By Ruth ABOAGYE
The sharp rise in Non Performing Loans of banks in the country has been largely attributed to delays by the government to pay contractors, Alliance for Development and Industrialization has revealed.
In a statement issued in Accra and signed by the Convener, Dr Richard Nunekpeku “government contracts over the years have been the largest reason for high NPLs with the banks which affected their profits.
These delayed payments by the government resulted in the closure of nine domestic banks and over 400 financial institutions, including microfinance institutions and savings and loans companies.
The Ghana banking crisis was a severe banking crisis that affected Ghana between August 2017 and January 2020. The Bank of Ghana (BoG) allowed several indigenous banks to be taken over by private companies.
“Governments over the past years award contracts but the usual characteristic of delayed payments of which some take as long as 8years to pay, damages the books and investment of banks of which most of the time the board and leaderships anticipated some profits buts get their dreams dashed whiles interest keeps piling up whiles Government struggles to make payments of which no consideration is given to the interest pileups’, it said.
It is clear that most of the banks had funded government contracts and were in anticipation of payments for which the bank of Ghana also owed it a responsibility to keep them functioning by giving them liquidity support.
Unfortunately, due to the usual politics of victimization and always shifting blame, there was empirical evaluation of the situation of which eg. evaluating the real cost of restoring the liquidity position of the banks and also addressing the lost profits of its shareholders. Just like the US did some time back under President Obama, they funded the banks under stricter supervision and made sure they recovered.
The financial sector reforms under Mahama/Asiama would not have been closing banks and losing jobs while putting the Central Bank in unrecoverable debt. These banks would have been challenged to be productive to recover with better supervision while jobs are kept and economic growth achieved. This could have harnessed the economy to avoid any Haircut.
Sadly the insensitivity of the NPP government lead such an economic calamity in 2022.
We should hail John Mahama for making sure the right thing has been done to restore the needed economic growth and welfare of the citizens.
The mind boggling question to the NPP and receiver is, how much in asset wastage and true cost of the exercised has cost and we will realize that the cost of job losses, Asset Idle cost and projected returns in addition to payouts have cost the economy over GHC50billion.
