Coming full cycle - The man Rex Danquah
The scene is set in the late 1980s-through early 1990s. Who was this upstart who had burst from nowhere upon Ghana and was getting all the attention of the corporate world,
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namely well muscled captains of industry, tycoons, sports administrators and the wheelers and shakers of the arts and entertainment scene?
“They say his name is Rex Danquah”
Without any formal journalism training, the young man had on the newsstands, publications such as Sports Coin, Public Opinion, Sports Superstar, Leisure Arts & Music, and some industry-specific journals like Ghana Motor News, Glostal News, Banking & Finance Quarterly.
For those of us in the Arts, something about him irked us. How dare this man attempt to compete with the Entertainment Critics and Reviewers Association of Ghana (ECRAG), considered the most prestigious artists awarding institution in Ghana at the time! And he was succeeding; indeed, his ‘Leisure Arts and Music Awards’ succeeded so well that in its second year, he was invited to present a paper on the Culture Industry at the (then) OAU.
In PR, advertising and event management, he succeeded like success. The money to undertake any event of his dreams did not seem to be his headache because all of a sudden, the corporate world was too willing to place their brands behind those events.
Publicity beyond imagination
Rex Image gave them more than their due: they got publicity beyond all they had ever asked or imagined, especially on TV. That was the beginning of the era of TV programme sponsorships and sponsorship syndication for sporting tournaments. His outfit could get industry to support anything. No wonder, it was said of him at the time that “Ghana is too small for him”.
Among the kingpins in the Sports Writers Association of Ghana (SWAG), Rex Danquah was no name. So how come he was so close to power in the sports industry! I am talking about the last quarter of the 1980s.
Enter the 1990s and then into the 2000s, the man was ruling the sports world. He was not a salaried official of the GFA or national Sports Council, yet he was the voice that policy makers seemed to listen to, not only in Ghana but also at the African level (CAN/AFCON) and in the hallowed sanctums of FIFA. He was the man Presidents of Ghana and their Sports Ministers dealt with – a sort of consultant to governments on sports.
Name a tournament - Africa Cup for Nations Hockey Championship, ECOWAS Games etc. Rex Image would be the consulting firm. How many Ghanaians would not remember CAN 2008? Even the word of the then Sports Minister could not prevail against him. I remember the World Cup in Germany and the run up to that event. Name any sporting innovation such as annual lectures and symposia and you were likely to find the signature of Rex Danquah all over the place.
Presidential Friendship Cup
What language was this man speaking that was getting Presidents of Liberia and Sierra Leone to listen to him, leading to his organising the first Presidential Friendship Cup match between the Liberian national team and the Black Stars of Ghana, for instance?
It took me four years at Ashanti Goldfields, under the management of Dr (now Sir) Sam Jonah and nearly 20 years of direct dealings with other corporate entities, mostly in Accra to which I offered media consultancy services, for me to learn what Rex Danquah had known all this time.
The answer I found out – and I still suspect that this truth has not hit many others – was (and is) going at one’s passion with raw talent only. Most of us in the newsrooms and sports/entertainment fraternities were bundles of talent. Passion and talent are good starters, but they can only earn you a daily minimum wage.
If Esther Cobbah added “the science and art” as an emphasis to the practice of public relations, Rex worked passionately to add one word to journalism, sports management, public relations and event management.
The word is “business”, namely the realisation that it is the business of any discipline of life that squeezes out the creative juices in any man or woman. He recognised early in his career that even those who profess vows of poverty eventually come to realise that what drives the world is profitability or refusal to lose money.
Rex saw what most people had not seen at the time: that in the corporate world, what mattered most was not a helpful friend/advisor who had only passion, but someone who could “make impossible dreams come to life”. On his website, Rex calls this the “architecture”. In passionately pursuing his dreams of “adding value to brands”, he offered his clients (including governments, associations, and business entities) excellence.
As I studied the rise and rise of Rex Danquah I came to see what King Solomon had seen in his days, that a man’s gifts (I’d say excellent skills) will bring him before kings. So by 2010, I had come to a point where I should have called Rex Danquah and offered to shake hands.
That call came from a mutual friend, Nana Kobina Nketsia V, paramount chief of my “holy village”, Essikado, who also happened to be an Mfantsipim School mate of Rex’s. Something Nana needed me to do for him took me to Rex’s office. This was 2015. There, I discovered that the man had found a greater mutual friend, Jesus the Christ.
We did not need to go back into time.