The man known commonly as McDan today may well be one of the easiest people to envy today because of the heights of success he has reached. They may all not be entirely negative envy, but what he has achieved in life is something many people may also desire to reach.

But like most great stories of success, Daniel McKorley was also at, perhaps, some of the lowest points in his life once.

And that lowest involved days of strategically eating because of he didn’t, he would be left to battle with hunger for a long time.

He describes how this was and the strategic inclusions he made with ‘gari’ in nearly anything he ate at the time.

In his book, ‘The Path of An Eagle; Despair, Hope and Glory,’ under Chapter IV ‘When Hunger Gnawed,’ McDaniel wrote that in order to somewhat balance his hunger and attainment of food satisfaction, he made it a trade to constantly eat food to required him to drink a lot of water.

“On some lucky days when I had little money on me, I ate strategically, choosing only foods that would constantly force me to drink more water. In most cases, gari (a dry gritty kind of food prepared from cassava) did the trick.

“Due to its ability to induce the consumption of large amounts of water, I made sure it was a substantial part of every meal I took - gari and beans, gari and rice, gari and waakye, soaked gari and groundnuts; these were but a few of the gari meals that I ate regularly.

“Consumption of any of these was followed by many moments of severe thirst. The intake of large volumes of water helped keep a good check on hunger and it usually took a long time for me to go hungry again,” he wrote.

The situation at home with his mother was no different and as a mother who ensured that she did whatever was needed to make her children comfortable, Daniel McKorley recalled some of the smart ways that she employed to see that they never went hungry

“For support at home, my mother always knew just how to work magic. I can still remember some of the domestic economics that she was forced to practice on daily basis. There was never enough for us, but she always made sure we never slept on empty stomachs. Initially, the strategy was to serve us in a big earthen bowl so that all of us would eat together from it, but this almost always resulted in our scrambling for the food.

“It was a clear case of survival of the fittest and the stronger ones among us always got more of the food. The entire household depended on the food crops that my mother grew on the farm. That was our source of food most of the time. On the days that we wanted to have a change of diet, my mother had to sell what she brought from the farm in order for us to buy what we wanted to eat,” he also wrote.

Today, Daniel McKorley (McDan) is one of the widely-known richest people in Ghana.

Meanwhile, catch up on GhanaWeb's interview with Dr. Nana Ato Arthur, Head of the Local Government Service, as he explains the procedures involved in undertaking projects that are originally government projects. He spoke with Etsey Atisu on The Lowdown:





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