Former President John Dramani Mahama has described the current Speaker of Parliament, Professor Mike Oquaye as an oppressive leader of the lawmaking chamber.

Mr Mahama, who has been touring the Savanna Region ahead of the 7 December 2020 polls, said: “Today, you cannot expect justice when you go to the judicatory, you can’t speak in parliament, you have an oppressive Speaker who won’t allow them to freely express themselves.”

In the view of the flag bearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), it is one of the ways in which the Akufo-Addo administration has politicised national institutions such as the judiciary and Parliament.

Also, Mr Mahama has accused the Akufo-Addo government of collapsing nine local banks for political reasons.

He explained that the government could have spent GHS9 billion to save the banks rather than allowing them to collapse only for it to use GHS22billion of taxpayers’ money to refund monies to the affected depositors.

The Bank of Ghana, in 2017, commenced a series of clean-up exercises in the financial sector that saw the revocation of licences of the nine banks along with 347 microfinance companies, 23 savings & loans companies as well as finance houses, and 39 microcredit companies.

Mr Mahama said: “Financial institutions have been collapsed, Ghanaians’ money has been locked up. You needed GHS9 billion to save those banks and financial institutions that collapsed but because of politics, somebody decided to closed them down”.

“Now, Ghana is spending GHC22billion to pay the deposits of people whose monies were locked up.

“What kind of sense is this? You won’t spend GHC9 billion to save the banks but you pay GHC22billion to pay back peoples’ deposits and you can’t even pay”, Mr Mahama criticised.

“I heard the president say he has paid 98 per cent of the depositors. We should ask the depositors how have they received their money?” the former President said.