“It was so painful, I wanted to cry.”
These are the words that summed up the worst day for Adetunji Omotola of African Wine Circle.
It was a day that began so innocuously. Omotola was merely moving his business and consignment of wines and glasses from Ghana to Nigeria, while he flew to South Africa on business. But, when he landed in Johannesburg, he received a phone call which ushered in the nightmare.
Wine was a new business, by chance, for lawyer Omotola. He was working in the insurance industry. As a Nigerian, working in South Africa, it was quite tough to earn the trust of clients. He began to host wine dinners to help win over customers. So, when this deep voiced, imposing man decided to quit the insurance industry, wine was the next best step.
Omotola moved to Ghana in June 2008 to pursue his wine dining business, selling South African wine. He saw the perfect business opportunity in festive Ghana as they celebrated their 50 years of independence as well as hosting the Africa Cup of Nations.
Without doing much research, he packed his bags to start Veine Wines Ghana. He set up shop, signing a one-year lease for $14,000 in East Legon, a suburb in Accra. His first case of 1,200 South African wines arrived in Ghana… Omotola held his first wine tasting evening on a Saturday night, in September 2008. In Accra, Saturday is a sacred day.
“I didn’t know the Ghanaians buried their dead on a Saturday. So I almost had a blow-out. I just wasn’t bothered about the culture, I just wanted to go in there and sell the wine. And do my things the way I did it in South Africa. South Africa is very cosmopolitan. So this all leads to excitement, people come to this first tasting. So I was coasting along, I was doing my business,” says Omotola.
He soon realized that the area he was staying in was expensive, making his business expensive. Ghanaians don’t spend much and are modest, compared to Nigerians which he says are showy and love to flaunt their wealth.
“It was quite expensive because there were mass products at the time like Distell’s Two Oceans, Nederburg, and Drostdy Hof wines. I was in that market, where there was this cheap wine that was under $10 a bottle and I needed to break out of that market and I needed to break into Nigeria.”
“I was moving to Nigeria, with the idea that people were going to be buying things for three times the price. Nigerians are very generous. At the time 5,000 naira was about $30 and they didn’t mind paying that for a bottle and buying a case of 12 for around $400. So the wine that I would buy in South Africa for maybe about $100, I could sell for $400 in Nigeria. I was very excited. That took me to Nigeria,” he says.
This led to the sad story.
Omotola started looking at Nigeria as his lease in Ghana was running out.
“I started doing wine events in Nigeria, the big next door neighbor, the richest country in that region. It was a natural move. I’m Nigerian, I have ties there, so I started to move there,” he says.
He began by selling the wine cellar to another entrepreneur in Nigeria for $6,000. It was in Ghana and had to be freighted to Nigeria. It was a good deal, he was selling it for around three times the price he had bought it for in South Africa. Omotola had struggled to sell the cellar in Ghana; Nigeria was the only option.
Omotola had to freight what was left in Ghana: a mountain of wine glasses and wine. These were given to an agent who would see to it that the goods arrived in Nigeria. While that was happening, he decided to go to South Africa on business.
On landing, he took an unexpected call from Nigeria.
“Would you believe that they broke the wines and the bottles? I had paid $400 for freight in Ghana and 54,000 naira ($330) for duty in Nigeria. They damaged the crystal glasses. They broke 27 bottles of wines out of 72. The rest stained the cartons. All the cartons were wet and you couldn’t put the wines in them. They delivered fewer glasses and less wine… I was in South Africa. The wines had been forklifted, which rammed into them, when they delivered them in Lagos.”
“How do I solve the problem, being remote? So, it was a nightmare for me and I felt that I was helpless. And there was a breach of trust because the agent in Nigeria who had helped me to bring in the cellars successfully, for a person who recommended or referred him to me the first time, was now an agent who disappeared even before the consignment had arrived,” Omotola says.
This agent had gone to Spain and wasn’t answering his phone.
It was very painful, Omotola says. He felt that he had wasted money on paying duties, freight and losing some of his stock. Worst of all, he has yet to get reparation.
“We didn’t get any respite. We didn’t get any response. We didn’t get any compensation. The advice that we’ve given ourselves is that anything that is not containerized in Africa, you’re on your own. Because they can damage it and nothing will happen.”
“The lawyer that I had instructed was adamant that he will not write a letter until the New Year. So we lost an opportunity to reclaim about R50,000 ($4,600) in terms of the costs, phone calls, time, the loss of stock etc,” Omotola says.
“Everything was severely damaged. And just because of this I’ve been very scared to send anything unaccompanied to anywhere via freight.”
It was psychological damage more than anything, Omotola adds. He says he still begrudges all those companies involved; the law firms and the agent, whom he says he still calls today to remind him that he is still alive and that one day justice will be done.
“This is a Nigerian who did that to me. You can imagine if they do it to a foreigner. That foreigner may never come back, but because I’m a Nigerian, I’m laughing about it.”
Nonetheless, Omotola set up shop in Nigeria with what was left from this accident. Although, he says it wasn’t easy. He changed his business name to First African Wine Circle. He says the biggest challenge was the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), which he says is where everything must be registered but it takes a year to get approval, whereas registering with Ghana’s food and drug board was easier. This was one of the reasons Omotola started his business in Ghana rather than Nigeria.
“Most of the big companies in Ghana are owned by Nigerians. So if I had paid three years rent, which is generally what people pay in those parts, I would have still been in Ghana. I would have been very successful. Now, Ghana has discovered oil since my exit and their GDP grew by 14%, that feel-good factor would have benefited my business,” he says.
In Nigeria he made a few changes to the way he ran his business. Instead of importing South African wine, he would buy wine in Lagos to avoid a repeat of the accident.
“That’s been working for me very well. That was the reverse way of dealing with it,” he says.
In 2010, leading up to the first football World Cup on the African continent, Omotola saw another opportunity. He could ride on the World Cup fever in South Africa, while hosting wine dinners and tasting events. In South Africa, he called the business African Wine Circle.
This month, Omotola’s business should be going into Tanzania. By the end of the year, he wants to see African Wine Circle in Uganda and Mozambique. But, he is still wary of shipping so much as a glass.