Meet John Elliot Hagan, the cleaner-turned-journalist with a Master’s degree from Westminster
John was admitted to St Thomas Aquinas Senior High School but had to drop out in June 2002 during his second year of SHS because of financial constraints
The road to greatness can sometimes be lonely and daunting but it will surely lead to success if one is determined and stays true to the course. One man who has made this a reality is John Elliot Hagan, who started his career in journalism as a cleaner with the Finder newspaper in Accra.
John was admitted to St Thomas Aquinas Senior High School but had to drop out in June 2002, in his second year of SHS, because of financial constraints.
His father had died and his mother was struggling, barely managing take care of the family. Family members offered glimmers of hope, but to him the case seemed hopeless. John, the eldest child, says he decided to sacrifice his education for his siblings.
Nursing the potential
In 2004, he got a job with a cleaning company and was assigned to the Graphic Communications Group. At Graphic, John went beyond the cleaning. His hard work endeared him to the reporters, old and young. He would stay on after work and run errands for them. They sent him to buy food and anything else he could do.
In 2007, a woman who was working at the Graphic (now a judge who wants to remain anonymous) struck up a conversation with John after he had been cleaning her office for some time. She asked him what he wanted to do with his life and John narrated how his hopes had been cut short. This kind woman, he recalls, said she saw great potential in him and wanted him to go back to school.
John was now 22 years old. Going back into the mainstream senior high school system was a bit problematic, so he enrolled at the Accra Technical Training Centre (ATTC) to study electrical engineering, pursuing the course between 2007 and 2011. For the first three years, he was able to find a part-time job so he worked alongside going to school. The benevolent woman paid his fees.
In 2011 one of John’s friends at Graphic, Maurice Quansah, tipped him off about a vacancy at the Finder. The newspaper was looking for an office assistant and the key quality required was someone the company could trust.
When John went to see Kwadwo Larbi, the founder editor of the Finder, he was told that Maurice Quansah had spoken so well of him, he didn’t have anything to prove.
The trust factor
With time, John took on additional responsibility for cleaning when the office cleaner stopped work without any notice. The editorial staff still needed someone who they could trust to clean but not steal confidential information.
His transition from cleaner/office assistant to reporter began in 2013 when, on his way to work one morning, John saw a dead body in Asylum Down. That dead body resurrected John’s hopes and dreams of a life beyond office cleaning and assisting the editorial team.
When he got to the office, he decided to write a report on what he had seen himself. He had spent so much of his spare time at the Daily Graphic and the Finder reading so many reports that filing one came effortlessly.
The Finder editor at the time, the late George Koomson, was at once impressed with John’s report and encouraged him to write more. The editor thought the cleaner was reporting in a way some reporters could not. With time, whenever there was an assignment and the reporters were too busy, John would be asked to go and cover the story. His output impressed the editors, who soon began assigning him to cover weekend engagements.
In 2015, Elvis Darko, the editor of the Finder, to whom John says he owes huge gratitude, announced that John was too good to be a substitute and appointed him as a full-time reporter. John slipped into the role of playing in the newsroom’s first eleven with ease and excellence.
It is one thing to learn on the job as a hack and another thing to understand the ideas, theories and intricate academic nuances of the areas of knowledge that you have to master to be good in the job. John wanted to study journalism. Fortunately, the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) had introduced a diploma course for mature students, so John took advantage of this new opening.
The publisher of the Finder, by then the minister of state in charge of business development, Mohammed Ibrahim Awal, sponsored John to go to school. After two years, he decided to enrol for a top-up degree course.
He worked for the Finder for a while before securing a Chevening scholarship to study in the UK.
Hagan subsequently earned a Master’s degree in media and development from the University of Westminster, one of the UK’s top five universities for media and communications studies.
Speaking on the Road to Greatness interview on the Asaase Breakfast Show on Thursday (27 June 2024), Hagan urged young Ghanaians to be determined and true to themselves.
“You just have to be true to yourself … you can start very little and not let people down .Just show a sense of determination, and show to people they can trust you,” he said.
Listen to excerpts from the ABS interview with John Elliot Hagan in the audio clip below:
Reporting by Fred Dzakpata in Accra. Additional files from manassehazure.com
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