No such insight from Janet, who seemed mystified by the whole coupon-book thing. She was, however, laser-focused on the twenty-pesewa individual purchase offer—even though that cost customers more money and earned her less commission. Undoubtedly she was planning to push individual recharges, and not even tell customers about the “complicated” money-saving coupons.
We walked over to Christy’s father’s shop, where she worked behind a five-foot-long glass display case that contained nothing but packaged cookies—I counted a dozen varieties of chocolate chips, ginger snaps, and others. I’m no expert in merchandising, but it seemed an odd use of prime retail frontage considering the cornucopia of wares on offer in the shop—especially as each cookie brand was piled several packages across. Assuming it was essential that her customers see every brand of cookie available, wouldn’t it suffice to display one example of each? I caught Whit’s eye and nodded toward the display case. He politely suggested to Christy that she might consolidate the cookies and make a little room for a stack of Burro batteries. She nodded in agreement. Whit and I looked at each other as if to say, “No time like the present!” But that’s not how time works in Ghana. Several days later, there were still no batteries on display—only cookies—and this was a merchant who seemed excited about Burro.
Whit and I clambered into a packed, sweaty tro-tro for the forty-minute ride back to Kof-town. “So you’re back on the bus after all, Whit,” I said. He ignored me and turned to the New York Times on his smart phone, looking up only to glance at our sad, broken-down Kia as we flew past it, still jacked up in the clearing by the gari stand.
A few days later, Kevin reported that both Mamfe shopkeepers were still pushing back on the process of taking down clients’ cell phone numbers and other information. “Christy says many people do not want to fill it out,” he said. “Also the people at Redeemer say it is too much trouble.”
“Okay, then let’s close them down,” replied Whit.
“So we lose that money?” asked Kevin.
“Yes, if they won’t do it our way. Look, I hear you—maybe long-term we do it some other way, but I’m just not ready to give that up yet, for several reasons. Fraud is one, also marketing and brand building. The sign-up makes it clearer that the customer is entering a program, not just buying a Tiger Head. That’s really important. I mean, I think we have a really compelling offer here, and frankly I don’t want to do what Cranium did with Walmart, which is when they say ‘Bend over,’ we say ‘How far?’ So you should tell agents that gathering this information will help us to market to their clients, which will earn them more money. And another way to put it is that people are giving us one cedi for a battery that’s worth like six or eight cedis. So we are essentially loaning the client several cedis. Ask them, would they give away five cedis to a complete stranger without getting some information from them?”
“But if someone wanted to steal,” said Kevin, “he could just give a false name and phone number.” Kevin was beginning to sound like Charlie.
“Right, but most people won’t,” said Whit. “There may well be some theft, but we don’t want to make it easy for them. And I think some people will just forget, or lose batteries, and this gives us a way to track them. Again, Kevin, I hear you on this. But we need to test it. If we never test it in a big urban market, we’ll never know if it works or not. We need leadership from you guys in the field on this. You can’t seem to be waffling and say, ‘I’ll go to the obrunis and see what they say.’ You need to be in charge and explain it.”
“Oh no no no,” said Kevin. “I will explain it to them.”
“Okay, good,” said Whit. “Keep in mind that when we get smart cards, which is the holy grail, it’s not gonna be any easier, because agents are still gonna have to fill out the card when they sign a new client so we track their usage and make offerings. So this information is a huge advantage to us and the agents, and you have to make that clear to them.”
Most of Burro’s business was still in small villages around Koforidua, where personal relationships with agents and clients made a huge difference. So even while expanding to the big city, we were talking about seeding goodwill in villages—the process of greeting chiefs, queen mothers, and youth leaders and giving them free battery coupons (they still needed to sign up and pay their battery deposit) in order to spread the word. “That’s a very good thing to do,” said Adam, whose late father was an Ewe subchief in the Volta community of Adaklu, actually a collection of thirty-nine villages around a sacred mountain of the same name. “The chiefs can be very helpful to us.”
