The second fieldnote in our series takes us to Anna-Riikka’s fieldwork that occurs in the midst Ghana’s on-going financial crisis. In the course of the upcoming six months, Anna-Riikka will explore the aftermath of the 2017-2018 state take-over of nine indigenous private banks and the collapse of several investment Ponzi schemes, characterised by vibrant public moral debates and ethical reflection on the reasons for the crisis. As part of her research, she traces business networks between banking professionals, bank shareholders and Charismatic Pentecostal religious institutions; she also interns in a Ghanaian private bank and follows debates around finance and investment in the public sphere. Her objective is to map out a network of agents, interactions and concrete efforts that engage the popular ethical imagination towards building a viable banking sector in a country characterised by centuries of mistrust of banking, volatile macro-economic conditions, and dominance of foreign banking powers.

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At the moment, everyone in Ghana’s capital Accra is a financial analyst. Amidst the country’s on-going financial crisis, which includes the state take-over of nine Ghanaian private banks, finance excites vibrant popular debate (Figure 1). Frequently, I find myself engaging in conversations on the root causes for the crisis with people I meet in public transport, taxis, marketplaces, churches, and other sites of urban daily life. The records published by the Central Bank, Bank of Ghana, showcase liquidity challenges, non-performing loans and investments, as well as inaccuracies related to the process of acquiring licenses that led to the collapse. Attributing moral blame strongly characterises the conversation. Personal greed features high: banking executives are accused of using bank deposits as their personal “piggy banks.” From the ruling government perspective, the banking crisis boils down to lack of good corporate governance and adherence to proper banking regulations, which has led to the establishment of a special department, the “Office of Ethics and Internal Investigation”, at the Bank of Ghana (BoG). Finally, popular debates of political games excite imagination of the banking crisis as a conspiracy to concentrate political power. A taxi-driver gives me his version: “You see, if you are an entrepreneur and you want to start a bank, you first think, who do I know in the government? Is there someone I can approach for a licence? So, you apply for a licence, and promise the bank will support the projects of your party. When your party loses power, the new party that takes over doesn’t continue your projects and comes after you. That’s how banks collapse. It’s all about politics.”

While the Ghanaian public entertains the possibility of the banking crisis as a power game between domestic capitalists and the two dominant political parties, New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC), perhaps counter-intuitively, Ghanaian Charismatic Pentecostal churches have also become part of the conversation. One of the nine collapsed banks, Capital Bank, was known for its strong links to one of Ghana’s largest Charismatic Pentecostal churches, International Central Gospel Church (ICGC). The head pastor, Mensa Otabil, a widely respected Christian voice in Ghana and beyond, was the board chairman of Capital Bank which was started by a member of his church in 2009. From its beginnings as a microfinance enterprise, Capital Bank grew into a savings and loans company, before it acquired a universal banking license in 2013. Due to liquidity challenges, the bank was taken over by the state-owned Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB) in August 2017. One year later in August 2018, Bank of Ghana released a document that implied that Otabil had been part of the board that authorised questionable investment decisions when the bank received a 610 million GHS (116 million USD) liquidity support from the Central Bank. This year, Otabil will appear in court to respond to these allegations.

On a broader scale, given the large number of churches in Accra and the consistent amount of liquid cash that churches amass on a weekly basis in the form of offerings and tithes, which they deposit on their own bank accounts, the banking crisis has brought the economic role of churches to the public limelight. At the same time, the role of Otabil in Capital Bank has excited moral debate on the proper role of “men of God” in economic life – “Can a pastor own shares in a bank? Is it right? They are men of God, even the Bible says they should shy away from earthly riches” as a journalist friend of mine reasoned. Also, Otabil’s expertise as a chairman of a bank is called into question. In social media, old Youtube videos circulate in which he admits his lack of skills in mathematics, while he claims banking is just about ensuring “money comes in and money goes out.” My young colleagues working in the call centre of a Ghanaian private bank, where I am doing an internship, clearly disagree; as they watch Otabil’s speech, they repeat his words with sarcasm and conclude that the entire church is in “crisis.” Otabil, meanwhile, urges his church members to tell his critics that “God is good.” (Figure 2)

Closely connected with the banking crisis, the past two years have also seen the proliferation and collapse of diverse Ponzi schemes that, according to some estimates, have diverted customer deposits away from the traditional banking system. The most widely known one is Menzgold, a gold-trading platform that attracted thousands of investors; wildest estimates believe the number to be in hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians, including many in the diaspora. The company promised to pay a monthly 10 percent interest, which they called a dividend, stating that they do gold trading via their own platform. Their spectacular, gold-glittering buildings emerged in Accra’s poshest neighbourhoods from 2016 onwards (Figure 3). They run an ingenious marketing campaign: popular music artists became brand ambassadors, while the CEO, Nana Appiah, posted pictures of himself next to influential political and public figures. When the Ghana Securities and Exchange Commission ordered Menzgold to shut down in

September 2018, ruling that the company was not authorised to deal in gold nor take deposits, stories started circulating of celebrities, churches, politicians, bankers and professionals who have their investments “locked up” in the gold trading firm. “The tithes are gone!”, a friend of mine laughed one evening, telling me a story of a Charismatic church that had invested significant sums of money in Menzgold. Besides capital equity, the media reports on individuals who have taken a bank loan to invest in the scheme, as well as marriage break-ups due to locked-up investments. Another friend of mine, who is starting up a real estate company, laments that potential investors have lost their capital and are unable to do other projects. But no-one seems to be willing to admit they have fallen victim to this scheme; people are afraid of being accused of greed and culpability, while protests around the closed-down gold-glittering buildings intensify.

One evening after a full day visiting the headquarters of ICGC and a Ghanaian media station that broadcasts daily stories of the “aggrieved customers” of Menzgold, I take an Uber-taxi back home. My incisive taxi-driver remarks: “Me, I didn’t go to school, but even me I know you can’t get that kind of interest. Menzgold, they had lawyers, teachers, bankers, the learned people! Oh Ghana, people like money too much. The moment someone says, I give you eight percent, ten percent, people run for it.” Indeed, the “learned people”, or, the “professionals,” are at the heart of public scrutiny: Who didn’t do their job well? Why were the rules and regulations bypassed? For whose benefit? And above all, what kind of knowledge and expertise is required to run a bank and invest successfully?