Ghana’s Interrupted Capitalism: From Gold to a “CEO-Lifestyle” Economy

The Promise That Was

If you ever want to understand how nations lose prosperity, study Ghana. Not because it lacked talent or opportunity — it had both in abundance — but because it systematically learned to distrust its own capitalists.

Long before independence, Ghana was on track to become the continent’s first truly capitalist economy: African entrepreneurs investing in gold, cocoa, and trade; reinvesting profits; competing in open markets; building wealth from the ground up.

And then, in slow motion, politics happened.

The First Capitalists — and the First Betrayal

Let’s start with gold — the literal foundation of the modern Ghanaian economy.

In 1890, two indigenous entrepreneurs, Joseph E. Ellis and Joseph Biney, negotiated the early mining concessions in the Gold Coast and helped found Ashanti Goldfields in 1897 — marking the beginning of large-scale industrial mining in West Africa.

Their vision was revolutionary: African ownership of a world-class mining enterprise in an era when British capital still saw Africans as labor, not shareholders. But their reward was all too familiar. Through a series of colonial manipulations and later government interventions, their shares were quietly erased.

By the time Ashanti Goldfields became a global giant, the men who had made it possible — Ghanaian pioneers of modern capitalism — had been written out of their own story. Mysteriously their original equity share had disappeared.

This was the first great act of economic dispossession: not theft in the crude sense, but a subtler kind — the systematic denial of ownership and agency to the very people who built the wealth.

Cocoa and the Rise of Indigenous Capitalism

The same pattern repeated with cocoa.

From the late 19th century onward, Ghana’s farmers built a market economy from scratch. They organized labor through abusa sharecropping, financed expansion, and even resisted exploitation.

Abusa is a traditional Ghanaian sharecropping system used mainly in cocoa farming, where profits (or sometimes harvested cocoa beans) are split into three equal parts — hence the name “abusa,” meaning “one-third” in Twi.

Here’s how it worked:

• The landowner provided the land and sometimes the initial capital (seedlings, tools).
• The farmer or caretaker (called “ɔsomfo” or “abusafo”) did the cultivation and managed day-to-day labor.
• When the cocoa was harvested and sold, the proceeds were divided into three shares:
  • One-third to the landowner.
  • One-third to the farmer/caretaker.
  • One-third often went to cover capital costs or hired labor — sometimes retained by the owner, sometimes distributed depending on the arrangement.

Why it mattered economically:

• It mobilized labor and land without formal credit markets — a clever local solution to the absence of banks.
• It aligned incentives: both landowner and farmer benefited from higher yields.
• It allowed smallholders and migrants to build capital over time, and it was one reason cocoa spread so rapidly across southern Ghana.
• Many of the early “cocoa barons” who became wealthy and reinvested in transport, trading, and urban property started as abusa farmers or landowners using this model.

In short, abusa was a homegrown capitalist institution — one that helped Ghana become the world’s leading cocoa producer by the 1930s. It’s a perfect example of how indigenous systems of cooperation and incentive built real markets before formal capitalism ever arrived.

The 1937–38 cocoa hold-up, when farmers refused to sell at rigged prices, was a triumph of collective bargaining and economic rationality.

These were capitalists in the classic sense — risk-takers who believed in private enterprise.

But as success grew, so did state suspicion. The Cocoa Marketing Board, established in 1947, was framed as protection for farmers. In reality, it was a device for extracting surplus from them.

The colonial state had learned the same lesson as every insecure regime since: control the capitalists, and you control the economy.

AWAM: When “Capitalist” Became a Dirty Word

Enter AWAM — the Association of West African Merchants. Originally a cartel of foreign trading houses, AWAM became the symbol of everything the colonial economy did wrong — monopoly, collusion, and exploitation.

By the 1950s, “AWAM” had morphed into a national insult. It no longer referred to a group of firms; it meant fraudulent capitalism — rigged markets, crooked merchants, and alien greed.

And that was Nkrumah’s opening.

