How a deportee became a leather micro-entrepreneur
Michael was born in the precincts of the famous Asantehene Palace in Manhyia. His father, a bus driver, failed to make a world class footballer of his son due to a recurrent knee injury.
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His parents worked hard to provide him with a city standard pre-high school education and a senior high that would have earned him decent wages and fashioned out a gentleman of him.
Michael Ahinkan Antwi was sent to Kotoko Academy, a football team in the Ashanti Region, and later graduated to Kotoko Babies.
At Kotoko Babies, he occupied the full back right position until his knee injury threatened and finally truncated his then promising football career.
When that window shut after Senior High School, Michael’s mother assisted him with some capital. Thanks to his mother’s support, he was able to sell second-hand shoes and sandals at Elubo and later found clients in neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire.
It was in Cote d’Ivoire that he met a man who introduced him to a cross-country human trafficking agent.
This agent owned a locally refortified cross-country Toyota Hilux, which was his main tool for the export of young people across the vast Sahara Desert to Libya.
First adventure
As fate would decree for Michael, he melted his stocks of shoes and sandals and other valuables into liquid capital. A portion of this was used to pay the agent as transport fares and other clandestine immigration obligations. The rest were kept and intended to be used for the rest of the journey from Tripoli to Spain.
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Unfortunately, however, by the time they arrived in Libya in April 2012, Michael had no dollar on him! The entire money was stolen from him by the desert highway bandits.
Michael secured employment as soon as he arrived. As a manual labourerer for a construction firm whose activities were mainly outdoors, the weather and climate and the absence of time to adjust to the new environment all connived to produce a breed of Michael incapable of coping with his new world.
Worthy training
Michael left the construction firm when he had wind that a leather company, then managed by Chinese nationals, was hiring.
He was hired and placed in the factory floor to do some menial jobs. After six months, when the Chinese left, following worsening post-Gaddafi crises, he was upgraded and sent to the cutting room.
Here, Michael joined scores of others who cut little pieces of leather for knapsacks, travelling bags and ladies handbags.
From this workstation, he worked his way to one of the plants that sewed most part of the bags. For one and half years, he was among the hands that tended the equipment.
Just when Michael’s wages began to rise, Libya was becoming increasingly uninhabitable almost by the day and the time to continue to the destination country seemed to have arrived. This was in March 2014 and the destination was Italy.
An impossible adventure
Michael paid his boat fares and braced himself up for the terribly frightening and quite impossible journey on the salty, glittering waters stretching between North Africa and Europe.
With women and children as young as eight months olds on board, the most terrifying journey in Michael’s life began.
Luckily, however, there were no casualties and in no time, all the content of the boat, except its two pilots, were refugees in Lampedusa, the largest Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea.
Three months later – on June 2, 2014 - when Alitalia Airplane touched ground at the Kotoko International Airport, Michael and seven other Ghanaians were deportee cargos on that flight.
Shamed by his new penniless returnee status, the now bags maker settled in Toase in the Ashanti Region away from his parents.
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He converted the metallic container he had built for his girlfriend, prior to leaving for Libya in 2012, for the sale of provisions into a little factory.
First start
Michael resolved to set up a little enterprise; he wanted to make bags. To understand the market, he first set out to scan the local markets all the way to the Kumasi Metropolis.
By the time he finished segmenting the markets and discovering the niche that he believed would be profitable, Michael knew he had a business.
Challenges with finance
The capital headache reared its ugly head after he had taken the pain to write down all the tools and raw materials he needed in order to kick start his venture.
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The capital his girlfriend handed him was way, way below what was on the piece of paper he had.
Michael had to trim his list, pruning out what he could improvise and those he could manage to do without.
The list shrank but the capital outlay still fell short of what was ideal.
In the end, GH¢2,300 had to deliver the miracle. And this seed amount was over GH¢2,200 below what had been revised, and revised, again and gain.
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Michael purchased a Singer sewing machine, a set of large industrial scissors, commissioned a carpenter to make a large table and three chairs and procured other materials he needed. There was no more resources to afford power, leather, zips and industrial threads, among others.
Testing the market
Notwithstanding these constraints, Michael managed to make 10 knapsacks to test the market. The test proved successful.
By the time a month could go full cycle, a bag dealer in Kumasi (Ever Thing Bag) had sought Michael, the bag entrepreneur, and offered a game changer deal.
Since then, Michael has been manufacturing knapsacks of regular sizes, specifically suited for high schools, hand bags for ladies and medium capacity travelling valise since.
The orders he receive regularly are rising steadily. And in order to be able to stay ahead of these steadily mounting orders, he has had to increase the hands he employs.
Sturdy employment opportunities
Michael’s business goes by the name PaaPason Creations. At the time of this interview, two employees were charged with making dummy copies of standard patterns. One applies glue. Two others stick some hard plastic cardboard to the near finished bags.
One helps with the zips and locks while the new entrepreneur himself sits behind the Singer machine all day, pressing and releasing the little motor that propels the instrument and thinking about innovative ways of staying ahead of the competition.