“The Kumasi City Mall has an enviable status of not just being the only mall outside of Accra, but was also arguably the biggest mall in Ghana and the biggest in West Africa,” the President , Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has observed.
“It should therefore not come as a surprise to residents of Kumasi, that your compatriots in Accra resorted to poking fun at you and trolled you on Facebook and social media when this mall opened for business last month,” the President said.
He added: “The reason is simple, you have stolen their thunder. They no longer have the bragging rights of having the biggest mall in West Africa. As from this very moment, it is no longer “Y?n nso y? w? bi”, [Kumasi also has a mall] as I have heard some say here, but “K?si no w? Kumasi”. KCM, you do all!! [The biggest mall in Ghana is in Kumasi]
President Akufo-Addo made these remarks on Wednesday, when he officially inaugurated the US$95million Kumasi City Mall with support from the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II.
According to the managers of the mall, the mocking of residents of Kumasi online following the opening of the facility in Kumasi – the first in the Ashanti Region – has turned out to be a blessing with the mall recording 75,000 visitors on May Day, up from the 67,000 it registered when it was first opened to the public in April.
This, the managers view as unprecedented given similar facilities in Accra have never recorded such numbers in a day.
The one-stop destination shopping mall, is the first to be opened in the Ashanti region and it covers all kind of shopping items and entertainment.
It is located at Asokwa, on the confluence of Lake Road, Yaa Asantewa Road and Hudson Street and sits on a total land area of 15.4 acres with a space of 18,500 square metres and potential for further expansion of up to 10,000 square metres.
It is the third straight development by Delico Property Investments Limited, coming after West Hills Mall (2014) and the Achimota Retail Centre (2015), both in Accra.
With a total car parking capacity of over 1,000 bays on-grade as well as undercover basement, Kumasi City Mall is anchored by two well-known retail operators in Ghana, namely Shoprite and Game.
The marketing manager of the mall, Mr John Badu Bonsu, in an earlier radio interview with Class FM for instance said many of the pictures from the trolling that went viral were fake, “you can’t bring goats into a mall; it’s not possible but it also helped us. We had a special international coverage. BBC actually made a report on us and it took us international.”
“We trended on Twitter for two weeks and everybody was talking about Kumasi Mall. People wanted to actually come and see if what they were hearing was true and when they came and it wasn’t true, that many went back to talk about us, so I think it helped in a way. We wouldn’t have loved something like that to happen but as it happened it was very fruitful to us. The opening day we had 67,000 people, subsequently 45,000 people, and on May Day we had 75,000 people coming – it’s never happened anywhere in Ghana before.”
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