Rev. Albert Ocran – A Life Devoted to Serving People

Mfantsipim School has its foundation in the Methodist Church, and for decades, every single headmaster was an ordained priest. The leadership and guidance of the clergy have played a significant role in the education of thousands of boys who attended the school. And so it also makes sense that the school would produce impactful men of the cloth, like the late great Rev Gaddiel Acquaah. And from that line of impressive clergy men comes Rev. Albert Ocran.

Albert entered Mfantsipim in 1979 and was in Sarbah-Picot. He graduated in 1986 and entered the University of Ghana at Legon. He graduated with a degree in Economics with Sociology in 1990. He later obtained an MBA from the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) in 2002.

Shortly after graduating from Legon, Albert, together with his wife Comfort, founded a printing and publishing business called Combert Impressions. After a decade of running this business, their shared passion for human capital development began to redefine their interests.

The couple initiated a personal development Road Show to mentor young people in January 2007. This had them traveling across the country with a contingent of accomplished Ghanaians speaking to young people and encouraging them to reach for their dreams and aspirations. The sessions included free workshops where participants were trained in skills like CV writing, business planning, talent development, public speaking and preparing for interviews. This roadshow is still held annually. Within four years, the Road Show had gone nationwide and been extended to Gambia and Nigeria. In 2011, the couple set up the Springboard Road Show Foundation to enable more young people to freely benefit from their diverse initiatives.

For the past 18 years, Albert has hosted “Springboard, Your Virtual University” on Joy FM, Joy News and other digital platforms. This educational and empowering show educates its audience and helps them improve their leadership and professional skills.

In 2013, Albert responded to the call to be ordained as a Reverend Minister. He first served as Executive pastor at the ICGC Christ Temple for ten years. In March 2023, he became Senior Pastor at the ICGC The New Wine Temple at East Legon, Accra, a position from which he has an even greater opportunity to win souls and shape the human development of the nation’s youth.

By combing his pastoral duties with his love for human capital development, he is not only developing souls for the afterlife but helping them to live better lives in this one, too. He has continued writing, publishing about 26 books with his wife, Comfort.

With books like “Snakes and Ladders: Entrapments and enablers on the complex journey of life, 2019”, “Sheba – Ancient Customer Service Secrets Repackaged In A Social-Media Driven Era (Biblical Economics Series Book 5), 2013”, and “The Lord, Madiba & The Eagle“ by Albert & Comfort Ocran, 2010”, Albert showed his penchant to find wisdom not only in the Bible but in the lives of courageous and accomplished leaders. And this penchant reflects in his sermons, speeches, and workshops.

During the COVID pandemic, Albert and Comfort managed the CoRe Program in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and Solidaridad. The program used an integrated e-learning, e-mentoring and e-counselling approach to equip over 23 million young Ghanaians with resilience to cope with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Springboard’s most recent intervention is the Ghana Grows Program, a partnership with the Mastercard Foundation that has helped over half a million young people to explore opportunities in the Agricultural and related Vocational Sectors.

Albert is a Fellow of the respected Aspen Global Leaders Network based in Colorado, USA, and the Africa Leadership Initiative West Africa (ALIWA). He was voted as Ghana’s 7th Most Respected CEO for 2009 and also received the Millennium Excellence Award for Motivation in 2010. For four consecutive years, he has appeared on ETV Ghana’s list of the 100 most influential Ghanaians. He also won the Exclusive Man of the Year Africa Award for 2018 in the Mentorship Category, among other awards.

On any day, Albert will be found serving people through mentoring, counselling or speaking sessions. After three decades, he doesn’t seem to have lost steam on this mission. If anything, he always seems to find a way of reinventing it. The thousands of testimonies from lives touched and volumes of impact stories published are a testament to the spirit of sacrifice, humility and service to humanity.

In all he does, that spirit of excellence, duty, and service that is taught on the Kwabotwe Hill is evident. Albert more than embodies the thoughtfulness and foresight preached by Mensah Sarbah.

Rev. Albert Ocran is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

Rev. Lockhart and the Move to Kwabotwe Hill

“Who hurts the honor of the School hurts my honor. It is the only thing I have in this country.”
– Rev. R.A. Lockhart, 1927

The Mfantsipim School campus has 2 main parts: the buildings on the top of the hill form “the Academic Site”, and those at the bottom of the hill, as you enter the school from Kotokuraba, form “the Domestic Site”. The academic site buildings were the first ones to be erected on the present campus. Construction started in 1929, and the boys moved into them in January 1931.

The story of the construction of those buildings is one of a headmaster who loved the school like no other and fought for it at all times. It is also the story of a long and intense brouhaha between this headmaster – Rev. Lockhart – on one side, and the Office of the Governor of the Gold Coast and the first Principal of Achimota School, Rev Fraser, on the other. It was a beef even the Methodist Church could not mediate, and one that drew in all the newspapers in Cape Coast at the time. Lastly, it is the story of a school that made so much out of the little it had, and the local communities that believed in it.

