The Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Trade Fair Co Ltd., Dr. Agnes Adu, has said that the Trade Fair site was not operational prior to her appointment as CEO by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.
Speaking on Artsy on Asaase 99.5 on Saturday (10 August), Adu stated that Akufo-Addo was very deliberate in sorting after her professionalism.
“I walk in my first day, July of 2017, I walked in and there’s total chaos, right? You would think that nobody cared. There’s garbage everywhere. The townspeople dump their garbage into the Trade Fair site.”
“His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo, he was very deliberate and purposeful in going after those of us who left Ghana.
“But, he was really, deliberate in coming after us. When I say us, people who have left Ghana, they’ve gone out there, you’ve acquired some knowledge. In my first career, I’m a doctor, not a book doctor.”
She added that the president went to the United States specifically to recruit professionals like herself who had been abroad for far too long.
“He comes into America and recruits professionals, right? And then he said, well, you know, you have talents. All of us has, we have multiple talents. I’m an eye doctor, but I run my own business. I had retail stores everywhere at some point.”
“And so he told us, drop what you’re doing. You are paying taxes into somebody else’s system. You need to come back, suffer for your own country and build your own country,” Adu said.
She stated that in order to be the CEO of Trade Fair, she needed to develop a tough skin.
“So I think he purposely gave me the toughest thing he can imagine. And you have to have a tough skin for that as well. You have to, you develop it with time. It doesn’t come naturally.”
“I felt that although the place [Trade Fair] was abandoned for quite some time, the major thing that needed to happen was to put a plan together. So we started exactly with that. We drew up a modern cosmopolitan master plan. It’s 150 acres of prime beachfront land being wasted with track.”
The CEO explained that redeveloping the Trade Fair Company came with challenges, “So we started with the basic master planning, but it is also a government agency. So you can imagine the loops and hoops that you have to go through, you have to get cabinet approval, any developer you want to bring there to develop, you have to get PPA approval.”
