I’ve always been fascinated by the stories and journeys of some of history’s greatest men. If you’ve read books like Makers of Civilization by L. A. Waddell, you’ll know the feeling. Growing up, it was easy to admire the likes of foreign technology and business magnates like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs, alongside all the other Silicon Valley greats. More recently, I’ve found myself drawn to the ones who grew up and built amazing things in this very country. A pattern I’ve seen with months of deep research is the success of these local businessmen linked to the kind of businesses they built. The same kind this piece promotes: building physical products and owning full-value chains.
And yet, for some reason, there’s less and less people building on top of physical things. Everyone I know and meet these days is in tech (and that comes from a very objective place), chasing an app or a platform, and the people still building anything tangible have mostly stopped playing the long game.
That tension is really what this piece is about.
If you’ve been in business for a while now (whatever it is you do, really), you probably realised early on that unlike people in western-world countries who start out competing against smarter or better-equipped rivals, building anything in Ghana means the environment you want to build in is your first and biggest enemy. Bad roads before bad competitors. Power before anything near a product-market fit. Policy before positioning.
I realised a while ago that software is fading, software solutions becoming worth less and less with every passing day, and yes, even in a country like Ghana that’s only now catching up to revolutionary, frontier technology. Most business ideas these days are either heavily recycled or built on assumptions. Critique them well enough and you’ll see how absurd and archaic these ideas are becoming. Software is no exception.
I’d been sitting with all of this for a while before finally resolving on this: the key to a long-lasting business is a controlling something people absolutely cannot live without, and then creating a self-reinforcing system around it. Put simply, a lifeline.
The most obvious lifeline here is food — either building directly in that domain, or a deliberate effort to build for different parts of a whole supply chain (a concept known technically as scaling vertically). Control that, and you control whole economies.
That is what a lot of the big companies have done for ages according to any playbook, whatever the pitch decks may say now. They built products we’ve become so heavily dependent on that we’ve structured entire days around them. So unless you’re in a high position in the FAANGs, or are the FAANG of your industry, building an entire company on software alone these days is risky business. You’ll find that you’re riding a trendy wave. And businesses built on trendy waves rarely ever stand the test of time.
There’s a spiritual dimension to this too, if you’ll sit with it. Dr. Myles Munroe often taught that the biblical idea of dominion wasn’t merely about possessing things. It was ultimately about stewardship. Creating order, taking responsibility for the resources entrusted to humanity and building things that outlive us. I’ve always found that interpretation compelling because it’s not the usual one you hear growing up. This interpretation is important because contrary to popular Christian belief, it does not encourage accumulation for its own sake, but because it frames business as service to mankind through creation.
Whatever your read on that, the pattern holds outside religious language too: the businesses that last are the ones built on the tangible, not the ones built on attention or trends. Real-world impact, especially the kind meant to last, cannot be sped up.
Going back to our roots is the only solution I see. For serious, business-minded people, at least.
Software was never meant to be the whole picture. It was only meant to be a crutch; a bottleneck today maybe, but never the whole picture. A tool that makes an already-real thing move faster, not the thing itself. Everyone is in tech now, for some reason. Whatever that reason may be, I don’t know. But even for an obsessed techie, that feels terribly wrong.
One way to think about it is this: owning a piece of land has rarely ever been a bad long-term decision. Year after year, it appreciates, and not just in price, but in strategic value. The price of land only moves in one direction over enough years. Hoard enough of it and, in time, you’ll have an unbelievable amount of money. Not liquid paper money, but actual money. Something with weight, something that outlives industry shifts.
Ghana’s market compounds this. You’re often building in an environment that may not even be ready for your idea yet. Early on in your journey, you’ll find yourself drowning in policies that are actively negative and need to change before your business can work at all. It’s easy to fall into naively assuming government and user adoption, or leaning on government procurement as a foundation, when neither is a foundation at all; a common pattern I’ve seen with startups.
The bad reception you get from the Ghanaian market remains whether you’re building a tangible product or just software. In fact, others may argue that your troubles are worse with the former, but if you’ll have trials and tribulations lie in waiting for you, why not choose the path with the highest return on your investment?
Here’s the real argument, though: you shouldn’t just read Rockefeller and the Silicon Valley canon. You should be reading the biographies of our own businessmen alongside these foreign greats. Because you’re building in their country, their environment, their context, and their market. The man who built an empire in 1930s Ohio was not battling erratic power supply, currency depreciation and a customs office at the same time. Ours were, and we still are.
By all standards, they’ve built legacies comparable to those of the FAANGs, if not better.
Our own businessmen have the grandest of stories. About their journeys, their struggles and experiences. Who better to learn from than the very men and women who have built amazing businesses in this very undervalued market with so much potential?