So how did it all start?

Mfantsipim in the 1920s was on Mount Hope. By 1924, the campus had become too small for the 68 students, and the waiting list stretched for 2 years. There was no way to expand the campus. The two previous headmasters, Rev Sneath and Dyer, had thought of moving the campus to Kwabotwe Hill, but they could not raise the funds.

Enter Rev. R.A.Lockhart.

He arrived in the Gold Coast in 1922 as the assistant to the then headmaster, Rev Dyer. He became the headmaster in 1925. In those three years, he witnessed the space problem at the school. He was also in the Gold Coast as the economy boomed from cocoa and gold exports. He witnessed the projects the then-governor, Guggisberg, embarked on in his “Ten-Year Development Plan”. One of these projects, conceived in 1924, was the plan to build the Achimota complex of schools, which was to consist of a kindergarten, elementary, and secondary schools, and a training college for teachers. It was going to have a hospital, playing fields, a farm, and a model village with a research facility, an arts and handicrafts block, a gym, a swimming pool, and a printing press, all that sitting on an area of 550 hectares or 1359 acres. Total budgeted cost was a whopping £640,000.
Construction began in 1924, and by 1929, all the schools were up and occupied. The Prince Of Wales himself was there for the laying of the foundation in 1925 and Guggisberg opened it in 1927. The schools were maintained with a budget of £68,000 a year.

Rev Lockhart was also at Mfantsipim when Governor Guggisberg and the future head of Achimota, Rev. Fraser, visited in 1924, and were all praises for the School. He was there when Kwegyir Aggrey visited several times and lauded the work being done.

So when Lockhart planned to build a new campus for Mfantsipim on the 80 acres of Kwabotwe, consisting of 4 classroom-dormitory blocks, 4 housemaster quarters, an admin block, a science block with 4 labs,a dispensary, and 2 bungalows, he hoped the colonial government would help out with 50% of the £40,000 budget. He hoped to build in two phases.

He planned to raise the rest from school fees, appeals to all farmers, market women, traders, chiefs, and workers in all the Fante towns and villages, and from the Methodist Church.

He had the land donated to the school by Jacob Wilson Sey and hired an architect to draw up a plan for the campus for £150. So in 1925, he set up a building committee to help with fundraising and help manage the construction.

Assuming the government would help, he initially focused on raising funds from the Fante communities. And the committee hit every Fante town you can think of – from Cape Coast to Asikuma; from Winneba to Anomabo. The Methodist Church in the UK would also only help if he could raise £5,000, so he worked hard to raise this. By March 1929, he had raised just over £9000 pounds and reached out to the colonial government. He was told there was no money and to reapply. Truth be told, there was a worldwide recession by then. That September, construction started at the site, and Lockhart reapplied in October 1929 and was told he would only get a third of the £20,000 he had hoped for, so £6800. In January 1930, when the Colonial governor, Slater, laid the foundation stone, he repeated the promise to provide a third of the £20,000. However, by November 1931, the government had given Mfantsipim only £3,300 pounds. When Lockhart requested the remaining funds, he was told that if he wanted more money, he needed to turn Mfantsipim into an elementary school.

That is when the brouhaha started.

In his address on Speech-day in 1931, he did not mince his words and blasted the government for going back on its promise, for asking Mfantsipim to become an elementary school, and for cutting teachers’ assistance by 55%. The newspapers piled in, asking how Achimota could be assisted with £1450 per student, while Mfantsipim, a secondary school with all the history and results, received only £45 per student. The Colonial Office never addressed the issue of funding but insisted that Lockhart got the 55% drawdown of the assistance for the teachers wrong. The fight drew in Rev. Fraser, who tried to defend Achimota’s funding. The head of the Methodist Mission in Ghana, Rev. Webster, tried to mediate but to no avail.

Without the help, Lockhart had to take a loan of £5000 from the Church in the UK. He also received a soft loan of £3000 from Mr. Pickard, a great friend of the school, and from the Church’s offertories and fundraising programs in the Gold Coast. By the beginning of 1933, the government had contributed a total of only £3960 out of a total of £22,349 raised. So the project took a little longer to finish than he had planned. The fourth dormitory was built in 1935, the great assembly hall in 1936, and the science block was not built until after independence, when Nkrumah’s government funded it.

The issue of funding pissed Lockhart off so much that he pulled Mfantsipim out of the annual Empire Day celebrations, starting in 1927 and continued till 1935, to lambast the colonial government.
Surprisingly, in February 1936, he announced he was leaving his position as the headmaster and returning to the UK. Many believe the colonial government forced the Methodist Church to oust him.

