Collapsing banks and the cost of finance capitalism in Ghana

SUMMARY

This briefing explains Ghana’s recent banking sector failures and renewed debt crisis as consequences of its uneven and deleterious integration into the global capitalist financial system, a situation that critical scholars in international political economy call international financial subordination.

Main article text

Introduction

There have been several recent banking failures in Ghana. They have resulted in the loss of over 40,000¹ jobs and have helped drive the re-emergence of a debt crisis. The crisis draws attention to calls for renewed and sustained debate on capitalism in the continent (Bush and Szeftel 1994; Ouma 2016, 2017; Taylor 2014; Wiegratz 2018a, 2018b; Zajontz 2022). Zajontz (2022) recently called for critical research on the social costs and the economic beneficiaries of debt distress in Africa, Wiegratz (2018a) asked why there was silence on contemporary capitalist exploitation on the continent, and Ouma (2016, 2017) warned that for our own survival, we need to understand the character of capitalism in Africa. He noted that it was important to rematerialise and repoliticise economic relations that are too often obscured by the mainstream. The lack of rigorous debate about the kind of system adopted in Africa to promote development and improve living standards is equally a concern. Taylor (2014) observed that the political sphere is captured by opportunists, often funded by the West to promote the notion that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. Earlier, Bush and Szeftel (1994) reflected on the continuing crisis of development in Africa – namely that debt opens the way for the continent’s creditors to take control of its affairs and exploit its resources. They called for urgent, renewed debate on neoliberal capitalism in Africa. Franklin Obeng-Odoom has affirmed this by offering a radical critique, underlining the need for ‘continuous questioning’ of the prevailing economic system (Obeng-Odoom 2020, 293).

This briefing responds to these calls for discussions on the nature of capitalism in Africa by focusing on the financial crisis in Ghana. My analysis is in the context of what is called international financial subordination (Alami et al. 2021). International financial subordination exemplifies recent theorisation of financialised capitalism as being ‘inherently global and uneven’ (Bonizzi, Kaltenbrunner, and Powell 2021, 1), and is crucial to understanding emerging capitalist economies in the global South. International financial subordination synthesises dependency theory, post-Keynesian economics and Marxist scholarship to make the case that developing and emerging economies in the global South have been persistently and structurally integrated into ‘an uneven and hierarchical world capitalist economy’ (Alami et al. 2021, 3). Crucial to international financial subordination and of particular interest in this briefing is its reliance on theorisations of dependency to explain financialisation in the South. Its singular strength lies in the understanding that underdevelopment in Africa is rooted in colonial systems of production and extraction as well as neoliberalism that integrates the continent into a global financial order, opening it up for continued exploitation. This should be the starting point for scrutinising the banking and debt crisis in Ghana, and arguably in many other African countries facing renewed debt distress and the consequent dependency on the global North, China now included.

Ghana’s financial crisis

When President Nana Akufo-Addo was sworn into office in January 2017, there were huge expectations across the country. He won the December 2016 presidential elections based on what was described as mass suffering associated with the previous John Mahama government (Akolgo 2018). President Akufo-Addo promised rapid industrialisation, free education and a war on public-sector corruption. By August 2017, far from building factories, the new government identified what it said were a few indigenous vulnerable banks with inadequate capital, high levels of non-performing loans, and weak corporate governance (BoG 2018). By the end of August 2017, two of those banks, UT Bank and Capital Bank, were closed. A year later, in August 2018, five other banks had their licences revoked, followed by 23 Ghanaian-owned savings and loans companies in 2019 (BoG 2019). The ‘cleanup’, as the government christened it, extended to the closure of 347 microfinance institutions by May 2019. Over 6000 direct jobs (iWatch Africa 2019) and about 42,000 industry-wide jobs (Africa Eye Report 2020) were lost. The government said it was 3000 direct jobs lost, not 6000. Whatever the number, the Akufo-Addo administration admits it has spent US$2.1 billion on a banking-sector clean-up that has led to the collapse of hundreds of local financial institutions and the loss of thousands of jobs. No foreign-owned bank was closed. Yet the collapse of the financial institutions was just the beginning of the crisis.

