The Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II has charged the board of directors of Development Bank Ghana (DBG) to work on projects aimed at accelerating development and growth in the country.
“Work on serious development policies,” Otumfuo Osei Tutu II said when a delegation of the board of directors for the bank paid a courtesy call on him at the Manhyia palace. “If you have to do infrastructure, go out there, get the money, do the roads, and put a toll on it. For instance, we want to do an inland port but there is no railway connection.”
“How do you do it? That’s infrastructure and that is development. Why can’t you get GPHA to commit to how many tonnes of loads they get and use that to guarantee them a loan so that they can use the loan to build a railway? So, if they record 300 tonnes each day that the railway is going to cart, that is enough funding. So you space it out with the cost of the railway line. These are things we should prioritise,” he said.
Otumfuo advised the bank not to lose sight of their mandate and capitalise on making Ghana self-sufficient and export-oriented to help salvage the country’s economic crisis.
“If you fail at this, it will mean Ghana has failed because I don’t think you should sit and watch it turn into a commercial bank. You must be able to go out to source funding, do your feasibility and programme it in such a way that you can defend it and then bring the funding home so that you manage it.
“You must understand how you will be contributing to economic development. This will help us deal with our fiscal upheavals. I hope you as a development bank capitalise on making the country self-sufficient and export-based,” the king added.
The role of DBG
For his part, the board chairman of DBG, Yaw Ansu said the bank will live up to expectation.
“DBG is designed to be a key instrument in supporting Ghana’s economic transformation to an industrialised and prosperous Ghana beyond aid,” he said. “This is a goal that I know His Majesty Otumfuo is very passionate about.”
He explained that DBG’s mandate is to provide medium and long-term finance to “Ghanaian businesses, specifically manufacturing, agribusiness and high-value services particularly, in the tech sector and tourism.”
“DBG is a wholesale bank. This means that we don’t lend direct loans to businesses. So, if you are a business you cannot come to DBG and ask for funds. What we do is that we source long-term capitals at a very reasonable rate and we provide it to the banks.
“We send the guidelines, and the banks choose their customers, but then we give them the mandate in terms of manufacturing or agribusiness and sectors that we think can help transform Ghana’s economy.
“What we hope to do is to bring this long-term finance so DBG can lend up to about 10-15 years at reasonable rate compared to what one can get in the market. So, this is our contribution to try to ginger up these sectors with the vision of an industrialised Ghana,” Ansu said.
Irene Pomaa Kumi
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