Alexander Donkor - Championing the canopy business for OMCs
Alexander Donkor is young. The business he set up is christened to communicate his gratitude to his creator. That business, God’s Favour, will be six years in the eleventh month of this year.
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Alex is slender, has a jealously preserved goatee and loves to lie low. He was born to a family that was soon going to bid a bitter, painful farewell to a father and a primary school teacher who would have been proud of five set of twins. Alex was four when this tragedy struck the family.
He was sent together with two other siblings to go live with the maternal grandmother, a prosperous cocoa farmer in Wassa Amemfi. When she too joined her ancestors, Alex was put on a cargo and returned to the overworked mother.
Education
He took two additional years to complete the regular junior high school due to the family’s inability to foot the bills that would have bought Alex the right to take the final exams with his peers. But when he completed this delayed school, he would be waiting another eight years before setting foot into a post junior school of his dream.
And that dream school, the German Volunteers Technical School, in the right jaw of the city of Cape Coast, was going to teach Alex both welding and lessons that would illuminate his crooked path through a troubled early adulthood. When he fought tooth and nail to arrive at the threshold of his dream, Alex had one final hurdle to cross. The head of the school would argue that if allowed to partake in that year’s final exams, Alex would scandalise the results of the school and tarnish its respectable image.
As would be expected of the unassuming entrepreneur, Alex drugged the proprietress of the school into a scuffle over the matter. He won. He took the welding exams, passed it and shamed the head of the school who had sarcastically counselled him to consider a career in the ministry of Jesus Christ.
Dashed hopes
Alex ran to the Anglogold Ashanti soon after school following clandestine news that the multinational was hiring. He was booked for the next recruitment. And when the then HR of the Daman Mine asked Alex’s batch to secure residence in the vicinity of the mine, Alex could hardly control his excitement. But these exciting feelings were going to evaporate, leaving the young man with only enough hope to keep on moving.
When three months elapsed and Alex went over to take his promised job, the global price of gold had conspired with other unfavourable factors at home and subsequently introduced painful elements that would have Alex and his batch waiting indefinitely.
New grounds
Alex arrived in Kumasi two months after this jilting. Fang Geng offered him a job. His aspirations were dashed when the rewards fell way, way below his basest expectations. He left six months later to undertake an uncertain journey to Nigeria.
One and a half years later, Alex was so troubled that he feared he might return home a failure. He sought travelling prospects and secured a clandestine route to Libya, from where Spain would be the final destination. He paid for the right to be on the bus to Tripoli. Three days to the day of departure, news broke that Alex had lost his twin brother back home.
The turning point
After burying his brother and having run out of money, Alex had to figure out what lay ahead of him. He sought and found his seniors in German Volunteers who offered services frequently sourced by petroleum downstreamers. While on a project in Wassa Akropong, a man approached Alex to discuss the prospect of building a fuel service station. He took the young man’s particulars and disappeared. This man was going to return to Alex through a phone call several months later. When they met, Alex had left the team and gone solo.
Alex built three 45,000 litre capacity underground tanks for this customer. After the tanks had been successfully buried and calibration having been completed on the tanks, Alex was offered the second contract. He had to build a 60 metre square canopy on the forecourt. When this was also successful, the client introduced him to another customer.
Incorporating the business
Soon, it made no more sense to continue hiring using the old formula. Alex disbanded the casual labour system in use and replaced this with a more committed set of hands. He procured space formally and set out transforming steel plates of various thickness into tanks fit for underground petroleum storage and steel poles for giant canopies.
By the second year into the business, the enterprise was taking great shape. At the horizons, hope donned some of its beautiful garments on the young enterprise. One contract after another came, steadily, but sometimes in a rush, creating a stampede.
“By the second, third and fourth year, it was clear we had left behind most of the trouble spots that had threatened our core business.” Alex exclaimed, drawing a breath of hope and great expectations. Between then and now, God’s favour has designed, constructed and in some cases buried several scores of underground tanks of various capacities ranging from the smallest, 9,000 litres to 45,000 litres in many parts of the country.
When I asked him which oil marketing companies he had designed tanks and canopies for, he grinned, saying: “Goil, Petroland, Union, Total, Petrosol, Mahmud, many other OMCs.”
The ‘metalpreneur’ confided in me that up to the end of the second quarter of this year alone, his company had built 17 giant canopies on the forecourts of many petroleum distribution companies in many places in Ghana. He needed not tell me how many tanks he had designed, manufactured and buried. As an industry person, I knew he had constructed not less than 50 underground tanks.
When I asked him if Anglogold Ashanti job offer as a welder would arouse his feelings positively today, Alex exclaimed that Anglogold Ashanti did him a great favour by not hiring him.