An Open Letter To Switzerland's Ambassador To Ghana

Your Excellency,

When you recently spoke about the need to make Ghana a more attractive destination for investors, you were no doubt showing your commitment to strengthening the ties that bind the government and people of Switzerland, and the government and people of Ghana.

Those ties go back to 1843 when the first missionaries from the Basel Mission came to live and work in what then was the Gold Coast.

They were organised and sent to the Gold Coast by Swiss businesspeople who wanted the people of the Gold Coast to become Christians.

Those early  Basel missionaries - comprising Afro-Caribbeans, initially, and Europeans later on - left a legacy of uprightness, discipline and hard work that still underpin all the structures of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana.

Your Excellency, as regards the issue of making Ghana an attractive destination for investors, there is something that the Federal Swiss government can actually do to help the government and people of Ghana to attain that end  - at a time when most Ghanaian families have to struggle daily to survive: because of the prevailing harsh economic climate.

Over the years, there has been talk of the US-dollar equivalent of trillions of cedis lodged in accounts of the Oman Ghana Trust Fund, at the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS), supposedly belonging to the government and people of Ghana.

As you very well know, Your Excellency, behind the facade of uber-respectability, the world's leading banks that caused the global financial crisis, are centres of greed, chicanery and criminality. The recent benchmark rate-fixing Libor scandal being the latest manifestation of those unfortunate tendencies.

If they actually exist, it is only the Federal Swiss government that can force UBS to give all the funds said to be held in the Oman Ghana Trust Fund accounts back to the government and people of Ghana.

Your Excellency, by the simple measure of transforming those funds in the Oman Ghana Trust Fund accounts into a sovereign wealth fund for Ghana, which UBS can manage for a fee, those funds can be used to fund infrastructural projects, and to retire Ghana's debts, as and when contracted foreign loans mature, and to service those selfsame debts in the intervening years.

That way, it will not leave a massive hole in the balance sheet of UBS - and the crooks-in-high-places in Ghana will not have access to those funds: and the Ghanaian economy will be given a second-chance-opportunity to grow again.

Ghana can then finally be set on a course of becoming a fiscally-responsible and well-managed econony - and  uber business-friendly base from which Swiss businesses can manufacture and sell their products across the continent of Africa.

You can rest assured that the hard-pressed people of a grateful nation, will ensure that Swiss engineering firms bidding for contracts here, can play a leading role, in the expansion and modernisation of Ghana's infrastructure - paid for from the Oman Ghana Trust accounts converted to the Republic of Ghana Sovereign Wealth Fund, through the intervention of the Federal Swiss government.

Your Excellency, simply put, the best way the government and people of Switzerland can help the government and people of Ghana, for their mutual benefit,  is for the Federal Swiss government to order its secret services, and law enforcement agencies, to find that money sitting in the accounts of the Oman Ghana Trust Fund at UBS - and ensure that it is converted into a sovereign wealth fund for Ghana, which UBS can manage for a fee.

Thanks!

Kind regards,

The Ghanapolitics Blog.

 PS Your Excellency, since the Swiss are renowned the world over, for their meticulous record-keeping, Ghanaians would be grateful if you could request your secret services and law enforcement agencies now carrying out investigations into the financial affairs of Fifa, to give the people of Ghana details of all payments made to the Ghana Football Association (GFA), by Fifa, since Mr. Ohene Djan affiliated the GFA to Fifa in 1958, to date. Thanks.