Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia says John Mahama has nothing useful to offer the country’s banking sector, stating it was under the former President’s watch that Ghana recorded the biggest ever financial crisis.
“The former President and his NDC really have nothing useful to offer the Ghanaian people,” he said at a sod cutting ceremony Wednesday for a 100,000 housing project at Amasaman in the Greater Accra Region.
Mr Mahama last week said he will work towards turning around challenges in the banking sector to create a stronger and more resilient banking environment if given the chance in the 2020 elections to lead Ghana once more.
“The current challenges in the banking sector are surmountable and we can positively turn these into opportunities to establish stronger and adequately well-capitalised banking sector to support economic growth. If I come to power in 2021 I will improve the banking sector,” Mahama said in the Facebook live address.
But Dr Bawumia who was once a deputy governor of the Bank of Ghana in responding to the comments by Mahama said Ghanaians “will not fall” for the former president’s promise because it was under his era that several banks and financial institutions were rendered insolvent.
“The former President will like Ghanaians to believe that he knows how to stabilize the banking sector but he kept banks in their comatose state until they died,” he stated Wednesday.
For Dr Bawumia, “Instead of [Mahama] explaining to the good people of Ghana how his government superintended over outright regulatory failure which led to the biggest financial crisis ever in Ghana, he rather chose to rewrite history”.
The vice president said he was dismayed to read the statement by the former president, especially so when it was under Mahama’s administration that all the gains made over the last two decades were eroded.
Dr Bawumia recounted how the New Patriotic Party government under JAK put in place significant reforms between 2001 and 2008 to create a modern financial sector which he described as “well capitalised and liquid”.
During that period, he said banks chased people, “even at funerals,” to come for loans.
“This robust financial sector really helped SMEs and other institutions in this country. However Ghanaians have watched painfully as the gains from these far reaching reforms implemented under the Kufuor led administration were eroded by years of no regulatory and supervisory oversight under the last NDC administration which was led by John Mahama,” he said.
Mahama, according to Dr Bawumia, failed to allow the regulator, Bank of Ghana, to do its work independently as required by the law to administer the prompt interventions that were needed to ensure that the banks recovered.
The vice president said years of poor regulatory and supervision under Mahama saw the mushrooming of licence institutions which had no intentions from the very beginning, to engage in responsible banking.
These insitutions, he said, were only interested in plundering the deposit of the unsuspecting public and that it took the current Bank of Ghana leadership courage to sanitise the system with the revocation of licences of these financial institutions.
“The Bank of Ghana under the current leadership has shown courage by taking the bull by the horn and dealing decisively with the problems created under the government of John Mahama to avert the collapse of the entire system,” he boasted.
“When we were in opposition we pointed out that at least eight banks were likely to collapse yet nothing was done about it. So when matters came to a head in 2017, the Bank of Ghana took a decisive step to resolve the situation. But today the response of former President Mahama is that he is going to set up a committee to tell him what to do. You have been looking at this problem since 2014; it is 2019 now.”
By 3news.com|Ghana