The young nationalist movement cleverly fused anti-colonial sentiment with anti-capitalist rhetoric. “AWAM” became shorthand for everything the new Ghana would destroy. But instead of dismantling monopoly, the government simply nationalized it.

In the name of fighting “AWAM capitalism,” the state replaced private monopolies with public ones — and in doing so, suffocated the very indigenous capitalists it claimed to liberate.

The Commanding Heights – and the Crowded-Out Entrepreneur

The 1960s industrial drive looked good on paper: a seven-year plan, state-owned factories, import substitution, and infrastructure projects. But the economics was classic crowd-out.

The state taxed cocoa to subsidize loss-making enterprises, fixed prices, and rationed foreign exchange through politics. Private capital couldn’t compete because the game was no longer about efficiency — it was about access.

And as often happens in developing countries, access came with allegiance.

When Success Became a Crime

By the late 1970s, Ghanaian capitalism faced a new kind of hostility: moral outrage weaponized by populism.

The AFRC’s “house-cleaning” and early PNDC tribunals criminalized success itself.

• J.K. Siaw, founder of Tata/Achimota Brewery — the largest wholly Ghanaian industrial enterprise — had his assets seized and died in exile.
• B.A. Mensah, of International Tobacco, was detained and stripped of his factories.
• Appiah-Menka, creator of Apino Soap, was persecuted into silence.

Each name became shorthand for the same message: if you grow too rich, you must be corrupt.

In the language of economics, Ghana replaced creative destruction with destructive suspicion. The result was not redistribution but decay.

The Long Shadow of AWAM

“AWAM” had begun as a protest against exploitative capitalism. By the 1980s, it had become a reflex — a cultural suspicion of capitalism itself.

Even after liberalization, the mindset persisted. The market was reopened, but the morality of enterprise never recovered. Politicians who once fought monopolies now created new ones — through state contracts, import waivers, and strategic patronage.

And so Ghana entered the era of what might be called political capitalism — capitalism by connection rather than competition.

The Rise of the CEO-Lifestyle Economy

Fast forward to today, and the outcome is almost too on-the-nose. Ghana has a bustling private sector, but one optimized for survival, not scale.

A generation of entrepreneurs has learned the rules of the game:

• Build close to government, not markets.
• Win contracts, not customers.
• Stay visible enough to be invited, but not enough to be envied.

The result is what I call the CEO-lifestyle economy — enterprises that exist not to solve problems but to secure lifestyles.

They are technically private, but structurally dependent. The state feeds them, praises them, and quietly punishes them when they get too ambitious.

It’s capitalism as theater: the performance of enterprise without the substance of competition.

Development Without Being Developed

Economically, this explains Ghana’s central paradox. The macro indicators look fine — GDP growth, infrastructure, mobile banking. But the microeconomics tells a darker story: stagnating productivity, weak exports, and a private sector afraid of risk.

You can have growth without development. You can have capital without capitalism. And you can have entrepreneurs who are rich but never free.

That’s the Ghanaian paradox — a development without being developed.

The Way Back

The cure is not ideological. It’s institutional.

Ghana doesn’t need fewer capitalists; it needs better rules to protect them from politics. It needs a state that referees, not rivals, private enterprise. And it needs to rehabilitate the moral legitimacy of profit.

In other words:

• Reclaim capitalism from corruption.
• End political intrusion.
• Protect property rights absolutely.
• Make competition the organizing principle of policy.

The Final Irony

Joseph Ellis and Joseph Biney lost their shares in the gold mines they founded. The cocoa barons lost control of the markets they built. And modern entrepreneurs lose the businesses they create to the politics they can’t escape.

It’s the same story told three times — gold, cocoa, and contracts — each ending in dispossession, each justified by some moral crusade against “greed.”

But capitalism’s real moral test isn’t whether some get rich. It’s whether the rules let anyone else follow them there.

Until Ghana stops punishing ambition and starts protecting it, it will keep producing prosperity’s prelude — the promise of wealth without the power to keep it.