Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse: An appreciation
The first thing that struck me about the late Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse, who died in mid-September 2024 and was laid to rest last weekend, was his originality.
We first met at his mother’s home in Accra, where I was introduced to him above the delightful noise made by some very beautiful peacocks and peahens.
Without much ado, he said to me, “I’m working on software that can give you your TV channel!”
I was dumbstruck! Was the guy a mind reader? I’d been wondering how I could make use of YouTube, TikTok, and similar platforms to drum into the ears of Ghanaians the message that their tolerance of the woeful destruction being wrought remorselessly in their country by galamseyers was equivalent to their acquiescing to a “self-genocide” being perpetrated in the country they claimed to love so much.
TV stations had been sparse in inviting me to share my views on galamsey. They were usually more interested in my life story, as I am one of the few journalists still writing who has worked under every regime since Ghana achieved independence in 1957.
To some TV journalists, my constantly harping on about the obnoxious aspects of galamsey must be “boring” or even “obsessive”! Yeah – they want to wait until their children are being carted off to hospitals with cancerous diseases caused by mercury and cyanide before they fully understand the danger the galamseyers are posing to Ghana’s survival as a nation.
Herman was not thinking like the rest of the Ghanaian intelligentsia. No – he recognised and shared my passionate and true concern.
And now he’s dead! At the relatively young age of 61. How cruel can fate be?
I am sure there are unkind spirits waiting to make the case that I am saying such nice things about Herman because he approved of what I was doing in Ghana and desired to help promote it.
I am therefore going to demonstrate to readers that his concerns about developing software for good social purposes went far beyond his native Ghana, to other parts of Africa, such as Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. I hereby quote for you extracts from an article about him published in Ethiopia:
“Ethiopia News Meet the Bill Gates of Ghana December 21, 2008- EthiopiaReview.com
By Max Chafkin Inc
Magazine…
It’s just past midnight, and Herman Chinery-Hesse can’t sleep. The 43-year-old entrepreneur is lying on his back, eyes closed, mind cranking…..
He’s working through the details of a pitch to American and European investors – many of whom have never backed a company like the one he’s proposing. The pitch is absurdly ambitious: a tech company that aims to reshape the business climate for small entrepreneurs in Africa, while grabbing a share of the $28 billion that Africans living abroad send home every year.
His start-up is a long shot, will cost millions of dollars to execute, and could take five years to get off the ground. In other words, it’s not the kind of thing you would expect from a company based in West Africa, a place known for many things – malaria, civil wars, famine – but definitely not disruptive technology companies.
But Chinery-Hesse thrives on just this sort of contradiction. They have also landed him speaking engagements at [THE UNIVERSITIES OF] Harvard, Wharton, and Cambridge. …..”Herman is the godfather of the software industry, not just in Ghana but in all of Africa,” says Eric Osiakwan, a Ghanaian journalist and IT consultant. At its height in 2003, SOFTtribe employed 80 people, mostly programmers, and was booking well over $1 million a year in revenue — a substantial sum in a country in which a three-bedroom house costs $20,000…
It’s hard to imagine the founding of a software company as a revolutionary act, but in 1991 in Ghana, it was. Not only were there no technology entrepreneurs to speak of but the idea of entrepreneurship as a path to wealth.”
Pity we didn’t get to know him better. Our sincere condolences to his family. ESPECIALLY HIS WARM-HEARTED MOTHER, AMBASSADOR MARY CHINERY-HESSE, as well as his wife and two children.
BY CAMERON DUODU