One can only wonder why the colonial government was so reticent to support the school. One can argue that the times were economically hard, and that even the construction of the gym, swimming pool, and chapel at Achimota was halted. Their stipend was also reduced to £48,000 a year. However, the demand to turn Mfantsipim into an elementary school as a prerequisite for more funds just reeks of an ulterior motive.

In spite of these humble beginnings, Mfantsipim dominated the Cambridge Certificate Exams throughout that period, and by the time Lockhart left, it was the most famous secondary school not only in the Gold Coast but in the whole of West Africa.
We also see in the story how Fantes from all over contributed in their small way to help build this campus. It showed how much they valued education and believed in the school.
Lastly, the story shows how indebted the school is to Lockhart. Not only did he move us to Kwabotwe Hill despite all the odds, but he also believed in the dream of Mfantsipim and fought for it every single day.

References:

Bartels, F. L. The Roots of Ghana Methodism. C.U.P. in Association with Methodist Book Depot Ltd, 1965.

Boahen, A. Adu. Mfantsipim and the Making of Ghana: A Centenary History, 1876-1976. Sankofa Educational Publishers, 1996.

Ace Kojo Anan Ankomah, the Litigator

Starting with the likes of John Mensah Sarbah and Henry Van Hein, Mfantsipim School has produced an impressive line of lawyers. Ace Anan Ankomah is a member of this prestigious lineage.

Ace entered Mfantsipim in 1979 and graduated after Sixth Form in 1986. He was the Senior Scholar of that graduating class. He was in Sarbah-Picot House from Form 1 to 5, and in Balmer-Acquaah for the sixth form.

After leaving Mfantsipim, he entered the University of Ghana, where he obtained his Bachelor of Laws (LL.B in 1990, followed by his Qualification Certificate in Law from the Ghana Law School in 1992. He followed that with a Master’s of Laws in International Taxation from Queen’s University, Canada.

He returned home to Ghana after his master’s and in 1995 joined a young law firm founded five years earlier by the lawyers Kojo Bentsi-Enchill and Divine Letsa – Bentsi-Enchill & Letsa. Ace has worked at this law firm till today. In 2000, he became a partner of the group, and in 2004, the firm changed its name to Bentsi-Enchill, Letsa & Ankomah. Six years later, he became the firm’s managing partner, a role he held until 2021, when he transitioned to Senior Partner, a position he still holds.

Ace started at the firm by helping build its now-formidable legal-technology subsidiary, “DataCenta”. Among other things, this entity houses an impressive compendium of legal cases for reference. He soon transitioned to what would become his forte – litigation. He has run the Disputes group at the firm for a long time. He is responsible for preparing and handling trials and arbitrations of contentious cases in Ghana and internationally. In that he has represented clients as varied as Achimota School, International Finance Corporation, Bank of Ghana, Abosso Goldfields, Exim Bank, NML Capital Limited, Vitol, Ecobank, Deloitte & Touche, AngloGold Ashanti, Vodafone, Volta Aluminum Company/Kaiser, Western Telesystems, Deloitte, Fortiz, and Balkan Energy.

One famous case he was involved in had him seize an Argentinian warship in Ghana for military exercises in 2012 on behalf of the hedge fund NML Capital for unpaid Argentine sovereign debt. The case played out before the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the Supreme Court in Ghana. Ultimately, a $2.4 billion settlement was reached.

In 2014, he was part of the legal team that secured a $50 million award for Bankswitch Ghana in a breach-of-contract case.

He was also Instrumental in the Supreme Court of Ghana overturning a $16 million judgment in a land dispute between Vodafone Ghana and Chief Ogyeedom Obranu Kwasi Atta IV of Gomoa Afransie in 2023.

Ace has built a formidable reputation as an expert in dispute resolution, corporate law, taxation, and civil litigation and procedure.

Beyond his work on trials and arbitrations, he taught at the Ghana Law School from 2005 to 2012. In 2015, the University of Ghana instituted the Ace Anan Ankomah Prize in Constitutional Law in his honor.

An ardent advocate of social justice and good governance, he helped found the pressure group “OccupyGhana” in 2014. One significant achievement of the group is seen in the case “OccupyGhana V. Attorney-General (2017)” that went before the Ghana Supreme Court. The justices ruled that it is the Auditor-General’s mandatory duty to issue disallowances and surcharges to recover public funds lost to negligence or illegal expenditure.

His legal expertise and experience as a litigator led him to serve on the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce. Also, besides serving on the board of Lex Mundi (the world’s leading network of independent law firms), he has served and sits on various boards and advisory boards in Ghana. He is a member of the Ghana Bar Association and the ICSID Panel of Arbitrators.

He is also a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN), Africa Leadership Initiative, West Africa (ALIWA), and the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the many awards he has won include being named to Africa’s 20 Arbitration Powerlist in 2022 and elected to the Legal 500 “Hall of Fame” for Dispute Resolution in 2025.

