The Vice President of the Republic, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has taken a swipe at former President Mahama over his uninformed remarks on the banking sector reforms undertaken by the Bank of Ghana.
Responding to the former President’s accusations of the Akufo-Addo administration having undertaken reforms which are inimical to the banking sector without conducting due diligence in the exercise, Dr. Bawumia said that the former President has very limited understanding of the issues and admonished him to desist from speaking to such issues which are clearly beyond his intellectual capacity.
The former President, in a Facebook live broadcast indicated that the best option was for the monies being sunk into the reforms to be used to bail out the struggling banks.
Explaining the rationale behind the banking sector reforms, the Vice President had this to say;
‘The Bank of Ghana under its current leadership has shown courage by taking the “bulls by the horns” and dealing decisively with the problems created under the Government of John Mahama, to avert the collapse of the entire financial system. Several of these failed financial institutions could not pay their debts to other financial institutions and that in itself was threatening to collapse
the other institutions.
As a responsible Government, the Akufo-Addo administration continues to spend considerable amounts of money to pay off debts Mr. Mahama’s Government and SOEs owed to banks that created liquidity challenges for some of these banks’
Accusing the former President of being the architect of the whole banking sector crisis, Vice President Bawumia said;
‘Mr. Mahama and his NDC have nothing useful to offer the Ghanaian people, and should apologize to the good people of Ghana for causing their pain in the first place. It is common knowledge that his brother’s companies led to the collapse of a number of the failed banks through loans granted to such companies above regulatory limits, which loans became unrecoverable. Former President Mahama, who now would like Ghanaians to believe he knows how to stabilize a banking sector, kept banks in their comatose state until they died instead of allowing the regulator to do its work independently as required by law’
Vice President Bawumia implored the former President to cast his eyes wider across the globe to learn about how bail-outs have not helped in resurrecting sinking banks.
He stressed that Mr Mahama has not caught up with the collective wisdom around the world that bailing out insolvent banks does not cure the canker that soon rears its head again and asked him if the Bank of Ghana should have continued to dole out the largesse of public funds to enrich bank shareholders who themselves had plundered the assets of their banks funded with depositors’ funds.
The Vice President schooled the former President at the groundbreaking ceremony to welcome the construction of a hundred thousand housing units in Accra.
Source: ABCNewsgh.com
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