Or not. One day we trained a shopkeeper in the largely Ewe village of Mintakrom, where the chief had seemed cool to us. After sitting through a one-hour training session, the man stood up and spoke to Adam in Ewe. “He says the commission is not enough for him.”
“Okay, I respect that,” said Whit. “We’ll find another shop owner.”
“He says they will all say the same thing.”
“Do you interpret that to mean they’ve been told to say that?”
“Yes.”
We drove on. “Adam, what about the whole schnapps thing?” Whit asked. The traditional gift to a chief is a bottle of Dutch schnapps, which costs anywhere from five to ten cedis, depending on quality—and the chiefs know the difference. “We’ve been burning through cases of schnapps, and I’m not sure it’s really necessary.”
“If you are just stopping by to meet a chief, then I would say no,” said Adam. “That’s more for a formal meeting with the chiefs and the elders.”
“They won’t be offended if we don’t always bring schnapps?”
“Oh no.”
“That’s good, because I see huge value in this approach Jan has been using of just pulling off the road, finding a group of people, and building enthusiasm. That creates a very different dynamic than showing up and immediately going to the chief. All of a sudden it’s very proscribed—you know, the chief says, ‘This guy will work with you, he will show you around.’ We don’t get to tell our story and pick who we would pick to be the agent. We get stuck with the chief’s son or something. So we need to balance the formal approach and the gong-gongs with the guerrilla tactic. And yeah, I can see where we should then go greet the chief and say hello—you know, ‘If you have time next week we’d love to sit down with you and the elders and explain the program.’”
When the routes started overlapping, banter between the teams grew more pointed. Jan and Rose came back one evening with the news that they’d secured a potential agent in the key junction town of Nkurakan. “You know, the guy in the polio shirt,” Jan said.
“Polo shirt?” said Whit.
“No, polio shirt, like Hayford wears—the polio eradication Rotary Club shirt. Well, actually it is a polo shirt, so a polo polio shirt. Anyway, he was great, showed us all around town, actually made us late for a meeting.”
“Wait a minute,” said Whit. “This is gonna cause problems because Nkurakan is a nexus for both our routes, and Kevin and I already had our sights on Yoko Ono in that town. She has the best shop.”
“There’s a woman named Yoko Ono in Nkurakan?” I asked.
“Yes. We drive through Nkurakan twice a week,” said Jan.
“So do we,” said Whit.
“Well, Kevin already said it was okay.”
“Look, Jan, keep your mitts off our turf in Nkurakan.”
I never settled the issue of the woman named Yoko Ono. The guy with the polo polio shirt turned out to be a dud.
3. Secret Farms
Out in the rural villages, we started ramping up the guerrilla forays—touching down in a new location and identifying our agents and shops first, while still being careful to pay respects to the leaders and schedule gong-gongs, which usually led to lots of new sign-ups.
One day Jan, Rose, and I headed north from Huhunya, following a dirt road that runs past Boti Falls, a one-hundred-foot cascade and one of the country’s major scenic attractions. Joining me
in the backseat of the Kia was our newest agent, a smart young man I’ll call Nkansah, who plied these roads weekly (on foot and by bush taxi) as a “medicine man,” delivering drugs to villagers.
“What kind of drugs do you deliver?” I asked Nkansah as we bounced along.
“Mostly painkillers,” he said. “Farmers hurt their backs a lot. Also Chinese herbal medicines for hypertension. You drink it in tea. I bring a machine to measure blood pressure.”
“That’s really a problem here?” I asked, wondering how people who did so much hard physical labor could be hypertense.
“It’s a very big problem in Ghana,” he said. “Too much palm oil in the diet. There is also a lot of diabetes.”
Nkansah’s genuine concern for the health of these villagers belied his long-term goal in life, which was apparently to become the Sammy Glick of Ghana. He was diligently saving his money, he said, so that he could afford tuition for business school in Accra. He wanted to study marketing. Already he was combining his health-care expertise with business acumen: “My uncle and I have brought some moringa cuttings from Tamale, and we are raising our own crop to sell for diabetes patients.” (Studies have shown that the leaves of the moringa, the so-called miracle tree, which Jonas had told me cured ninety-nine ailments, can help control glucose levels.)