Reading a biography for inspiration is one thing but reading it for and as a playbook is another. Here’s the pattern underneath each name in seven different profiles, with a deep dive on the mechanics: where the capital came from, what the actual structural move was, and what they’re doing right now to defend it.
Patricia Poku-Diaby (Plot Enterprise Group): stop exporting the raw material, keep the value that comes from processing it. I found her last but brought her first, because her approach is the simplest one here and her journey the most intriguing. Poku-Diaby grew up in her family’s trading and transport business in Abidjan, one of eighteen children, learning early how goods and value move across borders, and how much of that value usually leaves the country before locals can capture it. In 2010 she set out on her own with Plot Enterprise Group, entering the cocoa industry, where West Africa produces roughly 70% of the world’s supply but historically kept almost none of the profit, because the beans left as raw material and the money got made somewhere else. Her move was to stop being a cocoa exporter and become a cocoa processor instead, building an actual grinding plant in Takoradi that turns beans into higher-value product before they ever leave Ghana.
Mansa Musa: control both ends of the trade, not just one. Mali didn’t get rich from having gold; West Africa had gold long before Musa. What made Mali an empire was sitting physically between the Saharan salt mines and the southern gold fields, so every caravan moving either commodity had to pass through and pay a toll. Musa taxed salt one way and gold the other, using a “silent trade” system that let gold move and get priced without him controlling the miners directly, only the route and the toll. He left conquered territories their local customs, because a working tributary was worth more than a subdued one, then funded scholars and mosque-builders at Timbuktu with the surplus. The empire fragmented not long after his death, a reminder that a chokepoint monopoly is only as durable as the succession behind it. The 1324 pilgrimage, where he reportedly spent so much gold it crashed Cairo’s price for years, is usually told as a flex. Read differently, it’s a lesson in restraint, not just position.
Joseph Siaw Agyepong (Jospong Group): turn a liability into a value chain, then keep laddering upward. Agyepong started with almost nothing (reportedly under $3), hawking exercise books on foot in Accra before that became Jospong Printing Press in 1995, which found a recurring, apolitical need in Ghana’s election seasons: campaign posters and branded merchandise, cycle after cycle, regardless of who wins. The bigger move came in 2006 with Zoomlion. Waste collection in Ghana was tolerated, not built on, so Agyepong reframed it as a full value chain: door-to-door collection feeding into sorting, then into recycling and compost plants like ACARP and IRECOP, then into manufacturing inputs, ensuring ownership at every stage so revenue compounds instead of resetting with each contract. Much of it ran on a “sovereign-free” model, private financing and reinvested earnings rather than government guarantees, so a change in administration couldn’t pull the rug out. From there the group laddered into engineering, banking, ICT, hospitality, its own training institute, and sanitation contracts across ten-plus African countries, including a $130-million-plus deal in Mombasa. Jospong has outlasted several Ghanaian governments, though its scale has also drawn real scrutiny, a reminder that a full value chain puts you in the state’s path either way.
Ibrahim Mahama (Engineers and Planners): don’t just own the contract, own the equipment. Mahama returned to Ghana at 26 with no concessions, no serious capital, and a dropped-out engineering education, but a clear read on a gap: Ghana’s mining sector was full of foreign contractors who owned the heavy earth-moving equipment, while Ghanaian firms mostly supplied labor. Engineers and Planners started in equipment rental and contract mining, unglamorous work that meant owning the machines, not just the man-hours, and owning capital equipment in a capital-scarce market is itself a moat competitors can’t undercut overnight. E&P became the first Ghanaian firm trusted with major contracts at Tarkwa and Damang, historically the preserve of multinationals, and three decades later it’s the largest indigenously owned mining contractor in West Africa, creditworthy enough by 2026 to arrange a $205 million Stanbic financing package on top of over $250 million in earlier facilities. Mahama has also chosen dialogue over litigation when contracts get contested, preserving relationships rather than winning a fight and losing the partner. The diversification since follows Dangote’s logic exactly: once you control a capital-intensive input, you can move sideways into anything needing the same discipline.
Aliko Dangote: go where the government has to protect you, then vertically integrate everything upstream. Dangote’s founding insight, reportedly delivered directly to Nigeria’s president Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, was blunt: it was more profitable to import cement into Nigeria than to produce it locally. Rather than accept that as a fact of the market, he treated it as a policy failure to be fixed in his favor, and Obasanjo’s response, a Backward Integration Policy pairing import restrictions with tax holidays for local producers, turned that insight into the foundation of a cement monopoly. But policy alone doesn’t explain the staying power. Dangote integrated backward through the entire chain: mining the limestone, running the plants, even building his own ports and trucking networks rather than renting someone else’s logistics, so his cost base kept falling below competitors’ even as his prices stayed level, widening the margin every year. That same logistics-ownership instinct now underpins his refinery, financed partly through billions in Eurobonds rather than equity alone, keeping control concentrated while still raising serious capital.
