President Nana-Akufo and his government are a failure, UT Bank founder, Prince Kofi Amoabeng, has said.
“I think they’ve failed the country. Simple”, he said on CTV’s morning show Dwabre Mu on yesterday, Tuesday, 4 October 2022 when asked about his assessment of the president and his government’s performance.
“They said, ‘We were sitting on money and yet hungry’ and promised, ‘we’ll get Ghana out of aid’ but now we are beyond ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’” Mr Amoabeng said.
He explained: “We thought we were to make progress by coming out of aid but as it is, we’ve gone beyond the aid, as the president said, but we went behind not forward”.
“We’ve gone beyond aid because now, we need more than aid”, he told Nana Otu Darko.
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“So, simply put, this government has not done well and a lot of people are really really disappointed because we felt they were coming to do better than the NDC but they’ve proven that they are worse”, he contrasted.
Left to Mr Amoabeng alone, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, should have resigned for plunging the country into an abyss.
“I was the founder and CEO of the bank. In 2015, when things were not going well, I told my board that: ‘I don’t understand how things are going on’, so I resigned from that position as CEO and stayed as the Director of the bank. I resigned from the company I founded”, he stressed.
“Now, when it comes to a country, which the people have voted and entrusted you with, you must own up as soon as possible and say, ‘Listen, I’ve messed up’, but, of course, he reports to the President and if he can’t reign or give his resignation letter to the president, then the president has failed because the buck stops with the man at the top”, Mr Amoabeng argued.
He said: “Were I Akufo-Addo, I would have asked Ken Ofori-Atta to resign. He [Akufo-Addo] is failing. Akufo-Addo is failing, not Ken because you choose your people and you hold them accountable. You always delegate authority but you don’t delegate the responsibility. That’s what it is”.
Ghana is currently in talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout of $3 billion to save the economy from collapse.
Mr Amoabeng, whose bank was one of the nine local banks collapsed by the Akufo-Addo government, said the administration could have bailed out those banks.
“Ghana has been bailed out 18 times; can’t you bail out a bank that defaulted just once in 20-plus years rather than close it?” he wondered.
“And it was an iconic brand with footprints outside the country, it was a brand that was international”, he said.
“How many companies have we grown in Ghana with such an international and iconic image?” he asked.
“I am not personally pained by the closure of the bank but I’m pained for the staff, the investors who believed in us and lost money; I’m pained for the whole country that when are we going to create companies [that last] because with companies, come what may, you’ll slip at some point and you learn your lessons”, he noted.
