A requiem for uniBank and cousins
It is as if there has been a death in the family! The collapse of uniBank could be likened to the death of a vibrant young person, with immense promise and opportunities to make something spectacularly awesome out of life. The youthful person was supposed to be on track to make the entire family and village very proud, beyond measure. Even generations yet unborn were to gloat in the success story of this youth.
Then suddenly, it was revealed that all along, the promise was a sham. It now appears that a humongous castle had been built on sand, and painted gorgeously. The painstaking décor deceptively covered up falsehoods. Then a mighty storm came and before our eyes, the sand castle had crumbled back into sand, from which it was built. Meanwhile, uniBank has morphed into Consolidated Bank.
WHY I BANKED WITH UNIBANK
Patriotism took me to uniBank and kept me there! Now my patriotism and related trust in “made in Ghana” has been shaken. When I was looking for a bank 12 years ago, uniBank was very attractive. Undoubtedly, the attraction was that it was owned by Dr Kwabena Duffuor, who was at different times, the Governor of the Bank of Ghana and the Minister of Finance – all within one decade. So what could go wrong?
Dr Duffuor was finely packaged as a financial guru. At a point, his signature was on Ghana’s cedi. It is a big deal to have one’s signature on a country’s currency! So what could go wrong? With such a supper-fly stature, a customer of uniBank would have no reason to suspect that a bank set up, owned and controlled by our leading financial guru at the time, could go wrong.
In the creation of the personality décor, it was said widely that Dr Duffuor was not taking any salary as a public servant; meaning he was working for Ghana for free. This further meant that the man was so solid financially that he declined to take our paltry sum of money. This also deeply meant that he was very patriotic so had laid down his life in the service of the mother/fatherland – for free. So what could go wrong?
I was very proud of uniBank because it was engaged in good Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. For the past couple of years, it literally adopted Operation Smile, an organization I am associated with. Operation Smile brings in medical and other volunteers from various parts of the world to perform surgeries on people with cleft lips and cleft palates.
Through the bank’s sponsorship of the surgeries, people who had suffered from stigma owing to birth defects gained their smiles back. And with the smiles came dignity. That was a very good thing uniBank did. I crossed paths with some of their executives during Operation Smile and I felt so proud that a Ghanaian-owned bank could help some hundreds of people to undergo the dignity-gaining and life-saving surgeries. So what could go wrong?
UniBank was spreading very fast; and was opening branches across the country. It was probably the fastest-growing Ghanaian-owned bank. It was flying high! And oh, uniBank was winning banking awards! Nothing could have gone wrong! No, nothing! Yet, everything has now gone wrong – very wrong!
20/20 HINDSIGHT REVELATIONS
As the adage goes, hindsight is 20/20! As I write, my 20/20 vision of today tells me that there was a clear conflict of interest about Dr Duffuor opening a bank whilst he was a policymaker in the financial space. The government should have known! But then, who cares about conflict of interest in our national decision-making arena? For many, you could poke them in the eyes with conflict of interest and they will not blink; the wrong will be right.
Looking back, it appears that the fast growth, the awards and accolades, the Corporate Social Responsibility, and the super-high profile of uniBank and Dr Duffuor should have been the red flags to warn Ghana.
You never expect to wake up on any ordinary day to hear that your bank – be it a full-fledged bank or a microfinance institution has collapsed and possibly, the owner has moved on with your cash, or that the benevolent Ghana Government had stepped in to take control of your bank. The details of the collapse of the seven banks this past year are unsettling to read. The stories shake one’s trust in the banking sector. With such revelations, you scratch your scalp even though you do not have dandruff or lies in your hair.
UniBank was insolvent. In the language of us lay-persons, uniBank was broke. It had gone bust; it was bankrupt; it had been ruined beyond measure. The figures given by the Bank of Ghana (representing the findings of KPMG’s analysis of the rot) revealed that without due process, the operators of uniBank had given out a whopping GHc5.3 billion to its shareholders, connected parties and cronies.
So apparently, uniBank did not care about good corporate governance and its customers, let alone care about the laws of Ghana. The owners and managers used the bank as a piggy bank from which they dipped their hands to take, and give, and spend, and blow without regard to those of us who entrusted our money with them! All this while, the Bank of Ghana just sat there and did nothing.
Is there a backstory that needs to be told? What really happened? Does Dr Duffuor have his own version of what went wrong, which may suggest that he did the right thing but someone choked him? Did Dr Duffuor knowingly and deliberately deceive me and other Ghanaians who saw uniBank as a great Ghanaian success story at entrepreneurship? Why has he not spoken? Has he lost his voice? Would uniBank have collapsed if the NDC had won the 2016 elections?
AN ABRUPT CONSOLIDATION
I have now morphed from uniBank into Consolidated Bank. The new bank has reached out to me (and the many other millions of customers of the five collapsed bank, which have been merged). The message I received reads, in part: “We warmly welcome you to Consolidated Bank Ghana Limited and are delighted at this opportunity to serve you. …..We remain dedicated to providing you with the exceptional client service… Our commitment to this is absolute…. Best regards, Daniel Addo, CEO.”
This message is supposed to make me feel better. But I am not feeling “warmly welcome”. I do not know what to do with the assertion: “Our commitment to this is absolute”. As I recall, the commitment of Dr Duffuor and his uniBank (and that of the other collapsed banks) was equally absolute. Or it wasn’t? So why didn’t the Bank of Ghana caution us to beware? Why should things be allowed to go so wrong?
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