Kojo Oppong-Nkrumah
KOJO OPPONG-Nkrumah, Information Minister designate, says the Akufo-Addo administration is committed to dealing with challenges in Ghana’s financial services sector.
At a press briefing yesterday in Accra, he said the recent challenges being reported in the banking sector were part of the legacy problems in the financial services sector inherited by the Akufo-Addo administration in January 2017, adding that those nearly collapsed Ghana’s financial services sector between 2013 and 2016.
He mentioned that the heads of the regulatory agencies appointed by the administration, upon assumption of office, developed a comprehensive roadmap to tackle the various challenges and address the distress fully.
According to him, there were a series of exercises aimed at addressing the inherited challenges. Among these were the introduction of mechanisms to forestall a repetition of such challenges, holding accountable persons involved in unethical and criminal conduct in the sector and strengthening the financial services sector to engender confidence as well as enable it perform optimally in the future.
Over the last eighteen (18) months, he said government had assured stakeholders that the aforementioned objectives were being achieved simultaneously in strict compliance with legal and international best practices.
“Government, as part of its resolution and remedial actions, believes that regulators should be supported to clean up the system and restore confidence. Stakeholders are, however, being reminded that this is an ongoing process which has not ended and the administration gives the regulators its full backing to do the needful every step of the way,” the Minister designate noted.
He further stated that there was the need for strong indigenous banks hence the corrective measures being pursued by Government.
He said these had been demonstrated in how local banks had been assisted either through debt/equity or both to assume the struggling indigenous banks.
Additionally, he reiterated the incumbent’s assurance to shareholders, depositors, the general public and all other economic actors that the new leadership across the financial sector regulators, as well as the Ministry of Finance, was doing everything within their power to ensure the full, firm and final resolution of the challenges that bedeviled the sector.
“This is the time to tone down and soberly reflect and come to terms with the nature of the challenge and the efforts to resolve it as a country instead of reducing the initiative to partisan politics. Our focus is to govern and deliver change where there are challenges. So we shall stick to it and leave partisanship for another day.”