Obituary: Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse, top African I.T. innovator
It may be inexact, or even a cliché, to dub a person in one country as the “equivalent” of another person who comes from a completely different locality. Nevertheless, those who coined the short-hand term, “The Bill Gates of Ghana”, to describe the late Ghanaian I.T. (Information Technology) entrepreneur, Herman Chinery-Hesse, had more justification than most of those who resort to such comparisons.
For Herman Chinery-Hesse, who sadly passed on September 14, 2024, was the equivalent of the American IT magnate, Bill Gates, in more ways than one. (He wittily retorted, once, when the sobriquet came up, that he could not match Bill Gates when it came to the size of the “bank balance”. That was all, he implied!)
Herman was not boasting. Some of the software he created for African institutions and companies was so terrain-friendly that Microsoft, which is largely regarded as “mono-proprietorial”, allows Herman’s Softribe company to market a product called MICROSFT DYNAMICS NAVISION (a “global enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that provides mid-sized and large businesses greater control over many of their operations.
Indeed, Herman’s uniqueness stems from the fact that, unlike Bill Gates, his “natural playground” was a financially parched territory, whose drawbacks include a backward technological infrastructure that is, simultaneously, under the control of short-sighted clients who have to be wooed –paradoxically – before adopting ingenious products specifically created to liberate their countries from dependence on systems developed for use in alien environments.
The usual fear of such people arises from the question: “Doesn’t innovation carry a built-in risk? Why take a risk when tried and tested systems are available?”
Herman was equipped with such an adaptable brain that he understood where such queries were coming from. He was a great psychologist and could discern that some industrial “power players” in developing countries had a mindset wedded to a business ethic that worked against their own best interests. The solution to their growth and expansion problems lay in a fast adoption of products developed with industrial integrity at their heart, and unequalled adaptability to unexpected socio-political developments. But didn’t the preaching of such notions to conservative institutions amount to a tacit criticism of the leadership of those very institutions in need of help?
For instance, how could software developed for, say, foreign exchange management in Germany or the US, be of much relevance to the needs of a Central Bank in Ghana or Nigeria, where excessive forex market volatility has been the norm for decades? And yet (!) weren’t German and American economic managers the golden standard in a world ruled by the ultra-powerful institutions THEY created, a la Bretton Woods?
Would the financial authorities in a developing country dare to try out newly-minted solutions from home, knowing full well that such solutions could be tossed aside unceremoniously precisely because they offered unorthodox methodologies?
So, even as African economic managers they wailed incessantly against the financial mechanisms they had inherited from the “developed countries”, through “historically-skewed international trade and business protocols” the “developing countries” had had no hand in effectuating, they were prevented from saving themselves because they feared what “master” would say!
Herman’s death, at a mere 61yars of age is thus, a great loss to the evolution of software that solves the real-world problems of today, not perpetuate them. He lived with African solutions as his very breath of life.
Who would have thought of saving the growing African middle and upper classes from the terror that can be unleashed by armed burglars? Herman – with a system called HEY JOLOR! that uses mobile phone systems to alert residents of a neigbourhood, as well as the Police, that their area is under attack!
TO BE CONTINUED
By CAMERON DUODU