Revealing what can be described as the criminogenic character of capitalism (Whyte 2009; Wiegratz 2019), Menzgold, a Ponzi scheme that defrauded about 16,000 customers of over 1.68 million Ghana cedis [GHc] was exposed in 2018 (Amponsah-Mensah 2021). Incorporated in 2014 to trade gold and other special metals, Menzgold rebranded as Menzbanc and received deposits with promises of 7–10% monthly interest payments for depositors (Myjoyonline 2019). After its chief executive officer, Nana Appiah Mensah, was arrested in Dubai for similar fraudulent activities, the crackdown on Menzgold intensified. Its offices were closed and the hopes of thousands of customers were shattered. There were sporadic and violent protests across the country. When the demonstrations appeared fruitless, the victims resorted to vigils, prayers, curses on government officials for failing to rescue them and, for some, suicide (Citinewsroom 2019).

There is considerable debate about the cause of Ghana’s financial-sector crisis. An attempt has been made to blame the Bank of Ghana for its failure to regulate the financial sector, and the defunct banks for their poor banking practices. For instance, Torku and Laryea (2021), as well as Benson (2019), cite weak corporate governance as the reason for the crisis, while Amponsah-Mensah (2021) insists it is a consequence of poor regulation. Dogbe (2020) also blames regulatory failures and suggests the need to create a new independent regulator of the financial sector.

Rather than view the banking and financial crisis in Ghana as the result of regulatory failures or even political corruption, the crisis should instead be situated in the context of Africa’s post-structural-adjustment political economy. Neoliberal capitalism on the continent ensures a weak domestic financial system dominated by foreign banks, global capital, foreign currencies and, consequently, debt distress. This facilitates, as Samir Amin observed, ‘the extraction of imperialist rent from Africa’s suffering population and others from the (global) south’ (Amin 2012, 16). As Tim Zajontz recently noted, ‘periodic cycles of debt financing, debt distress and structural adjustment are a systemic feature of the malintegration of Africa into the global capitalist economy’ (Zajontz 2022, 173). I explain the recent banking and financial crisis in Ghana on the basis that African countries have been integrated into the global financial system in a subordinate position, which creates, sustains, aggravates and perpetuates what Koddenbrock and Sylla (2019) called the chain of monetary and financial dependency. Put differently, African countries are victims of international financial subordination: not only in this neoliberal era, but throughout the continent’s history of colonial and postcolonial exploitation.

Discussing the Ghanaian situation helps unpack the various manifestations of neoliberal capitalist exploitation in Africa. Ghana, more than any other country on the continent, has embraced neoliberalism, starting from its enrolment as the first African country that was part of a structural adjustment programme in 1983 to open its economy to foreign financial institutions. It therefore provides a good starting point for understanding how countries on the continent are integrated into the global financial system in a subordinate position.

Ghana’s financial subordination

In 1983 Ghana was praised as the ‘star pupil’ of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank’s structural adjustment programme (Bello 2006; Rothchild 1991). The following decades witnessed simultaneous deregulation and financial liberalisation, opening the economy to multinational corporations and financial institutions to facilitate the extraction of surplus. Ghana is currently caught in a global financial system in which its currency, the cedi, is not a basis for trade. It maintains foreign exchange reserves in an attempt to stabilise the cedi and back its liabilities, yet the cedi continues to depreciate rapidly. In the last 40 years, the cedi has slumped by about 18.8% per year against the US dollar (Dzawu 2020).

Financial subordination in Ghana is also historically evidenced by a foreign-dominated banking system focused on repatriating profits and moving capital out of the country rather than supporting domestic industries. During the colonial period, the Bank of British West Africa and the West African Currency Board (WACB) served the colonial administration and facilitated British exploitation of its colonies including the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The WACB that marked the establishment of the colonial monetary system in British West Africa was simply an extension of British imperial power (Hopkins 1970). The board was positioned to financially empower Britain and keep the West African Colonies dependent on it. As Hopkins observes:

The main function of the banking system, which was also based on the metropolis, was to improve the efficiency of the money supply rather than to increase the volume of money. Bank lending was confined for the most part to large expatriate firms. The functions of the currency board were mainly a passive kind, being limited to large-scale money changing activities, to investing the reserves of the colonial currency, and distributing the profits derived from these investments. (Hopkins 1970, 102)

