Dealers in Foreign Currency Exchange, popularly known as Black Market, has alleged that banks in the country sell the dollars to them for their businesses, which has contributed to the sharp depreciation of the cedi in recent times.
According to the man who spoke on anonymity but goes with the alias, Baba Mohammed, it will be wrong for anyone to say that there’s is no dollar in the system.
“The banks themselves are the ones who sell the dollar to us. Anyone who tells you there’s no dollar in the system doesn’t know what he’s saying. The banks have the dollars but they haul them and sell them to us and other individuals,” he alleged.
Though he is aware that their business is illegal, they are not scared because they are also helping the government in a way.
“Right now you will not get some of the dollars to buy if you go to the bank. If someone wants to travel and goes to the bank to exchange his money into foreign currency, the bank can say they can only give them 10,000. So will such a person engage the bank again? But with us, when we hear the cedi is down we go and buy plenty of the dollars to satisfy our customers,” he said.
Speaking in an interview with Nana Sei Ampofo Adjei on Adom TV’s The Big Agenda, he said that some Ministers and other government officials even engage their services and therefore if the Bank of Ghana will openly involve them in their quest to make the cedi strong, the strength of the dollar will reduce.
Meanwhile, a renowned currency expert, Dr Samuel Ampah, has said that Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has failed and must be sacked.
According to him, the current state of the cedi alone, as well as the economic situation currently, makes his continuous stay in office unjustified.
He said that: “where you are in Multimedia, if your bosses at a point realise that you are not performing in the role in which they employed you, what will they do? They will fire you. So what is the Minister still doing in office?”
He also expressed disappointment in the fact that government continues to blame COVID-19 and Russia/Ukraine war for the current state of the economy because COVID-19, for instance, hit many African countries as well, but they’re not experiencing “our kind of economic turbulence.”