Sam Jonah engineered Africa's $1.48 billion gold merger then rejected the billionaire label
Billionaires Africa | 29.06.2026 21:00
The price of gold used to arrive at the Obuasi mine on a small chalkboard, carried from shaft to shaft so the men breaking rock a mile underground could read the number that ruled their lives. They prayed for it to climb. In the last week of September 1999, that prayer was answered with a violence nobody at Ashanti Goldfields had bargained for. Fifteen European central banks announced they would stop dumping gold onto the market, the price leapt, and the rally that should have enriched a gold miner instead opened a hole beneath the most celebrated company in Ghana.
