NPP communicator takes on Agyinasare over comments on banking crisis

A member of the communications team of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Edmund Kyei, has said although jobs have been lost following the closure of some troubled banks by the central bank, the decision was inevitable.

Edmund Kyei, who is also the First Vice Chairman of the party in the Asokwa Constituency said past governments should have acted earlier to close the troubled banks to reduce the effect on jobs and the entire financial sector.

“For some time now some banks in Ghana have been closed down following poor management and some other factors. We accept that jobs and properties have been lost but the harm of allowing these banks to be in operation would have been greater than this,” Mr Kyei stated in a press release.

Presiding Bishop of Perez Chapel International, Bishop Charles Agyinasare, during a sermon recently asked whether locally-owned uniBank, GN Bank and UT Bank could not have been salvaged by the Bank of Ghana during its financial sector cleanup exercise.

In his virtual sermon on Sunday, July 19, 2020, which was themed: ‘Getting rid of envy’, Bishop Agyinasare said the same “demons” that possessed politicians in the days of old to collapse local businesses were still lingering and causing havoc.

He said they are “still at work today and we must exorcise this nation from that demon otherwise we are far from going forward”.

“I have been asking myself: So, for Dr Kwabena Duffuor, under whose time as Minister of Finance, we had the best economic growth rate of 14 per cent, there was nothing we could do with his bank?”

“What about Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom, who introduced or expanded susu banking and had branches than any commercial bank with more customers?” the Perez Chapel International founder asked.

“Then, my own Amoabeng, who helped me grow my money to my first $100,000, which I withdrew and gave out for the building of the Dome, as part of my contribution. Could nothing have been done to salvage some of these great institutions?”

But reacting to Bishop Agyinasare’s sermon, Edmund Kyei said that the government did not really close down any of these banks during the clean-up exercise, but only took over their management.

“I plead with Bishop Charles Agyinasare to speak about the benefits customers and potential customers will receive which surpasses the close-down,” he urged.