Kafui Dey says the studio crew picked him to host Who Wants To Be Rich

Broadcaster and MC Kafui Dey says the crew, and not the producers, decided he would host Who Wants To Be Rich, Ghana's version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

He told the story in The Kafui Dey Conversation: A Journey Beyond Sales, a 37-minute interview with host Abena Soreno, posted on Oreno Media's YouTube channel on 22 October 2026. For once, the interviewer was the one answering questions.

Forty people, then two

Who Wants To Be Rich started on GTV in 2009, with 15 questions between a contestant and the top prize. Kafui Dey said about 40 people auditioned to host it. That went down to three, then two. After a year of waiting there was a final audition, and the producers still could not choose.

So they asked the crew. He gave Graphic Online the same account in an earlier profile, saying the producers "asked the crew… who would you like to work with and I understand I won their vote".

Turned down by TV3

Before that, TV3 had rejected him. He had done some radio, and he auditioned when TV3 came looking for presenters. In 2019 he told Citi Newsroom: "TV3 was happy to reject me when they came to town for the first time… They did not call me back after the interview."

In the new interview he said "I kept it quiet", and that the station was right: "I wasn't good enough." TV, he said, is not "radio with pictures".

Seventeen years in sales

He told Abena Soreno he got into sales by accident. After writing to 100 companies and getting three replies, he met a former school senior at a communications centre, who offered him a job selling roofing products. He stayed in sales for 17 years before becoming a full-time MC, a figure he has also given to Graphic Online and MyJoyOnline. He admits he crashed the company car.

He also said his father made him learn ten new words a day from the age of six or seven, which by his own sums came to about 10,000 words in three years.

Recording other people's parents

Kafui Dey now hosts his own podcast, Kafui Dey Interviews, and since 5 October 2026, The Kafui Dey Conversations on DGN TV. He told Abena Soreno he often interviews people in their seventies, eighties and nineties. His mother died in 2013 and his father in 2015, he said, and he never recorded a long conversation with either of them.

The waiter rule

The ON RECORD episode compares the crew's vote to what American business leaders call the waiter rule. In 2006, chief executives told USA Today that how a person treats a waiter says a lot about their character.

The full interview also covers his views on caning children who score nine out of ten, why he does not believe in retirement, Mzbel and the media, and how many people he blocked online the day before.