‘It was the most regrettable experience in my life’ – Mahama shares tale of trust in business

Speaking at the Kwahu Business Forum on Saturday, April 19, the former president recounted how, in an effort to ease the financial burden of his parliamentary income, he purchased a bus over ten years ago for a relative to operate a small transportation business.

Rather than proving beneficial, the venture turned into a regrettable experience that taught him a valuable lesson about corporate responsibility and trust.

He explained that the bus was handed over to a driver who overworked it to the point that the axle broke, resulting in expensive and time-consuming repairs that ultimately undermined the purpose of the initiative.

“Anytime you saw the bus, it had more load on top of it than inside it. So what happened? The axle broke down, and it was the most regrettable experience of my life. When the axle broke down, they came to me to buy a new one. The whole purpose of buying the bus was defeated. Every time it broke down, they would come to me for repairs. It was costing me more to fix the bus than if I had just handed the money to them,” he said.

The situation worsened when he discovered that the driver—who was living in the family home—had started building a house using income from the mismanaged transportation business. That building, Mahama noted, remains incomplete to this day.

“So I refused to repair the bus and decided to dispose of it. I sold the bus. This was several years ago, probably more than ten years now. And ever since I sold the bus, that building, which had reached the lintel level, is still at lintel level—even today.”

President Mahama’s story was in response to a point made by Minority Leader Alexander Afenyo-Markin, who had noted that many businesses fail not due to a lack of funding, but because of unreliable partners or staff.

Mr. Mahama agreed, stressing that “finding reliable partners to collaborate with” remains one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and a major obstacle to the growth of the industrial sector.

“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 forum attendees to prioritize loyalty and integrity as core values for building sustainable business cultures.

“If you want to suck your pound of flesh out of a business and kill it, no industry will grow,” he cautioned.