Following the 1979 coup that saw the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) seize power, one man who had spent nearly three decades building a life of fortune lost everything within one year.
Joshua Kwabena Siaw, the man who had built West Africa’s largest wholly African-owned brewery, Tata Brewery, from a £50 loan, was left with nothing as soldiers seized everything he had.
Who was J.K. Siaw?
Joshua Kwabena Siaw was born in January 1923 at Obomeng in the Kwahu Mountains of the Eastern Region, though his family roots trace to Juaben in the Ashanti Region.
Growing up in a poor home, he worked on cocoa farms and wove baskets to fund his own education. He was already 12 years old when he first stepped into a classroom.
By 1942, Siaw had become a teacher, a profession he pursued for several years across government and mission schools. His devotion to education eventually led him to found Christ College in Ashanti, an institution that would later evolve into the Ghana Secondary School in Effiduase.
But Siaw’s dream stretched far beyond the classroom. Drawing on childhood memories of helping his father on the cocoa farm, he borrowed £50 (Ghana’s pre-independence currency was still the British pound) and set himself up as a cocoa broker.
Within four months, he had turned that loan into £600 in profit. The venture launched a business career that would take him from siding clerk hauling cocoa from Kwahu Praso to Accra, to work with the state-owned Cocoa Purchasing Company, and eventually into cocoa and timber trading and the importation of enamelware.
His biggest break came in the late 1960s, when he stood his ground and refused to take on German investors as junior partners in a proposed brewery venture, despite being pressed by Ghana’s military government at the time, the National Liberation Council.
Siaw insisted on full Ghanaian ownership and persisted until his operational license was finally approved on July 26, 1969, the same year he founded the Tata Trading Company.
His persistence paid off, and on January 30, 1973, Siaw’s 50th birthday, Tata Brewery Limited was formally inaugurated, becoming the largest wholly African-owned brewery in West Africa.
The Head of State at the time, Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, attended the ceremony and publicly threw his support behind the venture.
Photographs from the era, including one showing Siaw in conversation with the 15th Asantehene, Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, capture the height he had achieved as one of Ghana’s leading industrialists and philanthropists.
Tata Brewery secured the rights to be the exclusive exporters of the Maltex drink to several African countries and was the first brewery to introduce draught beer into Ghana.
Three years after the official commissioning, Tata was employing 750 Ghanaians and 4 expatriates. They produced the Tata Pilsner Beer.
In 1977, Siaw founded The Modern Continental Bank with Kwadwo Ohene-Ampofo, a lawyer.
There was a clinic, a canteen serving subsidised meals and free buses to work.
Siaw was planning to put up housing for the workers close to the site before he lost everything.Â
Free vaccinations were administered to workers and their families. He presented the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital with an electrocardiograph and contributed to the building of a hospital in Akwaseho in 1975.
The Fall
In the chaos that followed the AFRC takeover in 1979, J.K. Siaw’s assets were confiscated by the military regime under allegations of tax evasion. He, however, denied these allegations, as documented in B. Agyeman-Duah’s biography of Acheampong.
After losing everything he had worked so hard for, Siaw went into exile in London, where he died in October 1986.
Tata Brewery, however, survived him under new ownership, passing through the Achimota Brewery Company before becoming today’s Guinness Ghana Breweries.