Outside of work, Ace is a prolific writer (law books and non-law books), a speaker, and an accomplished musician, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. He plays the piano, saxophone, and guitar. A member of Joyful Way since his time in Mfantsipim, the group has allowed him to hone his skills. His latest work in music includes co-writing and producing the “Jama song” for Mfantsipim’s 150th anniversary and producing the anniversary anthem.

In all he does, Ace embodies the Mfantsipim can-do spirit. He surmounted challenges like a stutter to become a great speaker and an aversion to math to graduate from Mfantsipim with flying colors. His hard work, patience, perseverance, and faith are qualities that are beaten into the boys on the hill, and he imbued and now epitomizes all of them.

Ace Ankomah is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

Kofi Annan, the Diplomat

Seen in his lifetime as Africa’s foremost diplomat, Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, was born on April 8, 1938, in Kumasi in the then Gold Coast. He attended Mfantsipim School from 1954 to 1957.

In 1958, he started studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology (later KNUST), a degree he completed in 1961 at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, thanks to a Ford Foundation scholarship. He would go on to earn a degree in International Relations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1962, and a Master’s in Management from MIT in Boston, MA, from 1971 to 1972.

His diplomatic career started as a budget officer in the World Health Organization. After stints at various positions in the UN, he was appointed Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping in 1993. In this position, he oversaw peacekeeping efforts in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia in 1995. He became the UN Secretary-General in 1997.

His time at the UN was marked by his work to revitalize and reform the organization to make it more effective. He also advocated for human rights, and the rule of law, the Millennium Development Goals, for Africa, and forged ties with civil society and the private sector. He played a central role in the creation of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, the adoption of the UN’s first-ever counter-terrorism strategy, and the acceptance by Member States of the “responsibility to protect” people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. The “Global Compact” program he launched in 1999 has become the largest worldwide effort to promote corporate social responsibility.

He was quite active as a diplomat, too. He mediated in conflicts between Timor-Leste and Indonesia, Lebanon and Israel, Hizbollah and Israel, and Cameroon and Nigeria.

For having revitalized the UN, given priority to human rights, supporting the fight to stop the spread of HIV in Africa, and his declared opposition to international terrorism, the Nobel Committee decided to split the Nobel Peace Prize between Kofi Annan and the United Nations in 2001.

After retiring from the UN in December 2006, he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation the next year. The foundation was an independent, not-for-profit organization that aimed to “work to promote better global governance and strengthen the capacities of people and countries to achieve a fairer, more secure world”.

Even after retirement, his diplomatic efforts continued either under the umbrella of his foundation, as a member of “the Elders” (a group of independent global leaders who work together on peace and human rights issues), or on behalf of governments or international organizations. He would mediate in conflicts in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Syria, and Myanmar.

He also served on several corporate boards and was active in the affairs of many non-profit organizations, both in Africa and around the world. In Ghana, he served as Chancellor of the University of Ghana, a position he held until his death.

After a short illness, Kofi Annan passed away at the age of 80 on August 18, 2018, in Bern, Switzerland. His body was returned to Ghana for a state funeral on September 13, 2018. He is buried at the new Military Cemetery at Burma Camp in Accra.

Besides the Nobel Peace Prize, he was honored with many other awards during his life and even posthumously, like the “Four Freedoms Awards” in 2004 and the Max Schmidheiny Foundation Freedom Prize” in 2006.

He was also honored with the enstoolment as the “Busumuru” of the Asantes in Ghana by the Asantehene, Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II, in 2002.

The UN released a stamp in his honor in 2019.

Institutions named in his honor include the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Center and the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center of Excellence in ICT, both in Accra, Ghana; the Kofi Annan University of Guinea in Conakry, Guinea; and the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.

Kofi Annan’s impact on the UN and attempts to make the world a peaceful place cannot be denied. His education and upbringing at Mfantsipim not only laid the foundation for the leader he was going to be – he organized a successful strike for better food while at the school – but, like he is reported to have said, the school taught him that “suffering anywhere, concerns people everywhere”. It is no wonder he spent his life trying to alleviate suffering through diplomacy and mediation.

Kofi Annan is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

J. Kweku Bedu-Addo, the International Banker

Kweku is an impact-driven financial services leader with a distinguished career spanning economic policy, development finance, and international banking across Africa (11 markets) and in Asia. He became the first Ghanaian CEO of Standard Chartered Bank Ghana after 115 years of operation.

Kweku Bedu-Addo (MOBA-84) entered Mfantsipim School in 1979. He was in Balmer-Acquaah House. After finishing 6th Form in 1986, where he studied science, he entered the University of Ghana at Legon, resolved by then to switch to the arts. Looking for a good confluence of the business/economics and the sciences, he graduated with a degree in Agricultural Economics.

