Group Chairman of Allied Consortiums, South Africa, Benjamin Kofi Quarshie, has asserted that some decisions including the banking sector clean-up that led to the collapse of several banks in Ghana are some significant decisions that have led to the country’s economic stress.
In an interview on e.tv Ghana’s Fact Sheet with Samuel Eshun, Mr. Quarshie believes these decisions are politically influenced as he reiterated that a better approach could have prevented the dire consequences currently being experienced in the country’s economy.
“The banking sector at the time was a good decision but did it prove right? Reading article 4 of the report you’d also have to put your mind to the fact that if the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana had done things in a more prudent way and a different perspective, we would not be seeing the stories were hearing today,” he said.
“We have always proved and very obvious that political decisions affect businesses and so when you have a country that went into collapsing banks with that kind of huge sums of money and banks have been collapsed other banks have been formed the economy had to suffer from these kinds of decisions. I have always maintained that the government would have done better by not collapsing those banks because you know people got laid off. Families had to struggle and once one aspect of the economy faces such challenges it becomes imperative that all the other sectors would have problems.”
He added, “So, I believe these kinds of policies, not only with the collapse of banks but for example going back to the IMF, when we started as a country, we were told that we were never going back to the IMF and it was a good thing that we left the IMF Programme but here we are back again. So, you ask yourself why and it means that there were certain things we did along the line that did not inure to the benefits of the Ghanaian economy. “
By: Jude Tackie