By acting in this way, the colonial banking system guaranteed an extraction of ‘all available savings from the colonies’ by ‘forcing colonial governments’ surplus balances and savings banks’ funds to London’ (Narsey 2016, 210). Effectively, it ensured ‘a divorce between the financial system and domestic production’ (Koddenbrock, Kvangraven, and Sylla 2020, 17). Structural adjustment consolidated this divorce between finance and production. The banking system in the neoliberal era may appear different in scale and instruments, but its core structure is no different from that in the colonial period – it is dominated by foreign banks (Figure 1) and creates little domestic credit for the private sector (Figure 2) to support job creation and the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As shown in Figure 1, over 50% of banks operating in Ghana are foreign owned.

Figure 1.

Licensed banks in Ghana (2017–21). Source: Bank of Ghana (BoG 2021b).

Figure 2.

Domestic bank credit to the private sector (% of gross domestic product). Source: World Bank (2021b).

Meanwhile, the so-called banking sector clean-up also revoked the licences of seven local banks since they could not meet the minimum capital requirement of GHc400 million. Despite calls from civil society groups to protect local financial institutions (for instance, from the Africa Center for Economic Transformation in 2018), the government nonetheless required the same minimum capital from local infant banks and global giants like Barclays Bank. It is also clear from Figure 2 that the banking system suppresses credit. Over the last 20 years, domestic lending to the private sector has been curbed compared to the sub-Saharan average. Fluctuating, but mostly decreasing, credit to private businesses is between 13% and 11% of gross domestic product (GDP), compared to the continental average of about 27%, between 2017 and 2020. The period before the closure of the banks showed much higher percentages of domestic credit to the private sector in Ghana. Other African countries like South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire offer more credit to the private sector, mostly averaging above 60% in South Africa and about 20% in Côte d’Ivoire. Certainly, South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire display their own nuances and do not represent ideal banking systems. Even within the mainstream literature extolling the virtues of neoliberalism, there is widespread evidence that foreign banks tend to lend less to SMEs (Berger et al. 2005; Clarke et al. 2005; De Haas, Ferreira, and Taci 2010; Gormley 2010; Quartey et al. 2017). The reasons given for the credit repression range from SMEs’ lack of collateral (Quartey et al. 2017) to the risks and transaction costs of SME lending (Beck 2007), the absence of formal business records from SMEs (Berger et al. 2005), and the quality of lending laws (De Haas, Ferreira, and Taci 2010). What these studies fail to account for is that in liberalised economies of the South, foreign banks, far from being interested in supporting domestic development in the countries they operate, facilitate capitalist accumulation and exploitation. In this way, the financial system works with global capital to keep developing countries dependent on the North, as Samir Amin and Kwame Nkrumah argued. Amin inspired commitment to rigorous research and radical change (Kvangraven, Styve, and Kufakurinani 2021). He posited that in globalised capitalism, money is the dominant instrument for extracting capital from the underdeveloped periphery of the world system and channelling it to developed countries (Amin 1974).

Prior to Amin, Kwame Nkrumah feared financial dependency and warned of imperialist domination of Africa through the financial system (Nkrumah 1965). On the methods of neocolonialism, Nkrumah observes that it may take military forms, but ‘more often, however, neocolonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means … by monetary control over foreign exchange and through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power’ (Nkrumah 1965, 1). Of course, this happens with the support of domestic actors; political leaders and other private entrepreneurs who benefit from Africa’s continuing economic and financial dependency, and who are determined to sustain it.

This duality of external and internal forces sustaining Africa’s financial dependency is emphasised by Koddenbrock and Sylla (2019). Externally, they argue that African countries with their subordinate currencies face US dollar and euro hegemony. Additionally, international pressures on free capital flows enable capital flight from African economies and keep them dependent on the global North for the money needed to finance national policies. Internally, this dependency is sustained by a foreign-dominated and oligopolistic banking system that represses credit. At the same time, internal political elites who benefit from the chain of dependency tend to support neoliberal policies of free capital flows rather than domestic-oriented development policy. Ultimately, the subordinated economy (Ghana, in this case) serves the interest of global finance capital – opening its doors to foreign financial institutions and enabling them to accumulate as much as they can under the guise of attracting foreign direct investment.