After graduating in 1990, he joined the wonky Policy Analysis Division of the Ministry of Finance of Ghana as an Assistant Economics Officer, working under Dr. Kwesi Botchway, one of Ghana’s famed Finance ministers. At the Ministry of Finance, he was exposed to public policy at the highest level. He was also exposed to budgetary institutions and policy dialogue with the IMF/The World Bank, and other bilateral and multilateral funding agencies during Ghana’s structural economic reforms in the 1990s.

In 1995, he headed to Columbia University in New York City to pursue a Master’s in Economic Policy Management, followed immediately by a 6-month stint with the Eastern Africa Department of The World Bank in Washington, D.C. In 1997, he returned to the Ministry of Finance in Ghana, where he worked until 1998 before moving to the private sector.

His first job in the private sector was as a Financial Analyst at General Leasing & Finance Company Ltd, where he worked for two years.

Towards the end of 1999, he made a cold call to the corporate head office of Standard Chartered Bank in Accra. The cold call landed him a job as a corporate relationship manager in 2000. Due to his impressive output at the bank, he was promoted rapidly over 4 years, culminating in his first senior leadership appointment as Head of Corporate and Institutional Banking at Standard Chartered Bank’s Zambia subsidiary in 2004. His time there saw a total transformation of the unit. Under his leadership, the department’s financing balance sheet exceeded $500 million for the agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and commodities sectors. His team won the Best Corporate Bank Business in Africa in 2006.

In 2007, he was moved to Wholesale Bank’s head office in Singapore to oversee the implementation of a global technology project. He returned to Ghana in 2009 as a Managing Director and Head of Corporate Banking with regional responsibility for Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia. In that time, he led a unit that managed a portfolio of over $2 billion in business assets across the energy, oil & gas, and public infrastructure sectors, among others. He joined the Standard Group Business Leadership Team (top 300 leaders globally) on this appointment.

In 2010, he was appointed as the CEO of Standard Chartered Ghana, becoming the first Ghanaian to hold that role since the bank was established in the then Gold Coast in 1897. Standard Chartered’s subsidiaries in Sierra Leone and Gambia were later added to his portfolio.

He held this position until 2017, when he moved to South Africa as CEO of Standard Chartered South Africa and the Area General Manager for Southern Africa, comprising Angola, Botswana, Mauritius, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. He managed a balance sheet of $8 billion plus and held this position until 2024.

Deciding to scale back and explore other career interests and opportunities, Kweku left Standard Chartered Bank in 2025 and now has a portfolio career as Chairman and Non-Executive Director of Standard Chartered Bank Mauritius Ltd, as well as a Non-Executive Director on the boards of Standard Chartered Botswana and, the Development Bank, Ghana.
Just recently, his nomination as a member of the newly constituted five-person Fiscal Council of Ghana was announced.

Kweku is a true corporate leader who has led multi-billion-dollar businesses in different jurisdictions. He has advised and financed ventures for corporations, financial institutions, and sovereigns. His insights go beyond Ghana to Africa and the global markets.

His board experience is impressive, with stints on boards in Zambia, Ghana, Botswana, Mauritius, and South Africa. He is a former Chairman of the Ghana Stock Exchange, a founding Vice Chairman of the Ghana Fixed Income Market, and a former Chairman of the International Banks Association in South Africa.

Believing in the importance of social justice, Kweku has previously served on the global and Africa investment committees of Acumen Fund, a New York-based impact financing entity. He is a big believer in the role of media in creating and shaping ideas and started a podcast titled “It’s Morning in Africa” in 2021. It is a platform for him to discuss working toward reimagining a better, brighter future for our continent.

Kweku sees his foundational experience at the Ministry of Finance in Ghana as a catalyst for his meteoric rise in the corporate world. His interest in public policy never waned over the years that he worked in the private sector. He expects to be involved in shaping public policy in one way or another, bringing his experience and network to influence policy and to shape Africa’s economic development.

A very good public speaker, he includes insightful anecdotes from his professional life in his speeches. One of my favorites is how, when he was a few weeks in the Bank in 2000, he walked into the then-CEO’s office for an interview and asked him what it took to become a successful CEO. The CEO at that time, Vishnu Mohan, willingly shared key insights which Kweku wrote down in a notebook. Ten years later, Kweku was named CEO of Standard Chartered, Ghana, and sat at Vishnu’s desk. He still has the notebook and remembers all those lessons.

He also loves astronomy and appreciates the creative arts immensely.

Kweku Bedu-Addo epitomizes the Mfantsipim spirit of knowing what you want and going for it by learning the steps those before you took. He is a true picture of letting your actions do the talking. In that he lives the very motto and spirit of the school – “Dwen Hwɛ Kan.”

