In 2024, I was in Kumasi for a project.
After a training session, I needed to get back to Accra to finish some business.
Since I schooled in Kumasi, I know my way around, so I headed to one of the popular bus terminals to get a car.
That day, I met a new manager.
A young man, freshly given the terminal to run.
And from the moment I stepped in, I could see something was off.
He was commanding people up and down, speaking rudely and harshly to elderly passengers and drivers alike, moving here and there as if the whole terminal existed to prove he was in charge. People were watching him.
Observing. The drivers were visibly uncomfortable and even the passengers already seated in the vehicles were unhappy, because you don’t provoke a driver before he moves his car.
We waited almost two hours to get a vehicle, because it was peak season and everyone was trying to move towards Accra.
While we waited, the conversation on the bus drifted, as it does, to the young manager.
Someone said maybe he was trying to be a fair man, trying to set standards.
But it became clear that wasn’t it.
He wasn’t being fair. He was being rude. He wasn’t managing properly.
And then someone mentioned who he was: the owner’s nephew, handed the terminal to manage after finishing his tertiary education.
Missing link
Now, on the surface, that’s not a bad decision.
Give the young one an opportunity.
Let him learn the business, grow into responsibility.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
But here’s what happened in practice: no proper training, no proper handover, no mentorship and systems.
Just, “you’ve finished school, go and manage.”
And a business that the owner had clearly built with some level of order and reputation was now being run by someone who didn’t understand how to treat people, how to lead, how to represent what the founder had spent years building.
This is not a small story about one bus terminal in Kumasi.
This is the story of countless businesses across Ghana, across Africa.
A father builds something for 20, 30 years.
He grows a name, a reputation, a system of trust with customers and workers.
Then age catches up with him or he simply wants to step back and he hands it over to a relative.
A son. A nephew. A niece.
Someone he trusts by blood, not necessarily someone he has prepared by design.
And that is where I want to draw a line that I think every business owner reading this needs to sit with: inheritance is not succession.
Inheritance gone wrong
Inheritance is what happens when you pass something down because of relationship.
Succession is what happens when you deliberately prepare someone or a system to carry a business forward.
One is about who you are to the owner.
The other is about what you are equipped to do for the business.
They can happen together; a relative can absolutely be the right successor, but they are not the same thing, and treating them as such is how businesses that took decades to build collapse within a few years of the founder stepping away.
Think about the young manager in Kumasi. He inherited a position.
He did not inherit the wisdom, the temperament, the systems or the standards that had made that terminal work before him.
Nobody sat him down and said, this is how we treat our elders here; this is how we handle a driver who is under pressure; this is how we keep passengers coming back instead of avoiding this terminal for another one down the road.
He was given authority without being given understanding.
And authority without understanding is a dangerous thing to hand to anybody, family or not.
I think of the owner in that story and I don’t believe he set out to sabotage his own business.
I think, like many of us, he assumed that completing school was preparation enough.
He assumed that trust was transferable, that because he trusted this young man as family, the market would trust him too.
But the market doesn’t extend goodwill because of bloodline.
Customers, drivers, passengers- they respond to how they are treated, not to who your uncle is.
The point is, we must be intentional about trying to grow African businesses that last beyond the first and second generations, into institutions that outlive the people who founded them.
And that will not happen by accident.
It will happen because founders decided, deliberately, to stop confusing inheritance with succession and to start building the structures that make continuity possible.
So, I leave you with this to think through.
Look honestly at your business, at where it stands today and at where you are in your journey as a founder.
What structures do you need to put in place now, so that whoever takes over after you, family or not, inherits a business that is ready to be led, not just a title to hold?
The best is yours.
