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Ghanaian business mogul, Sir Sam Jonah, has narrated an experience he once had in a mine at Obuasi that shook him so much, that he momentarily passed out.

According to him, during one Easter season, he led a team beneath one of the mines in an attempt to locate a man who had illegally gone in there during the break.

Speaking to GTV Breakfast Show and monitored by GhanaWeb, Sam Jonah, who is the current Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, said that looking back on the incident today, makes him laugh at the same time makes him sad.

“One incident comes to mind, and if it wasn’t serious, it would be funny. One Easter, our local security picked up intelligence that… Obuasi was such a rich area that whenever the gold… so people would take chances, go underground illegally and try and mine and of course, we had good security. So, one fateful Easter morning, I was yanked from my sleep that the security had picked up local intelligence that some people had gone underground in the evening, and one of them had not been accounted for.

“So, because he had not been accounted for, and it was illegal, therefore, nobody knew they had gone underground, but of course talk in the village got to the security that one guy had not been accounted for – nobody owned up but they went. So, we went asking which level, or which floor in the building… he probably would have gone to and which area because they knew there were areas that were very very rich,” he said.

He added that being the captain at the Obuasi mine at the time, he had to lead the delegation and what they found shook him in a really unusual way.

“And so, I was the mine captain in charge of the area so they said I had to go with the team to go and look for him. So, we looked everywhere and then we looked at one particular area and when we went there, strange but… there’s a hole which is about 100 feet in depth… and so we noticed that some (sic) is coming from the hole, which is about 80 feet or so down and then there was a (sic).

“So, we had to go down and I had to lead by example… I had never had such an experience before. I’d never experienced such a stench: the smell of what the skin or flesh smelt like. The guy had been there since Friday. He was surviving on trickles of water coming down as dirty water. He was looking in good shape but he had not eaten since Friday, he had not had proper water, he had not had his wash, and the smell was just overpowering. And, I have to confess, for a moment, I passed out – id’ never smelt such rotten stench before,” he said.

Sir Sam Jonah also explained that while it was a great relief to find the young man alive, it turned out his supposed missing tale was rather a cooked-up plan by some of his friends as a payback to him for previously cheating them.

“The good thing is that… all he was saying was ‘Dzato aden?’ ‘Dzato why?’ We brought him up and it was Dzato who gave us the lead and so we went to the place and all of that and arrested the Dzato guy. It turned out they said he had cheated on them on previous occasions, so they actually pinned him down and they left him there for dead and came back and dropped the hint, thinking that he was dead. Mercifully, it ended well in the sense that he did not die,” he said.

Sir Sam Jonah is the executive chairman of Jonah Capital, an equity fund based in Johannesburg, and is considered one of Ghana's richest men.