KWABENA DANQUAH – THE BRAIN OF A BILLIONAIRE “Oh my God, that man owns half of Kempton Park!” That was the response I got from a good Ghanaian friend of mine Mavis Anim when I told her that I was going to interview her fellow countryman Kwabena Adjare Danquah. So that was the first question I asked him when we met in his office on Albatross Street in this eastern suburb of Johannesburg.
In Ghana, he is a 50% shareholder of Macsteel Ghana, the local subsidiary of Africa’s leading steel supplier. He also owns the Obuoba Group, a collection of companies which include a hotel, a roofing entity, alcohol distillery and
products and he is also in the process of funding the construction of a technical university. Before the meeting, I googled this Ghanaian entrepreneur and came across a detailed case study conducted on his business by the Columbia Business School in the USA. The paper found that the Metalex Group alone had net assets of over ten million dollars in 2007. Assuming continued growth within this and his other interests and the possible values of his real estate interests, Danquah’s net worth could easily amount to a billion rand or at the very least a billion Ghanaian cedis at the exchange rate of 1ZAR=2GHC. I engage him in the following question and answer sequence seeking to discover what lies within the brain of a billionaire.
“To become successful, you need to deny yourself and work hard. You need to separate your wants from your needs and constantly re-invest instead of living lavishly. You can start living lavishly when you have acquired enough passive income that you do not need to work at all to sustain your lifestyle.....”
“Well I do own very many commercial and residential buildings here but definitely not half of them,” he laughed. Within minutes I establish that the buildings he owns include several apartment blocks and other buildings in the city where one of the big four banks is a tenant of his All Danquah CC which also owns a restaurant and guest lodge in SA. He is also the proprietor of Comet Steel South Africa.
an FM station. Outside of Obuoba, Danquah owns Metalex, a company that manufactures high quality roofing, plastic and brick
Where did the journey to entrepreneurship begin for you? My father was a petty trader dealing in building materials in the town of Koforidua. I was his eighth child and assisted in the family business for a year after I completed high school education. He gave me USD 4,000 in 1982, to go to Accra and start my own business and that is when I started Metalex which at the time manufactured wood making machines. I started