Joana Quaye says she can neither confirm nor deny her ex-husband Richard Nii Armah Quaye's viral claim that he washed 5,000 plates a day in the UK—because she only knew he worked at Tesco.
Speaking in a Twi interview with Sallyman that premiered on Saturday, November 7, Joana was asked whether she remembered the gruelling kitchen-porter shifts the Bills Micro-Credit founder has placed at the heart of his rags-to-riches story.
Rather than calling him a liar or backing the number, she fenced her answer to what she personally witnessed at the time: as far as she knew, he was working at the British supermarket chain Tesco.
Quaye, widely known as RNAQ, first told the story in a 2025 conversation with Bola Ray, saying he scrubbed 5,000 plates a day at a large UK hotel before returning home to build the lending business and Quick Angels.
When Ghanaian social media did the stopwatch maths and questioned whether any human could wash that many dishes in a single shift, he doubled down on *The Delay Show* in April 2026, insisting that the 5,000 figure was actually conservative.
That origin story has followed RNAQ since his star-studded 40th birthday celebration and the months in which he was investigated and later cleared of wrongdoing by the Financial Intelligence Centre.
Joana's media appearances come while the former couple battle over their divorce settlement at the Court of Appeal, after a High Court awarded her GH¢300,000 and one-third of their seven-bedroom Dansoman matrimonial home, alongside a separate suit claiming a 10 per cent stake in Bills Micro-Credit.
Even so, her portrait of her ex-husband has not been one-note. In a separate sit-down on The Bite podcast, she said it was his strict financial discipline that first made her fall for him—down to insisting she braid her hair instead of buying wigs.
Between a Tesco aisle and a 5,000-plate hotel kitchen, Ghana's timeline is once again doing the dishwashing arithmetic on its own.
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