Femi Otedola: go all-in on control, cash out completely, and never confuse loyalty to a company with loyalty to the strategy. Otedola built his first fortune controlling a dominant share of Nigeria’s diesel distribution market, then was left badly exposed when oil prices crashed in 2008. He lost most of it, paid his debts in full rather than restructure away from them, and rebuilt by buying into a struggling, loss-making oil company most investors had left for dead, which became Forte Oil. The pattern since: build a stake past majority control, force the restructuring the business needs, then exit completely once it’s stable. At Forte Oil he climbed from roughly a quarter to three-quarters ownership before selling it all in 2019. At Geregu Power he passed 90% before selling down to institutional partners and eventually exiting entirely in a 2025 sale worth roughly $750 million, bringing in a technical partner (State Grid Corporation of China) to run what he lacked in-house expertise for while keeping ownership control himself. He’s since repeated the climb at First HoldCo, stating plainly that his threshold for any serious position is control, above 51%, or he’s not really in it.
Kevin Okyere (Springfield Group): self-fund the risk everyone said only a foreign multinational could carry. Okyere’s early capital came from petroleum trading and logistics, unglamorous distribution work that built cash flow and relationships rather than headlines, helped along by an already-comfortable family background that lowered the bar for his first checks. The defining move came later: Springfield became the first wholly Ghanaian-owned company to explore, drill, and find hydrocarbons in deep offshore water, historically considered too capital-intensive for any local company to attempt. Okyere and his partners reportedly self-funded a large share of exploration and appraisal costs on the West Cape Three Points Block 2, betting that being first mattered more than being fully hedged. The 2019 Afina discovery, credited with holding potentially over a billion barrels, validated a decade of that bet. Springfield has since added an export terminal moving refined product into Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria, though a reported 2025 trading dispute abroad is a reminder that moving fast into new territory brings new risk too. Some categories of “impossible for a local company” are really just capital-intensive, and that’s a question of how much risk you’re willing to carry before anyone else will.
The pattern across all seven: none of them started with the win. Poku-Diaby started in her family’s trading business and had to break from it to build her own. Musa inherited a chokepoint but had to defend it with discipline. Agyepong started on foot with schoolbooks. Mahama started renting equipment. Dangote started with a trading loan. Otedola started, lost almost everything, and rebuilt on a company nobody wanted. Okyere started in fuel logistics. The businesses that became lifelines all began as unglamorous, physical, low-status work in a sector nobody was fighting over, and the money came only after the position was already structurally hard to dislodge.
It’s easy to read seven success stories with nothing but admiration. The point of pulling them apart above was to find what’s actually usable especially today and for our context. The parts of each story that aren’t tied to that person’s specific luck, family, or decade, and that you could genuinely apply to a business you’re starting in Ghana today.
Tangible products built with tangible resources will thrive regardless of the era. Musa’s trade routes mattered in the 1300s for the same reason Dangote’s cement plants matter now. Because they were a physical resource, moving through a physical chokepoint, serving a need that doesn’t disappear or lose relevance with an industry shift or an app.
Position beats hustle, but you have to occupy it first. Musa didn’t work harder than other West African rulers; he sat on the one stretch of land every trader had to cross. Mahama didn’t out-hustle every contractor in Ghana’s mining sector; he was one of the only ones who actually owned the machines. The lesson here really isn’t to work less. It’s that hard work aimed at a spot nobody else occupies compounds differently than hard work aimed at a spot everyone’s fighting over. An under-saturated market with potential is the position a long-term builder should be looking to buy into.
The unglamorous stage of the business is usually where the moat is built. Nobody remembers Agyepong for the exercise-book hawking or the campaign T-shirts, and nobody remembers Otedola for years of unglamorous diesel logistics. But that’s exactly where the capital and the relationships that made the later, bigger move possible actually came from.
Vertical integration is a defense, and not just an efficiency play. Dangote’s real innovation wasn’t cement. It was refusing to just be a cement seller and instead owning the limestone, the plants, and the logistics underneath it. Jospong’s real innovation wasn’t collecting garbage. It was really refusing to stop at collection and building the compost and recycling stages underneath it too. In both cases, owning the full-value chain, instead of disconnected fragments, was what made the business hard to displace.
Scale eventually puts you in the room with government, whether you wanted to be there or not. Jospong’s contract disputes and Dangote’s monopoly accusations aren’t cautionary tales about avoiding government contact. In an economy like Ghana’s or Nigeria’s, that contact is close to unavoidable past a certain size. They’re cautionary tales about building the governance to match the ambition early.
