Host of Good Evening Ghana on Metro TV, Paul Adom-Otchere has explained what might have been the reason former Minister of Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah stashed huge volumes of monies in her home.
Mr. Adom-Otchere said because of unpleasant experiences in the past, most of the older generation are not comfortable keeping their monies in banks.
He noted that policy decisions of governments in the First, Second and under the military regimes which resulted in people, who had saved their monies in financial institutions, losing their savings eroded the confidence of those who lived at time in the banking system.
As a result, they dread the idea of keeping their monies in banks.
“A lot of the people who are beyond 70, they do a lot of cash transactions. They keep their cash with them. They don’t put it in any bank. Because of the history they have suffered, from Nkrumah era where people were afraid to have money in the bank because they would be called out and then the Busia’s era, they did the depreciation of the currency and people’s monies were lost.
In the Rawlings era, there was seizure of people’s monies in the bank just to clean up and deal with inflation. So they’ve seen all of these. Therefore, if you talk to them, you will not understand why but they don’t take their monies to the bank,” he said.
This, Mr. Adom-Otchere asserted, is the reason Ms. Dapaah, her late brother and her husband kept such huge volumes of monies at home.
The ace broadcaster claimed that, contrary to media reports, only $200,000 of the millions of cash stashed in the minister’s home belonged to her.
According to him, the rest of the monies belonged to her husband and her late brother.
The late brother, he said, owned an amount of $800,000 while her husband owns €300,000 of the now stolen cash.
Cecilia Abena Dapaah resigned from her position as Sanitation Minister following revelation that she stashed millions of cash in foreign and local currencies in her Abelemkpe residence.
The revelation sparked public outrage with many calling for her head.
She has since resigned and is under investigation.
