of course, the biting red ants and the Ping-Pong table.”
“Yeah, well, she gave her business to Hayford. It just wasn’t working for any of us, and we sort of agreed she would be better off doing something else. It was sad because she was our first agent. Anyway, her husband died last night.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. So we had two weird deaths in the Burro family last night. Oh, and here’s another charming development. A little while ago they put a new billboard up that you can see from our balcony: BREAK THE CYCLE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, REPORT PERPETRATORS TO POLICE. So a woman in the courtyard got beat up by her husband pretty bad two days ago. I mentioned the new sign and she just laughed. ‘The police won’t do anything,’ she said. I checked with Charlie and he agreed. ‘Some white people came in and gave the locals some money for a program,’ he said. ‘The sign makes them feel like they’ve done something useful.’”
“Your tax dollars at work,” I said, assuming the sign was paid for by some Western aid program.
“Actually just yours,” said Whit. “To pay taxes you need to make money, which I’m not doing yet. Which reminds me—the batteries got loaded on a ship in Durban today; they sail Friday or Saturday. Not sure how long it takes, but pretty soon we’ll have six thousand more batteries. Did I mention inflation here is running at twenty-two percent right now? We just raised prices on the rentals yesterday, and so far we’re not hearing any massive revolts.”
“Speaking of revolts, what’s going on in the government? Is Rawlings gonna stage another coup?”
“Charlie feels it’s a bunch of bluster and hot air. Some say Rawlings has no substantive support or effective power within the military at this point. And he is aware enough of his legacy that he won’t do anything to endanger that. I mean, he did run for election and relinquish power voluntarily. There’s a good chance history will treat him favorably as the George Washington of Ghana, albeit a George Washington tainted by the murder of four Supreme Court justices. When are you coming back?”
“June 13. I got on the same flight as Jan. When are you headed home?”
“May 15. Can’t wait to get a haircut.”
“You haven’t cut your hair since January?”
“There is no one in Koforidua who has ever cut a white person’s hair. Do I want to be the first?”
“Man, you can’t let your hair get long over there; you’ll get lice. Why don’t you just shave your head?”
“Shelly will leave me.”
“It will grow back.”
“She’s not that patient.”
“Hey, leave a light on for us, in honor of Dad.”
“I need your baggage allowance. I’ve got five hundred cell-phone chargers to bring over.”
I was becoming the Burro mule.
4. Noise Awareness
Today is National Noise Awareness day. Someone forgot to tell the roosters. And the dick with the 5:30 AM radio blaring.
—Whit on Twitter, 5:54 A.M., April 16
On May 12 I called Whit. “Didn’t sleep too well last night,” he said. “You haven’t met this guy Dave, a former two-term Peace Corps worker who’s been living here four years, about two miles down the road. He runs the bike shop around the corner. A couple of nights ago he was the victim of a home invasion and an armed robbery. They beat him twenty times with a board; his eyeball socket is all but broken. He woke up to the sound of these guys busting his front door down, and next thing he knew he was getting hit over the head with a board. They were screaming in pidgin English, ‘Where be the laptop? Where be the money? Where be the phone?’ He thinks they were Nigerian from their accents. He’s all bandaged and bruised. Told me in four years he’s never had any trouble here. The worst of it was that the neighbors didn’t do anything to help.”
“Holy shit,” I sa
id. “And I was sleeping behind nothing but a screen door off that balcony.”
“Yeah, I know. I mean, I feel a little better that we’re on the second floor, and I don’t think they would come in through the front balcony. The street merchants are out there most of the night, and the bank across the street has night guards. If they came in here it would be through the back, up the stairs. But we definitely need to be more careful. I want to get a bar for the door. It’s going to be an exciting summer.”
1. Beginner’s Luck
In June, Jan and I returned to a Ghana cleansed by monsoon rains. Outside the airport, steaming puddles filled every hole in the pavement, forcing us to negotiate our sagging baggage cart around small lakes of unknown depth. The sky was sea blue, the landscape green and polished like waxed limes, and the dust and haze of January had been wiped away like a smudge on a lens. This time, our drive up the Akwapim Ridge was rewarded with breathtaking views over Accra and the ocean we had just crossed. If only things were as clear with Burro.
Even before he left for home in mid-May, Whit realized that Burro was not growing fast enough to create what he called “a compelling business case”—meaning a business that could be duplicated and scaled across a whole country or, optimistically, a continent. His worries drove my own sense of doubt.
“Whit, I hope I haven’t hitched my wagon to a loser.”
“Huh?” he replied over the phone, distracted as usual.
“You. Your business.”
“Max, I feel your pain, but right now I’m packing for China.”
On some level, it was certainly possible to position Burro as successful: in just nine months, business had grown from nothing to an efficient network of more than thirty agents spread around a fifteen-mile radius from Koforidua. Whit, always the computer geek, had created a field management program for Burro using Microsoft Access, which he impishly named Fodder. It vastly simplified agent reconciliation. Under his new system, agents completed their paperwork on their own, which was then left in a zippered and locked bag, along with used batteries and revenue, at prearranged drop points in villages along the route—just the sort of thing an ex–CIA agent might design. Kevin would then circulate to the drop points on scheduled days and exchange fresh for fallen batteries, collecting cash and paperwork. A young accountant I’ll call Adam was hired to manage the Fodder system in the office, entering in the day’s receipts.
Max Alexander Page 9