IS MY MONEY SAFE?

               The fear of thieves and armed robbers had always being a plague Ghanaians fought hard to overcome when it comes to losing money. However with the introduction of the new currency notes am sure other concerns have being triggered.

Imagine buying something in traffic and the hawker is supposed to give you change for your 200 cedi note and the car speeds off. Herh! At times for even 50 cedis the way you can get attitude or worse still a verbal dressing because the troski mate or vendor does not have change for you, hmmm…. Yet soon bigger denominations will flood the system and am trying to predict, “What it will be like?” 

                   But on the whole, how is our banking sector?

Few years ago, mobile money was introduced to the country and we exclaimed out loud that atlas, we have sought of won the fight against thieves! Less cash to move around, easy and fast transactions are here to stay. What increased our joy was our banks joining the fad by allowing electronic transactions even to the point of giving customers the chance to link mobile money accounts to their bank accounts. At this point, we could sing the popular Yesu Adi Nkunim song for our ‘cherished’ enemies (armed robbers), because we seemed to have won the battle.

Then, suddenly, things started becoming frosty in the banking sector; board members of banks arguably squandering money and the Bank of Ghana [BoG] issuing reports on financial institutions that weren’t legit.

Shortly after that calamity arrived, some banks were closed, others merged (consolidated) or reduced to savings and loans, and the remaining asked to put things in order.

You can imagine the pressure that these banks were put through coupled with customers going hysterical about the safety of deposits because somehow “network” was denying clients access to their money.

Banks were becoming cemeteries because every now and then there is a new list of those going down [insolvent].

A pastor unnamed - recalls how he entered a bank with his clerk to withdraw money for a building project by his church. Now, upon waiting for hours on end, the money was brought but a half the amount (in a box) was loads of coins. Obviously, that was the remnants of cash in the bank that day. Broke banks!

I ponder over these and wonder whether our mobile money will in the near future suffer this fate? And, is our money safer under our beds at homes or safer with the various financial institutions in the face of these happenings?

I’m not here to dissuade anyone from keeping their monies with a financial institution. I am, rather, gripped by fear, just thinking out loud in asking, ‘is my money safe?’