Some staff of banks that were collapsed under the Akufo Addo administration under the supposed “financial sector clean-up” have vowed to vote against the New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration for causing them such misery.
Under the said financial sector clean-up, the Bank of Ghana, under the tutelage of the Ministry of Finance headed by Ken Ofori-Atta, closed down approximately 400 banks, savings and loans companies and other non-bank financial institutions. Many of these companies were indigenous, resulting in hundreds of thousands of job losses and loss of livelihoods by direct staff and their dependents.
Johnson Kwarteng Addo, one of the aggrieved staff who was employed at the Darkuman branch of the now-defunct Unibank, wrote on his Facebook: “As a permanent staff of Unibank. My Net salary was GHC 6,700 a month, I had good allowances. I had 6 dependents. I was able to take care of them by God’s grace. I had 2 cars and was building my house. Life was ok for me. Until NPP came to power and forcibly collapsed the bank and now here I am, jobless, frustrated, depressed,” he lamented.
“I sold my cars. My building project stalled. More painful is my dependents looking up to me, and I can no longer help. What wrong did do? My thumb misbehaved in December 2016. I campaigned for Npp in 2016. My friends use that to mock me till date. Well, I, together with my dependents will be doing ‘correction’ in December this year,” he wrote on Facebook.
The Bank of Ghana (BoG) in 2017 started its clampdown on these financial institutions because it claimed some of them were operating under insolvency, while others did not meet the minimum capital requirements.
Some of the major collapsed banks include Unibank Ghana Ltd, The Royal Bank LTD, Beige Bank LTD, Sovereign Bank LTD, the Construction Bank LTD, UT Bank, the Groupe Nduom Bank, etc.