President John Mahama added a personal touch to his keynote address at the Kwahu Business Forum on Friday, April 19.
He did this with a story about a failed family business venture, all to drive home a critical point about trust in business.
The former President recounted how he purchased a bus over a decade ago for a relative to run a small transport business in hopes of relieving some financial pressure on his parliamentary salary.
Instead of helping, the venture turned into a regretful experience that offered a valuable lesson about trust and responsibility in business.
According to him, the bus was entrusted to a driver who overloaded it until the axle broke, leading to frequent and costly repairs that ultimately outweighed the intended benefits.
“And anytime you saw the bus, the bus had more load on top of it than in the bus. And so what happened? The axle broke down, and it was the most regrettable experience in my life. When the axle broke down, they came to me to buy a new axle. So the reason for buying the bus had been defeated. Anytime the bus broke down, they’ll come to me to come and repair it, and they were causing me more to repair the bus than if I had just been moving the money to them,” he said.
To make matters worse, the driver, who had been living in the family home, had begun constructing a house with proceeds from the poorly managed transport business, a structure that still remains incomplete to this day.
“So I refused to repair the bus and decided to dispose of it, and so I sold the bus. This was like several years, maybe, yes, more than 10 years ago. And since I sold the bus where the building reached lintel level, it is still at lintel level, even till today.”
President Mahama’s story was in response to a point raised by Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin, who had stressed that many businesses fail not due to lack of capital but because of untrustworthy employees or partners.
Mr. Mahama echoed the sentiment, noting that “getting trusted people to work with” remains a major challenge for entrepreneurs and a barrier to industrial growth.
“There are business owners bringing in foreign managers to oversee their operations because they can’t trust local hires — that’s an indictment on our human resource,” he said.
He urged the forum’s participants to prioritize integrity and loyalty as key traits for building a sustainable business culture.
“If you want to suck your pound of flesh out of a business and kill it, no industry will grow,” he warned.
The anecdote was met with laughter and agreement from the audience, while reinforcing a sobering reality about the human resource challenges many Ghanaian businesses face.
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