Own enough to force the fix, then let go once it’s fixed. Otedola’s pattern is simple once you see it: buy into a company until you own more than half of it, enough that nobody can block the hard decisions it needs. That’s the whole point of owning a majority stake; it’s not about wealth or status, it’s about not needing anyone’s permission to act. He did this at Forte Oil (now Ardova PLC), at Geregu Power, and again at First HoldCo. He built the stake, forced through the restructuring, then sold out completely once the company was stable, rather than staying on as “the founder” for the rest of his life. Most people treat their company like part of their identity and something to hold onto. Otedola treated ownership like a tool with one job: fix the thing, then move. Holding on for sentimental reasons is its own risk. This is the kind of decision-making Ghana needs!
“Too capital-intensive for a local company” is often just an unexamined assumption. Okyere’s deepwater bet is the clearest version of this: an entire category of business in Ghana was written off as a territory only multinationals dominated, until someone was willing to personally carry the risk everyone assumed only outside capital could carry. It is worth asking, about any business written off as “not for us here”: is that actually true, or is it just what’s always been assumed?
NOTHING here was fast. It took Mahama three decades from equipment rental to West Africa’s largest indigenous mining contractor. Agyepong went from hawking books at 22 to a pan-African conglomerate, across multiple decades and multiple governments. Dangote: two decades from the Obasanjo conversation to today’s refinery. If the lifeline argument earlier in this piece is right, that lasting businesses are built on the physical and not the trendy, then the timeline these six ran on is probably the more honest one to expect.
Here I am writing an article half-arguing against software as a foundation, while I’ve spent real time building the very kind of product I’m against. If you’ve read my previous work, you probably know about Bantu. Bantu’s a startup and product we’re building as a central hub for all things waste management. It didn’t take long for the team to realise what we’re building would have a really hard time gaining traction in a country like ours (if it’d gain any at all) seeing that software had no chance at solving a lot of our problems, aside from the fact that several other groups had built the same thing. Demographics aside, you learn pretty quickly that environmental sustainability is the kind of industry that thrives on physical products. Since that realisation, I have pivoted away from that idea completely and turned my attention to more promising prospects, my only progress yet being experiments with biodegradable packaging alternatives; a stark contrast to trending Ghanaian startup models.
At this point, you probably see how this sits close to Jospong’s origin point. I was first drawn to this direction from my ideas about building lifelines. Rather than focus on just one layer or component, I found it more promising long-term to attack from the full-value chain perspective. In this context in particular, the reasoning is to address a problem before it even becomes a problem. I admit it takes skill to excel at this tactic but we’ll get there.
Now, for where Bantu sits in this conversation. After physical resources have built the foundation, software can be a crutch. The app or automation flow would be supporting collection routes, sorting infrastructure, and more importantly relationships with waste pickers and facilities. We’ll use this very approach in our own context to verify that it works. More on Bantu later.
Every name in this piece won, but as the saying goes, “For every rule, there is an exception.”
There have been countless individuals who have tried to build enduring businesses and failed. The aim of this writeup isn't to give you a sure formula for building something great, even though versions of it have worked for countless others. The aim of this writeup is to give you better odds than a lot of people have or see today.
I'm making the argument anyway, caveat and all, because the alternative isn't a safer bet. A software-only, trend-chasing business has its own survivorship problem. It's just newer and less studied, because the category hasn't existed long enough to produce a graveyard anyone's bothered to write about yet. Between a pattern that's at least been tested against fifty years of Ghanaian and West African weather, and one that's mostly been tested against a decade of cheap global capital, I know which odds I'd rather build for and which I’d build against.
Dr. Myles Munroe often spoke about how the Bible’s opening instruction to humanity wasn’t really to survive. It was dominion. Take over. Steward the physical earth.
That’s really the same instruction the rest of this piece has been circling: not to extract from the earth and move on, but to take responsibility for something physical long enough to shape it into something that lasts. A business built on land, food, or infrastructure is, in that reading, closer to the original mandate.
Cal Newport, the author of the book Deep Work argues that one group of people who will thrive in the coming economy is the group with access to capital and the massive advantages they have, and even more importantly, that some periods offer more advantages than others. Fortunately, there hasn’t been a better period than now to put capital to good use, and especially when so many people are so fixated on a narrow spectrum of trendy industries.
My own adaptation of this concept is that capital and skill are the perfect combination for building tangible products today. That combination pays off even more, though, if what you build with it is actually new to the market you’re building it in.
One mistake founders cannot afford to make today is heavily recycling existing business ideas. The obvious downside to this is that you make less money because you’re splitting active and prospective customers between yourself and your competitors, a problem you won’t face if you’re a monopoly or monopsony.
The overarching thesis is this: Understand the environment deeply enough to know where capital, policy, infrastructure and unavoidable human needs intersect. With our own businessmen’s stories as evidence that it’s already been done, right here, in this very environment, against these seemingly impossible odds.