J. Kweku Bedu-Addo is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

Nicolas Ossei-Gerning, the Interventional Cardiologist

Nicolas Ossei-Gerning entered Mfantsipim School in 1977. He spent his first few years in Sarbah-Picot House but was in Lockhart-Schweizer when he finished Form 5 in 1982. He thereafter joined his parents and siblings in the UK.

After 6th Form, he went on to study medicine at the University College in London. A residency in Cardiology followed at the Yorkshire Heart Center in Leeds. He then did a fellowship in the burgeoning field of interventional cardiology at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Following the completion of his fellowship, he took a job as a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at the University Hospital of Wales. Soon, he was named Clinical Lead of the Chest Pain Service in Cardiff.

As an interventional cardiologist, he championed new techniques such as the radial approach, rotational atherectomy, and the use of lasers in cardiology interventions, as well as various aspects of Chronic Total Occlusions.

Through conversations with his patients and research, he noted a strong connection between vasculogenic erectile dysfunction and coronary artery disease. He would go on to become a leading authority in the stenting of pudendal vessels as treatment for vasculogenic ED.
He has travelled internationally to give talks on vasculogenic ED. He has also worked on the psychological effects of heart disease and erectile dysfunction.

His work outside the UK includes a practice in Ghana, where, in June of 2016, under the most challenging conditions, he saved the life of a man with 99% occlusion of his left main coronary artery, and chronic total occlusions of his right main, left anterior descending, and circumflex arteries. The recipient of this care would later detail the unbelievable and heroic actions of Nick in a book titled “Heartbeats of Grace”.

Besides being an expert in his field, he is also a great leader. He is a key figure in the Sub-Saharan Africa Myocardial Infarction and Stroke Group, where he leads efforts to improve the management of heart attacks and strokes in the region. He has also been a faculty member for the British and European Cardiac Interventional Societies and the Co-Course Director of the African Percutaneous Revascularisation. He is the former Medical Director of Euracare Advanced Diagnostic & Heart Centre in Accra and was intimately involved in the setting up of one of Ghana’s leading centers for advanced diagnostic and heart care.

Due to his work and contributions, Nick has received numerous awards. He is the Professor of Practice at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the Silas Dodu Chair of Cardiology at the University of Cape Coast School of Medical Sciences. In 2024, he was awarded an OBE in the King’s New Year’s Honours for his services to cardiology and work in Africa.

Nick looks back at his years at Mfantsipim School with great nostalgia and appreciates the qualities of hard work, discipline, teamwork, healthy competition, and organization that those years nurtured.

At the moment, Nick divides his time between his practices in Cardiff, Wales, and Accra, Ghana.

Nicolas Ossei-Gerning is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

Abe Ankumah, the Entrepreneurial Technologist

The ability to marry smarts with entrepreneurship is a strength not many possess. However, Abe Ankumah, a son of Mfantsipim School, belongs to this great cohort.

Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1978, he entered Mfantsipim in 1992. While at the school, he was on the team that represented Mfantsipim at the 1995 Brilliant Science and Maths Quiz, the precursor of the present National Science and Maths Quiz. He would later achieve the second-highest score in the Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (SSSCE) nationwide.

He left Ghana after that to study electrical engineering and computer science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). While studying for his bachelor’s, he interned at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He worked on the team that developed software to annotate satellite images of Earth and other planets. This was before Google Earth was created.

He graduated from Caltech in 2001. His thesis was titled “Designing an Energy Efficient 80C51 Microcontroller.” Microcontrollers are used in various devices and are programmable integrated circuit (ICs) that consist of a small CPU, RAM, and I/O pins.
After graduation, he worked at a semiconductor startup called “Fulcrum Microsystems”. He was one of the founding engineers. Fulcrum would later be acquired by Intel. In 2006, wanting to be not only a great engineer but also a manager and business leader, he enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard.

Instead of taking the consultant route after his MBA, he opted to return to the technology sector. He took a job as chief of staff of the CEO of Aruba Networks. Over that almost 4-year period at Aruba, he also served as the lead on various new business and strategic initiatives for Aruba.

With a growing reputation as a great manager and technologist, he was soon poached by a cloud-managed networking startup, Meraki, in 2012. Soon, Meraki was acquired by Cisco.

Around this time period, he had been thinking of starting his own company in the enterprise networking space. In late 2013, together with two brilliant engineers , Anand Srinivas and Daniel Kan, “Nyansa” was founded. He was not only one of the founding members but also became the CEO. “Nyansa” means “wisdom” in the Akan language of Ghana, and the company sought to be the brainchild of enterprise networking. The name also played on the wisdom of striking out on his own.

In the six-and-a-half years Nyansa existed, Abe and his team raised over $27 million from venture capital firms, including 8VC (formerly Formation 8) and Intel Capital. Their clients included behemoths like Tesla, Home Depot, Mayo Clinic, and GE. In late 2019, the company VMware reached out to the Nyansa team to collaborate on projects. However, the more the folks at VMware studied the company, the more they liked what they saw. In February 2020, VMware acquired Nyansa.