We turned left at the Don’t Mind Your Wife Drinking and Chop Bar,* then headed deep into the bush on a bad road to the twin villages of Opesika and Sutri (the first was an Akwapim tribal stronghold, the second Krobo). Jan was getting concerned that these villages were too far off the route track, too difficult to service, but Nkansah insisted: “I will come every Thursday and the people will be ready then. There is a lot of opportunity here.” Jan relented, and we drove on to the villages, which turned out to be unusually pristine. Almost every house looked freshly plastered and painted, as was the shared school. A small health clinic seemed well stocked and was staffed by two workers. The children spoke excellent English—sign of a good (meaning well-paid) teacher. Opesika and Sutri felt like Hollywood movie versions of African villages.
We got out of the car, and Nkansah immediately started moving from door to door and shop to shop, showing batteries and launching into his spiel. Just about every person got it immediately and promptly whipped out cash for several batteries—lots of cash. Typically, when poor villagers make the important lifestyle decision to sign up for Burro, they carefully unwrap their savings from a handkerchief or skirt tie—a few filthy cedi notes and pocket change. But these people were flashing the Ghanaian version of a Philadelphia bankroll. Just about every customer paid with a crisp, new ten-cedi note, quickly draining our cash box of change. When one guy pulled out a twenty (the first I had ever seen in Ghana outside of a bank), I shot Jan a look; she raised her eyebrows. On the drive back, Jan asked Nkansah where these villagers got all their money.
“Oh, they have secret farms,” he replied.
“Secret farms?”
“Indian hemp. Marijuana. They grow marijuana.” Nkansah said this as if the crop in question were rutabagas, or pomegranates—a curious specialty item in the grocery store perhaps, but nothing out of the normal agricultural sphere. This was surprising because Ghana is not some stoner’s paradise; Bob Marley may be the most popular musician in the country, but his drug of choice is strictly illegal here—possession can bring a sentence of ten years’ hard labor—and not at all common outside a few Rastafarian enclaves in beach communities frequented by student travelers. “A farmer can sell a sack of Indian hemp for one hundred fifty Ghana cedis,” Nkansah the entrepreneur added. “Very good business.”
“Indeed,” said Jan, no doubt mentally comparing hemp profits to Burro’s languid balance sheet. “Do they hide it in between their regular crops?”
“Oh no, they just plant the whole field with it,” he said. “When the police come, the farmers pay them.”
Coincidentally, the very next day Whit saw an article in one of the papers headlined POLICE WILL “NOT RUSH” IN YILO KROBO NARCOTIC CASE. Yilo Krobo was the district we had been driving through the day before. “The Police Administration says it would ‘not rush’ to prosecute police officers alleged to have been taking bribes from Indian hemp farmers at Yilo Krobo,” the article began. Officials said they would instead follow due process and conduct an orderly investigation, after some politicians complained that police bribery had encouraged more farmers in the region to take up hemp farming. Given that the crop has brought obvious prosperity to Krobo communities and (to my observation) no local drug problem whatsoever, it seemed likely that any political pressure to “clean up” the district was window dressing.
If only every new village were as flush as the secret farmers. After a one-hour gong-gong in Twum, a village on the other side of the route, with no secret farms, the large crowd fell silent. “I guess what I want to know,” said Whit, “is why would anyone still use Tiger Head?”
A few people finally straggled up, mostly out of curiosity. Others admitted they simply had no money at the time. And for others, the issue of timing loomed large: someone who has just bought a new set of Tiger Heads needs to wait until those run down before buying Burro replacements. As we drove off in the dusk, lunking down a warped dirt road, Whit reflected: “It’s increasingly apparent that this business is brain-dead stupid simple and really hard at the same time.” It was getting dark fast, we’d never had lunch, and we were looking at nearly an hour’s drive home. It was a road we knew as well as one another, but you can never get to know the potholes because they change daily, so we stayed vigilant, trying to avoid fatal complacency. “But we’re gonna change this country,” said Whit, banging the steering wheel. “We’re gonna change this country one battery at a time.” That was when I began to see Whit as the gong-gong man.
