Masacring The MASLOC

No social intervention programme has been so abused, if you like bastardized, as the Microfinance And Small Loans Centre initiative, fondly referred to as MASLOC.

As one of the surviving social intervention programmes spawned by the Kufuor administration, it is suffering an unspeakable bout of financial hemorrhage at the hands of political activists who consider it as a milking cow.

The laudable idea behind the initiative has long been confined to the dustbin of history. It is today anything but a centre serving the needs of all Ghanaians requiring a helping hand from the state to start a business. As a conduit for siphoning public funds to satisfy the needs of hungry and deprived party activists, it has provided illegal oxygen to pockets of microfinance companies strewn across Accra.

Regarding it as a means of expressing gratitude to party activists and others who for instance organized and partook in a so-called national prayer sessions is not outlandish.

Funds from the initiative have been used for all sorts of projects in the name of assisting Ghanaians. It is appalling that even as the country is still grappling with the effects of unusual stealing of public funds, an initiative of this stature should be subjected to the wicked machinations of bad citizens in the name of 'our party is in power.'

The story which made the headlines yesterday was one of the many that Ghanaians are used to reading in the media these days.

It confirms what a disgraced doctor who cheated the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) said after his bribe money was rejected by auditors. His accompanying note that they should take the money and kill the story as he put it, 'everybody steals from their place of work,' spoke volumes about the current state of Ghana, MASLOC being an apt example.

Most people no longer care about moralities and would cut corners to cheat the state. For them the state is an abstract entity which must be milked using whatever means is available.

We have observed how successive leaderships of the initiative have let it down by way of irresponsible management and outright connivance in siphoning its resources.

The story which prompted this commentary is about a complex criminal engineering by a group of crooks who have mastered the art of siphoning from a state agency.

Were this to happen in China, the response of the state would have been too obvious. A number of state functionaries who were too smart in their appointments have paid the ultimate price in the Communist country.

Forging 102 non-existent associations and advancing so much to them through two financial institutions speaks volumes about how rotten our systems have become.

If this is only a tip of the iceberg of the rot in the country, it can only be conjectured how bad things have become.

From bloated public payroll to what has been unearthed at MASLOC, the list is endless. Tomorrow we do not know what would be brought to the public domain. Gosh!