The Apprentice wasn’t ready for a blind candidate like me
After being fired from the BBC show last night, Souleyman Bah tells Luke Mintz how the tasks left him on an unequal footing
Minutes after being fired in last night’s episode of The Apprentice, Souleyman Bah struck a typically confident note. “Next time Lord [Alan] Sugar sees me,” he told cameras from the back seat of the black cab used to drive the show’s losers away from the boardroom, “I will be a champion in athletics with a gold medal, and I will also be a champion in business with a big fat cheque.”
This sort of comment has become par for the course on the BBC’S 15-year-old “reality game show”, whose contestants have built something of a reputation in recent years for their preternatural self-assurance – in the first episode of this year’s series, one man tells the cameras he has “such expensive taste, that a million is not enough, I need billions”.
As a gold-medal winning Paralympic athlete at junior level and the show’s first disabled contestant – he uses a white cane due to being blind in one eye and having only “tunnel vision” in the other – Bah was no different. He opened the series by asking, “Why try at all if you’re not going to do it properly?”, and his Instagram account is packed with topless photos of him exercising, sometimes overlaid with the sort of “inspirational” quote you might find on a novelty tote bag.
But Bah struck a far more humble tone when we spoke this week, once filming had finished. The 20-year-old – who was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition which gradually degrades his retina, aged seven – excited disability activists when it was revealed that he would become the first disabled person to appear on the series.
He now says that his condition held him back in the tasks, which were not designed with the needs of a partially-sighted person in mind. If it hadn’t been for his eyesight issues, he thinks he may well have survived longer than week three.
“I did feel like I was at a disadvantage during tasks,” says Bah, who has also appeared in the Channel Four romance show, The Undateables, on which he was stood up. “Selling tasks, reading things, approaching clients, anything creative that had to do with screens or looking at things… my visual impairment was definitely a disadvantage and that should have been taken into account in the boardroom, which I don’t think it was. But other than that, I adapted, because being adaptable is what I do with my disability and what you have to do in business.”
Coming nine years after the Equality Act, which enshrined into law the requirement that employers make “reasonable adjustments” for their disabled staff, his comments highlight the daily struggle still faced by the 4.1 million Britons who are working with a disability, and raise questions about how far employers need to go to make their disabled staff feel welcome.
And Bah notes just how hard it is for those less physically able to rise to the top, too. “There’s not that many role models on the main stage that are doing business that happen to be disabled,” he says of his peers. “I think we need icons and I’d hopefully like to be one of those.”
Eventually, he will be completely blind. “Every single day, I’m waking up and I’m seeing less and less,” he says. But Bah is philosophical about his physical deterioration, believing that this means that, “the more imagination I gain, because what you see is what you see and what you don’t see is when the magic begins”.
‘What you see is what you see and what you don’t see is when the magic begins’
He is resolute that disability will not stand in the way of his business ambitions. He had hoped to win a £250,000 investment from Lord Sugar for “Vision Beyond Sight”, a company that would provide inspirational talks about sight-loss to children in schools across the country – and takes advantage of his condition where he can. Bah is currently training to make it into the Paralympic Games in Tokyo next summer as a sprinter, and even has intergalactic ambitions – he once sent a message on Twitter to Richard Branson to ask whether he might be interested in taking the first blind person to space.
Back on Earth, Bah found The Apprentice experience “frustrating”, and was left feeling “overshadowed [by] some big egos.”
In the first week, the candidates were flown to South Africa to organise a safari tour and the boys’ team endeared themselves to viewers by inventing various facts about wildlife off the top of their heads. But, unable to actually see the animals, Bah couldn’t join in the banter.
The following week, he had to sell ice lollies in a London zoo, but says “it was difficult for me to find where the clients were”.
And in last night’s episode, in which Bah struggled to follow dance moves in a promotional video for a children’s toy, the team leader attacked him for not being in-sync with the others.
The production company behind The Apprentice, Boundless, has launched an investigation, and said that the series team “continually worked with Souleyman to decide upon and ensure the appropriate adjustments were made at every stage, both in the house and whilst on task”.
Bah, who grew up in south-west London with his four siblings, tried his best to keep out of this year’s many arguments. But life back in the contestants’ shared house was a challenge in itself; by and large, he “stuck to his own”.
“Once you go home that’s it, you can unplug,” he says of an ordinary working day. But “it was difficult to do that in the programme, because you’re living with the same people [by whom] you’re getting stabbed in the back in the board room. It was difficult for me to adjust to that.”
As a para-athlete turned Apprentice entrepreneur, Bah holds a rare insight into both ultra-competitive worlds. Which does he think is more difficult?
“The Apprentice,” he answers without hesitation, “because you have to deal with other people who are trying to shoot you down and drag you under the bus, whereas in the Paralympics, you know what you need to do, you know what you’re training for, and you know what the competition is.”