Seth Terkper
I was the only member of my Liberal Arts graduating class at St. Peter’s Secondary School (PERSCO), at Okwawu-Nkwatia, who did not study Economics and Accounting, and so I am not going to pretend here that I understand much of the technical language of finance, beyond the broadest generalities.
But, of course, I am equally proud to observe the fact that when I decided to re-sit my “O”-Level exams at Prempeh College a year later – PERSCO’s 1981 “O”-Level exams had been cancelled across the board, there had been a few inexplicable exceptions – I was the only candidate who scored Grade One on the Commerce exam.
The second-highest score in Commerce at Prempeh College, in 1982, was notched by Mawuko Afadzinu, and it was a dismal Grade Five. There had been widespread cheating on the exam, an occurrence that I had soon come to learn was integral to the prevailing academic culture of the Prempeh College of the time.
Still, I strongly suspect that one does not need a bachelor’s degree in Economics and/or Accounting to fully appreciate the $250 million scam allegedly pulled over the eyes of Ghanaian taxpayers and citizens by the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
One of the best rejoinders to this wool-pulling over the eyes of the Ghanaian people by some of the key operatives of the National Democratic Congress was written and published in the Ghanaian Chronicle by Mr. Ebo Quansah, the renowned veteran journalist, and so I shall not spend too much time belaboring the same.
There are a few questions, however, that I would have the NDC human pit-bulls who have savagely bit into the cognitive flesh of Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia for so deftly, poignantly and opportunely exposing the lurid underbelly of the GYEEDA government of President John Dramani Mahama for so rudely, facilely and shamelessly presuming to play fast and loose with our national development resources.
We are all well aware of the fact that this is not the first time that the Mahama government has solicited development funds from the European Community countries.
And so the NDC operatives may do us and themselves great good by answering the following questions: Precisely when did it occur to the Terkper-Mahama posse that a quarter of the billion-dollar Eurobond money could be profitably invested outside of the monetary vaults of the Bank of Ghana?
Also, why was the $250 million invested in a Nigerian-owned banking institution, United Bank of Africa (UBA), when the same money could just as favorably have been invested in Ghanaian-owned and operated commercial banks in the country? what percentage of profits did Finance Minister Terkper and his associates expect from their $250 million investment with UBA?
We must also underscore the fact that the institution doing such investment will not consent to doing the same gratis. And so we also need to know exactly what percentage of the investment money went into paying the investor for his or her services.
You see, most Ghanaians may not be very sophisticated about the intricate dynamics of the money market, but we are also definitely no fools either.
To have a government that has been grabbing our oil royalties left, right, back, forward and center tell us that $250 million out of a billion-dollar solicitation from the Europeans was sitting idle in the vaults of the Bank of Ghana, staggers the imagination. The story simply does not add up. The Mahama Posse cannot also blame Dr. Bawumia for outing them at just the moment when a team of World Bank representatives are in the country to assess the economic performance of the government.
The fact of the matter is that, a well-performing economy has absolutely no reason or need to fear the negative pronouncements of any opposition politician, no matter the level of expertise or genius of such critic. They may not want to admit the obvious, which is the fact that even as Dr. Bawumia clearly points out, this is a watershed election season in which the NDC party machine operatives are hell-bent on doing what they have been known to do better than almost everybody else: steal the people’s money blind and bribe their way through the polling booth.