Editorial: Mendacious figures

The country’s apex bank has lost massive credibility and public confidence under the stewardship of Henry Wampah. The bank is now bereft of the deference which banks of last resort should command to remain afloat in a tumultuous international economic setting. Today, it is reeking of the partisanship common to the appendages of the ruling party.

That is how bad things have become, with government minders, joined by Henry Wampah, scampering all over the economic plane with doctored figures hardly representing the truth.

The country is in trouble when figures about the strength of the cedi, as being disseminated by the Bank of Ghana, are digested with a pinch of salt as though they were coming from government ministers with a predisposition for propaganda.

It is mindboggling that for the first time in the history of the national currency, its strength or otherwise against international convertible currencies is best sought from joint stock banks—figures which are at variance with the apex bank’s.

The schism between what the commercial banks put out as the picture of the cedi’s strength, and the apex bank’s, befuddles those who seek a situation report of the economy to plan their investments.

The apex bank’s inter-bank figures and other pictures are as good as what the propaganda secretaries of the NDC disseminate to shore up their dwindling political standing.

When a country’s apex bank loses so much confidence that it continues to think it is being believed, when it is not, the economy of the country can be said to have turned the corner. Indeed that is where we have reached.

We are dismayed that the commercial banks, aware of the erroneous figures being churned out by the apex bank and the accompanying implications to the economy, would fold their arms as the vile enterprise continues to thrive under the stewardship of Henry Wampah.

Sharing the blame with the commercial banks are the country’s economists, who, it would appear, have been so stupefied by the unethical conduct of the apex bank that they are not talking about it. If their silence can be construed to be acquiescence, then the confusion has taken another notch and demands extraordinary response if our economy must be returned to an even kiln.

The Bank of Ghana is going through its most tumultuous times since the Union Jack was lowered in place of the Ghanaian flag; and Henry Wampah is the man associated with the ill-wind.

We dread the day when we would suffer another humiliating query by one of the Bretton Institutions for touting falsified economic figures. When our naked governor is told so by strangers, it would be more embarrassing than one of ours doing so.

Mr Wampah would go down in the economic history of Ghana as the worst apex bank governor who, when it was time for him to clear his desk and exit the office, stayed put to the detriment of the economy.