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Mohammed Frimpong — NDP General Secretary
Mohammed Frimpong — NDP General Secretary

Corrupt practices having boomerang effect on national economy — NDP

The General Secretary of the National Democratic Party (NDP), Mr Mohammed Frimpong, has observed that past corrupt practices were having a boomerang effect on the national economy.

Citing the examples of the banking crisis and the panic withdrawals he posited that “it is a result of corrupt practices that is now creating a boomerang effect on the system” .

He said economics is a science and if one created a phony system, that is to say, a false economic environment and the situation was not right, “definitely you would not have got the roots to stand on.”

Trying the impossible

Speaking to the Daily Graphic in an interview, Mr Frimpong explained that “for instance, you cannot turn a pawpaw tree into a baobab. If you turn the pawpaw tree and pretended that it has the spread of roots just like the baobab, then in a storm, the pawpaw would be blown off and that is what we are facing.”

“What we are facing currently is the outcome of corrupt practices,” he stressed, adding that in economics, it was an act of reality and so the original intents and purposes of that arrangement would definitely not work out.

Throwing more light on his position, he explained that some people had come out with a whole lot of financial instruments to tell the public that if one deposited a cedi, in a month, one would get five cedis; “you have to think twice.”

Explaining further, he posited that rationally, everyone would want to gain but that was more of a gambling tendency than a reality.
In effect, he said, what had happened, first of all, was corruption on the part of the system that had turned out badly.

He questioned how it was possible that people could create banks when the capital adequacy ratio required them to have a stated capital of GH¢400 million and yet they went ahead to say that they had that much in hand and could create a bank, when in fact, they did not have it.

The boomerang effect

Stressing the point that it was corrupt practices that had boomeranged onto the system, he said realistically, it was a subtle form of corruption where people lied to the system that they could collect so much in deposits just because they claimed they qualified and had the required capital adequacy ratio.

“You might do that, thinking you are smart but the workings of the economy would expose you,” he pointed out.

On the way forward, he said, the only means to fight such systemic corruption was with serious commitment.

“We must create the necessary deterrents for corrupt practices and not until we do that, such things are bound to recur,” he maintained.

He, therefore, advised that people who were managers of the economy take the parameters of the economy properly and make sure that the system was run on specific parameters that would ensure an exhibition of the true state of affairs but not a projection of what might ultimately be a phantom created by someone’s imagination.

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