Abe went on to VMware with the acquisition to help with integration. Interestingly, VMware was acquired by Broadcom in 2023. He stayed on with VMware and then Broadcom till 2024, when he took a sabbatical to unwind and think about the future.
He is a member of the board of directors of Ashesi University in Ghana and served as an angel investor and advisor to various startups in the US and Ghana.

In March 2025, he returned to the industry as Chief Product Officer at 1Password, a company in the Identity Security and Access Management space.

Abe is not only a brilliant and great technologist – he is listed on several patents in the network and analytics space – but a seasoned entrepreneur too. His ability to navigate the world of venture capital firms to build a multi-million-dollar company in Silicon Valley is a testament to that. He attributed those latter skills to parents who opened the first travel agency in Ghana back in the 1970s. He is also driven to be the best at whatever he does and to constantly push and rediscover himself, qualities that are preached on the Kwabotwe Hill. At 47, the sky is the limit for him.

Abe Ankumah is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy

Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, the Leader

Some are born to lead, and Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe is one of them. Kodwo entered Mfantsipim in 1975 and graduated in 1982. Even then, his character, demeanor, smarts, and ability to relate to everyone made him stand out. It was no wonder he was named the 55th Headboy in 1981 when he was in 6th Form. Most of us who were in the school in those years remember him as one of the best Headboys of that era.

After Mfantsipim, he earned a BA in Economics and Finance from McGill University in Canada. Initially aiming to attend business school, the challenges many immigrant students face led him to reconsider his plans. The chance to study law at Duke University came up, and he seized it. In 1988, he graduated with a JD in Law from Duke.

For the next 10+ years, he worked in private practice, handling regulatory and commercial litigation. In 2002, he joined Duke Energy as a part of the legal department.
For those who don’t know, Duke Energy is one of the largest energy holding companies in the US. It supplies electricity to 8.6 million customers in the Southeast and Midwest and natural gas to 5 states. Its market cap is $96 billion.

Over the years, Kodwo will rise to become the Chief Legal Counsel, thus serving as the primary legal advisor to Duke Energy’s board of directors and senior management. Soon, his responsibilities went beyond the legal realm when he was asked in 2017 to run Duke Energy’s utility operations in South Carolina. After his stint in South Carolina, he was pulled back to Charlotte, NC, in 2019 to become the Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, and Corporate Secretary.
Then, this past July, he was named Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of Duke Energy Carolinas and Head of the Natural Gas Business Unit.

Besides his work with Duke Energy, he sits on various boards, including the board of directors of Energy Insurance Mutual, Ltd., the board of visitors of Duke University Law School, and the President’s Advisory Board of Clemson University. Savoy Magazine named him one of the Most Influential Executives in Corporate America in 2024.

Talking to Kodwo, I was struck by his calm yet confident demeanor—a presence he carried even back then in school. He remarked how each stage in his life seemed to prepare him for the next. He reminisced about his time as Headboy at Mfantsipim and the leadership lessons he learnt from it. He mentioned how degrees in Economics and Finance really inform his work running a Utilities company.
He shared lessons he had learnt in leadership, including putting a premium on actionable advice and treating people well. Like he stated once in an interview, one of his favorite quotes is from Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, an epitome of excellence, is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

Daniel “Archie” Afedzi Akyeampong, the Mathematical Physicist

Of all the sons of Kwabotwe I have written about so far, the significant contributions of the late Prof Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong to the field of Mathematics are achievements my puny brain cannot grasp.

A Google search lists them as follows:

– Applications of higher symmetry groups (1966; his doctoral thesis),
– SU(3) transformations (1972),
– Charged vector meson theory (1965), and
– Tensor harmonics (1979).

Born in 1938 in Senya Beraku in the then Gold Coast, he entered Mfantsipim in 1954 and was in Balmer-Acquaah House. Even then, his intellect dazzled.
After Botwe, he went to Legon, graduating in 1963 with a BSc in Mathematics.

He left for the UK in 1963 to do his PhD in Mathematics. Before he started on his doctoral work, he had to get a foundational diploma in mathematical Physics at Imperial College. He brilliance must have been very noticeable because after completing the coursework in Group Theory in 1964, the professor who taught the course called him to his office and made him an offer.
This professor was Abdus Salaam, a Pakistani theoretical physicist who would go on to win the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the electroweak unification theory.
Back in 1964, Prof Salaam was starting a new international center for theoretical physics in Trieste, Italy. He invited the young Daniel Akyeampong to join him as one of the first five fellows of the Institute that is now known as “the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)”.
Those years in Italy saw him publishing high-quality papers like “The scalar behavior of charged vector meson theory at high energy (1965)”, and “The quark model and elastic baryon-baryon scattering (1967)”.
In 1966, he got his PhD in Mathematical Physics from the University of London. His thesis was titled “Applications of higher symmetry groups to particle physics”. He also got a Diploma in Mathematical Physics from Imperial College.