A renewed debt crisis

Nothing evidences the cost of African countries’ subordinated integration into the financialised capitalist system more than their recurring debt crises. The 1980s debt crisis triggered by the oil shocks of the 1970s provided a justification for structural adjustment with the promise of economic growth and transformation but failed to deliver either (Mkandawire and Soludo 1998). Four decades since structural adjustment, Africa remains in debt distress and Ghana is no exception (World Bank 2021a). At the end of September 2021, Ghana’s total public debt stood at GHc341.8 billion (US$58.2 billion), representing over 77% of GDP (BoG 2021a), and as of 2019, the country spends about 37% of government revenue to service debt (Amegashie 2021). It is now, like most sub-Saharan African countries since the debt cancellation in the early 2000s, back to debt levels it is unable to pay (World Bank 2021a). Figure 3 shows Ghana’s external debt has risen by nearly 10 times since the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief of the early 2000s. Prior to 2004, when Ghana officially completed the processes required for the HIPC programme, external debt was US$8.3 billion; it had decreased to US$3.5 billion by the end of HIPC in 2007 (Figure 3). Like many sub-Saharan African countries after the debt cancellation, Ghana went on a borrowing spree, induced by the appeal of Eurobonds (Mutize 2021) and the Chinese lending boom of the last decade.

Figure 3.

Ghana’s external debt (2000–21, US$). Source: Bank of Ghana (BoG 2021a) and Ministry of Finance (2021). HIPC: Heavily Indebted Poor Countries.

Post HIPC, debt has increased significantly, from US$3.5 billion in 2007 to US$28 billion at the end of September 2021. The economic cost of the growing debt has been multifaceted; apart from constraining government policy space, natural-resourced collateralised debt, such as the US$2 billion Chinese loan, threatens the environment and livelihoods. In the deal, Chinese firm Sinohydro Group Limited is to provide a US$2 billion infrastructure loan in exchange for Ghana’s bauxite in Atewa Forest Reserve in the Eastern Region. Activists and non-governmental organisations have protested the potential destruction of the forest reserve (Citinewsroom 2020), but their protests did not stop the government of Ghana signing the deal with Sinohydro (Purwins 2021). Besides the localised problem of environment and livelihoods, the colonising power of debt is a concern. It legitimises lenders’ control of national policy priorities. An example has been the regular IMF conditionalities to Ghana on privatisation, liberalisation, eradication of government subsidies and freeze on public-sector recruitment. For instance, an IMF US$940 million loan to Ghana demanded an increase in oil prices, a freeze on public-sector hiring and an end to energy subsidies (BBC 2015). As Zajontz notes, ‘debt is a social relation marked by asymmetrical material relations and power differentials between debtor and lender’ (2022, 176). For African economies, debt reinforces their integration into the exploitative neoliberal order. It also means deteriotating living conditions for working-class citizens.

Conclusion

This briefing has argued that Ghana represents a visible example of an uneven and deleterious integration of an emerging capitalist economy into the global capitalist financial system. It represents the international financial subordination that developing countries face. This financial subordination sustains, and aggravates, the country’s economic and financial dependency on core capitalist economies. The evidence of this is in the foreign domination of Ghana’s banking system that suppresses domestic credit to the private sector. The consequence of Ghana’s subordinate integration into the global financial system is also shown in the recurring debt crises. This view is certainly not shared by the World Bank and the government of Ghana, both of whom take every opportunity to highlight how liberalisation is opening opportunities for poverty reduction and prosperity. This should not come as any surprise: it has been the paradox of neoliberal capitalism in Ghana – governments boasting about growth figures (now financial inclusion) while citizens complain, cry and curse the system daily, in buses, at churches and mosques, at funerals and parties. It is necessary to return to neocolonial discourse in explaining the current forms of exploitation, together with dependency theory. Kwame Nkrumah envisaged the consortium of financial interests we see today. His work is a good starting point for understanding contemporary developments.

Note

1

The Alliance for Social Equity and Public Accountability (ASEPA) estimates (as reported in Africa Eye Report 2020) the figure to be 42,850 for both direct and indirect jobs. iWatch Africa only estimated direct job losses at 6000, a figure confirmed by Fact Check Ghana.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Ray Bush for his kind editorial guidance, to the reviewers for their comments and to Dr Jörg Wiegratz for his comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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