4. Heads or Tails
Lunch on the road was usually the most basic street food: salty boiled peanuts ( just like the kind you get in the American South), grilled plantains, an ear of grilled corn, sometimes a hard-boiled egg with homemade hot sauce (tomatoes, rock salt, onions, and searing Scotch bonnet chilies, pulverized with a mortar and pestle), all of it washed down with purified water in five-hundred-milliliter plastic “sachets.” But this simple repast was rarely enough for Kevin, whose knowledge of Ghanaian cuisine was encyclopedic and in constant need of fact-checking. He ate perpetually and with abandon. Entire dried mackerel, heads and all, disappeared into his mouth like a sea lion. I too enjoyed the ubiquitous dried fish of Ghana (in a country with very little refrigeration, every size and species of marine life, from minnows to tuna to shrimp and clams, is preserved by smoking or salting), but eventually swore off it on sanitary grounds; it was simply impossible to know how it had been handled. Whit simply hated everything about it. For him, the very smell of dried fish—and it was pungent—filled him with inchoate revulsion, although we both liked the fresh tilapia from Lake Volta.
Not everything Kevin ate agreed with me. He exhibited a passion for deep-fried chunks of cocoyam that to my palate tasted (and to my eyes looked) like Ivory soap. And he reserved his greatest ardor for fufu, the gooey Ghanaian staple that Whit and I both agreed was not so much awful as forgettable. Kevin could go only so many days without tucking into a massive sticky ball of fufu, and I’m not counting his dinner, which for all I knew included fufu every evening. One day, scouting new territory up on the ridge with Whit, the fufu jones got ahold of him.
“Kevin browbeat me into fufu for lunch today,” said Whit that night over dinner at the Capital View Hotel. “I told him, ‘Dude, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve got a real problem eating with my hands.’”
“You’re eating with your hands right now,” I pointed out.
Whit dropped a French fry on his plate and glared at me.
“I told Kevin I’d eat fufu if I could use a knife and fork, but if that was gonna cause an international incident, we better forget it. He said fine. So we get to this place and there’s like two choices: fufu with brown goat soup
and fufu with brown fish soup. The goat looked like pieces of gristle. The fish soup at least had recognizable cross-sections of fish, but there were also lots of heads and fins floating around in there. You had a choice of one or two pieces of meat. I ordered the fish with two pieces, figuring the chances were fifty-fifty that I’d get some meat and not just heads.”
“Maybe you could flip a coin and get heads or tails.”
“I think the tails are for garnish. Anyway, Kevin got the goat. I couldn’t tell what the hell those pieces were. It was like goat kneecaps or fetuses or something. Of course he wolfed it down. I think he ate the bones.”
Yet even Kevin had his limits, his culinary no-go zones. One day, in the village of Nyame Bekyere (which means “God will provide” in Twi, and is the name of possibly six dozen villages in Ghana), Whit was meeting our agent, Nana Bekoe, while Kevin and I waited in the car. Nana, an Ewe, ran a local drinking spot whose walls were plastered in posters of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, the former military coup leader. Like his political hero, Nana was a man of status, albeit in a very small village—a distinction that in his mind excused him from a life of drudgery and toil. He spent most of his time engaged in heated games of checkers under a palm-frond canopy next to his drinking spot, surrounded by his acolytes and multiple litters of mangy, featherweight cats. When it became apparent that being a Burro agent meant distracting interruptions of actual work, Nana recruited a gang of older boys and young men to be his battery runners. The details of this business arrangement remained obscure to Whit, but he assumed Nana collected a hefty percentage as the godfather of this makeshift syndicate.
After a few minutes, Whit returned to the car and said, “That was weird. I was petting one of Nana’s kittens and he said, ‘When they get bigger I will give you one.’ I said ‘Yeah, just what I need is a cat.’ And he said ‘Don’t you eat cat?’”
Max Alexander Page 19