President and Chairman of Groupe Nduom (GN), Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom, has said the retrenchment of even a single employee of his firm leaves him in pain.

“At Groupe Nduom, we have over 6,000 employees. Most of them work hard. They have families and they have hopes for a better future. I agonise over even one employee who has to go home because the business cannot support him or her,” the business consultant stated in a Facebook post.

He recounted that: “Once in my life, I had to sell almost everything I owned and cherished and start all over again. But my dignity and knowledge was intact, so, I bounced back. I will do it all again if I have to. But not everyone has the choices available to me”.

Dr Nduom’s comments follow the action of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), recently, to fuse uniBank with Sovereign Bank, The Royal Bank, The Beige Bank and The Construction Bank, to form a totally new local bank called Consolidated Bank Ghana (CBG) Limited.

Before morphing the five banks into CBG, the central bank, in August 2017, revoked the licences of two other local banks, UT Bank and Capital Bank, and were subsequently taken over by GCB after having been declared “irredeemably insolvent” by the Bank of Ghana.

It has emerged that about 1,700 staff of CBG will be losing their jobs.

But Dr Nduom has entreated government and other authorities to quickly solve the challenges in the financial sector to boost local banks.

“We need lower cost of money, phased and guaranteed payment of government debts, managerial and shareholder/shareholder discipline, appropriate punishment for those who will not accept correction and a sustained programme to buy Made-in-Ghana among others,” he added.