Now, the aim of Salaam in establishing the ICTP was to foster the growth of the physical and mathematical sciences in developing countries. In that, Daniel Akyeampong was a firm believer. In 1966, he returned to Ghana as one of the first two Ghanaians to obtain a PhD in Mathematics (the other being Francis Allotey).

Back at home, he became a pioneer of Ghanaian Mathematics. Moreover, he turned out to be a great academic leader. He became a full professor of Mathematics at the age of 44. He would also serve multiple terms as the Head of the Department of Mathematics and as the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana.

He not only championed mathematics in Ghana but also on the African continent. He served as an assistant editor of the journal, “Afrika Matematica”. He was on the editorial board of a journal of the African Academy of Sciences, “Discovery and Innovation”.
He also lectured at the ICTP in Italy and was a member of the World Academy of Sciences.

The onus of his work was probably expressed best in the J.B. Danquah Memorial Lecture he gave in 1993. Titled “The Two Cultures Revisited: Interactions of Science and Culture”. Building on the lecture given by the British novelist and scientist C.P. Snow in 1959, Prof Akyeampong “advocated for integrating African indigenous knowledge and cultural values into scientific processes to bridge the historical divide between science and culture.”

Prof Akyeampong passed on March 7, 2015, following complications after surgery for a femur fracture, leaving behind a legacy of pioneering in Mathematics in Ghana and academic leadership.

Professor Daniel Afedzi Akyeampong was an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.

Moses Baiden Jr, the Visionary Entepreneur

He grew up watching his entrepreneur father create one successful business after another. He witnessed firsthand the work it took to create value and learned the laws of money. Above all, his father did not allow him to develop that feeling of entitlement that kills the hunger to dream and achieve.

Another contribution to his growth as a future entrepreneur was his athleticism. It has been proven that athletes develop qualities like resilience and perseverance, a strong work ethic, focus, teamwork, and collaboration, among many others.
In secondary school, besides his academic work, Moses explored his athletic abilities. By age 17, he was the Ghana National Martial Arts champion. (His fight with a group of men who attacked him one evening while outside the school’s campus is still the stuff of legend). He also did track and field and was the goalkeeper for the soccer team.

A further attribute of people who create is a thirst for knowledge. However, it is not just any knowledge. In all they read, hear and observe, be it by reading “Othello” or listening to a powerful speech, they pick lessons that feed into their purpose, passions and values. Listen to Moses speak, and one picks up on this thrist for knowledge,

And so, though he would go on to study law, it was only a matter of time before that spirit of entrepreneurship would take hold and dominate. He started his first business while working as a teaching assistant at the Ghana Law School at age 23. A love for computers drew him to technology. Due to entry costs, he decided to concentrate on consumables. With a loan of $100 and a team of classmates, he founded a lamination, binding, and consumables supply business in 1990 and named it Margins Supplies Company Limited.
Why Margins? Because in life and business, isn’t it all about the margins?
By 1995, Margins had over 2000 clients and made about $1000 per client per year.

However, that success did not dim his hunger. Driven by purpose, passion, and a desire to acquire knowledge that solves Ghanaian and African problems, he looked into the future of digitalization and saw the importance of identity on the horizon. He decided to learn all he could about bringing Margins into the business of identity. Margins ID systems was born. Undaunted by the lack of financial support in Ghana, he looked abroad and found backers in Denmark, and as they say, the rest is history.

Today, Moses Baiden Jr.’s dream is a multi-million dollar conglomeration of companies called “The Margins Group” with a presence in seven countries.
It is made up of five subsidiaries in two groups: the Margins ID Group and the Margins Supply Group. He won the bid to design and manufacture the Ghana ID card called the “Ghana Card.”
He has built the first and largest full-service certified card and secure document manufacturing facility in sub-Saharan Africa. The facility, Intelligent Card Production Systems (ICPS), is one of the subs of the Margins ID group.
He loves to say that he did it all in Ghana by finding solutions to Ghanaian problems.

He has received myriad awards. He has won “CEO of the Year” several times, Entrepreneur of the Year, and Man of the Year.
He also gives back through groups like the Margins Youth Empowerment Initiative or by constructing a lecture hall for the Law School.

Of all the honors he has received, I would wager $100 that the one he most appreciates is being named “Ebusapayin” (President) of the Mfantsipim Old Boys Association (MOBA) in 2023—the youngest Ebusuapayin to date.

You see, Moses Kwesi Baiden Junior is an illustrious son of Mfantsipim, a Botwe boy.