Disbursement of GH¢600m stimulus package won’t be political – NBSSI boss

The Executive Director of the National Board for Small Scale Industries (NBSSI), Kosi Yankey-Ayeh, has assured the general public that her firm will be fair in the distribution of the GH¢600 million to small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) to ease the pressure on them following the Covid-19 outbreak.

She said the disbursements will be transparent with external auditors in place to audit the funds, hence no need to entertain fear of introducing partisan politics into the allocation.

Her comments come after the CEO of Dalex Finance, Ken Thompson, and others raised concerns that the NBSSI package is too political to handle this assignment.

Mr Thompson suggested that the money should rather be given to financial institutions to handle and not the NBSSI.

He told local television channel TV3 Monday, May 11 that: “It suffers from the legacy of politics, it suffers from money going out and not being able to account because it was done on political basis.

“Why are we not working with the associations of non-bank financials? I have a problem with that?”

But speaking on Sunrise on 3FM Thursday, May 14, Ms Ayeh told show host Alfred Ocansey that: “ I can assure that there will be no partisan politics in this and the reason why we say that is that this is open and that is why we brought technology in.

“There will be external auditors as well. We don’t even know the beneficiaries. It is open so let us allow people to apply. What I challenge people to do is to actually show up with the data that is needed and fill the right data.”

She added: “People ask why NBSSI in this. We have been doing this for a long time but nobody has talked about politics but now that people see or hear of it then they assume.

“They are only assuming but let us not make the assumption. We have 178 offices in 178 districts called business advisory centres, we are in almost all the sixteen regional capitals, we provide the service, we have been doing it.

“For the past three years, we have actually facilitated up to GH¢45 million, we have support a 100,000+ people build their capacity but no one has said it is political.”