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Rawlings chose Jonah in 1982 as deputy managing director of Ashanti, then owned 55% by the government and 45% by London's Lonrho Corp. "I didn't know him," says Jonah. "He just reached out for the highest-ranking Ghanaian." In 1986 Jonah rose to the top job, becoming, according to him, the only black African ceo of a multinational company. "The obstacle to there being more like me on this continent relates to one thing," says Jonah. "Ownership. If Rawlings had not taken a personal interest in the mining sector, the level of prejudice would have kept me underground forever. I still tell my Ghanaians," he adds, "'Don't accept no!'"
Under Jonah, Ghana has learned the art, rare in Africa, of managing its natural resources effectively. Ashanti has led the country's gold production to record highs. Floating public shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994, the government sold off 30% of its interest. Then Jonah went shopping, acquiring mining interests and prospecting rights in 15 other African states. Instead of confirming that any multinational company involving foreign owners will only exploit African labor and steal Africa's natural resources for the benefit of shareholders overseas, Rawlings and Jonah have turned Ashanti into a model for made-in-Africa industrialization.
Modernization is also the byword of Nat Nii Amar Nuno-Amarteifio, the mayor of Accra, a sprawling port city that in 20 years will be home to 50% of Ghana's population. Rawlings has just launched an ambitious plan known as Vision 2020, aimed at making Ghana a middle-income country by then. Part of that is spinning off responsibility for local governance to district assemblies, shifting the jobs of housing, feeding, educating and picking up the garbage of Ghana's population to trained technocrats like Nuno-Amarteifio. Local government was career exile before decentralization; now, says the mayor with gusto, "it is where reality catches up with even the best politicians. If we don't make things work here, then we become Liberia."
Nii Quaynor saw what modernization can do when he went to study computer science in the U.S. But when he returned home in 1969 to spread the technology gospel, "I was too advanced. Computer science was too new." Twenty-four years later, Quaynor finally hooked his country into the Web. In 1993 his company brought the Internet to West Africa, and in 1995 Ghana became the second sub-Saharan nation to have full connectivity. "We're sharing the same information as everyone else in the world," says Quaynor. His most prized client: President Rawlings, an avid Web surfer. Soon, Quaynor hopes, wireless technology will let the phone-short country leap straight into airborne access