Accra, Ghana, November 14, 2018//-I’m increasingly losing trust and confidence in Ghana’s minority group in Parliament and their commitment to fight and wrestle power from the hands of this fascist, incompetent government.
The roundtable that was just held yesterday heralding the presentation of the 2019 budget statement tomorrow appears to be strengthening my case.
It was a poor performance and below the expectation of some of us. It is not surprising that, the media have shown no interest in our round table.
Just take a look at the trending issues in the media (print, electronic, online and social media) and you’ll observed that we missed their attention. This is because of our lackluster approach and presentation of issues at the roundtable. The minority simply didn’t do what the people expected.
The entire banking sector assets in Ghana is about 50% of Ghana’s GDP as at end of 2017. Other players such savings and loans, micro finance, rural banks and non-bank financial institutions put together, value over GHC60.0 billion. In all the financial sector’s assets represent a whopping GHC160.0 billion in an economy with a GBP of GHC203 billion at end of 2017.
How can crisis in such a major sector of the economy conveniently escape the critical lenses of the Minority in Parliament? And why should some of us not ask these critical questions? Is there something happening behind the scenes that we don’t know that we must know?
The banking and financial services sector appears clearly to be the Achilles hill and the most vulnerable and weakest link of this administration.
The sector has performed extremely poorly since this government introduced its regulatory measures in 2017 collapsing some Banks, creating a contagion collapses of other Banks and Non-Bank Financial Institutions, corporate entities, creating huge job losses affecting tens of 1,000s of families.
It is shocking that the minority group in Parliament couldn’t find it appropriate to hit this government where it matters most. With such a great media opportunity and attention, our minority group only chose to do a trend analysis of growth patterns of the financial sector.
How does this win us votes? What impact and impression does this analysis make in the minds of Ghanaians and industry players who obviously were expecting the minority in Parliament to represent the voice that they need?
I dare ask if it was a compromise position that our comrades took to please the executive.
It is disappointing that they couldn’t recognize what potentially could endear us to the masses. Trend analysis is banal. Get behind the scenes, the numbers and expose the real deals. In such turbulent times, industry players looking for messiahs are usually willing to talk and volunteer information.
The NPP embellished stories and told palpable lies to hang DKM on the neck of NDC for electoral gain. We have clear opportunity with factual information on how they have so far managed the Banking & Financial Services sector to nail them, but we somehow chose to “sell it out”.
Governor Addison and his team collapsed banks to put up a creature called Consolidated Bank Ghana (CBG) which practically is not behaving like a Bank. It is violating all the norms and standards in Finance and Accounting. This is bigtime mess by the governor. Yet the minority is silent.
Under what circimstances should we tolerate a commercial bank taking a decision to honor the value of a client’s cheque by installment?
How? They’re suppressing cheques drawn by clients. This is Nana Addo/Bawumia and Governor Addison mess. Who are we waiting for to tell this story for us?
The so-called consolidated Bank that was created by BoG has turned out to be an empty box with no liquidity of its own as it has to permanently depend on BoG against the laws.
This is how bad they’ve rundown the banking sector. These are some of the things we should be exposing because, they resonate with the ordinary people, the clients who don’t have access to their savings not performance trend analysis.
I’m deeply disappointed in our Members of Parliament
As we talk, there’s an enactment that prohibits the kind of life support that BoG is offering CBG. Who else than Hon Ato Forson and his group, is in a better stead to deal with and expose these issues?
Hon Ato Forson, you’ll remember how this propaganda government derided and taunted the NDC regime for offering liquidity support to banks when there was no law prohibiting that action.
Those are some of the things often wrongly referred to as the “Mahama mess” in their propaganda. Today, these same people after enacting laws to prevent the so-called type of “Mahama mess” from happening, are breaking the laws with brazen impunity. What mess is more than this?
You should be explaining to us why you’re unable to hold this government to account on this score.
As we talk, BoG has caused about GHC8.0 billion (liquidity) to be squeezed out and evaporated from the financial sector. These are some of the things creating the general hardships in the economy
We expect you to go behind the numbers that show the trends, to expose the real rot behind. This is what will give us the votes. Let’s not pretend not to know what’s going on.
By A.W. SULLEYMAN,
Public Policy Expert,
Development Finance Major,
Certified Public Private Partnership (PPP) specialist,
Development Economist
