2,500 fail to settle MASLOC loan

Page 30: Daily Graphic, April 21, 2010.
Story: Albert K. Salia
More than 2,500 persons who took loans amounting to GH¢1.4 million from the Microfinance and Small Loans Centre (MASLOC) in the Eastern Region have failed to settle their indebtedness.
About GH¢1.8 million was disbursed to more than 3,400 beneficiaries between 2007 and 2008.
A total of GH¢300,000 has so far been retrieved from about 500 of the defaulting clients since November last year.
The beneficiaries had between six months and one year to resettle their indebtedness.
The Eastern Regional Manager of MASLOC, Mr Dominic Baah-Ayim, told the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday that 119 of such defaulters were facing court action to enable the office to retrieve various sums of money from them.
He explained that the court action was the last resort being used to get defaulters to repay their indebtedness so that applicants on the waiting list could be served.
According to him, the office often sent text messages, made phone calls to defaulters and also summoned them before opinion leaders to impress upon them to pay.
Mr Baah-Ayim said it was only after those moves had failed that the office resorted to a court action to retrieve its funds.
He indicated that the office had been able to retrieve GH¢20,000 from four of its recalcitrant beneficiaries in the Eastern Region through court action.
He said some of the beneficiaries after collecting the money, often abandoned their business intentions thinking that it was freebie from government.
He cited the case of a 56-year-old poultry farmer at Suhyen-Koforidua, Kojo Anim, who allegedly accessed GH¢2,000 from MASLOC with the view to expanding his poultry business but absconded to Kumasi after selling off the birds on the farm and abandoned the project.
He said after several visits to the suspect’s project site at Suhyen near Koforidua to locate him proved futile, MASLOC quickly summoned his two guarantors to the office for a combined search effort.
“In a long and tortuous search, it was revealed that the beneficiary had abandoned his project at Suhyen-Koforidua and now domiciled at Bremen near Kumasi where he had deleted all contact details,” he added.
Mr Baah-Ayim said a joint effort of the Kumasi Police and the MASLOC recovery team tracked him down with an abscond warrant on March 25, 2010 for his refusal to pay MASLOC facility taken as far back as February, 28 2008.
In another vein, he said, a leader of the Betom Hope Movement in Koforidua, Comfort Agyapong, whose group was granted GH¢6,250 as microcredit loan, had also been arrested for extorting money from her group members on the pretext of paying the MASLOC loan.
Mr Baah-Ayim said to forestall recurrence, the management had also begun a nationwide public education for its prospective clients on how to effectively utilise the loans.
He explained that the training was essential to create the platform for prospective beneficiaries to learn business-like approach to handling money for productivity.
According to him, the training formed part of efforts to correct the erroneous impression about the operations of MASLOC that the loans granted to beneficiaries were "free money" or "government's gift" to party functionaries.
MASLOC, he explained, was expected to promote the emergence, development and growth of a sustainable and decentralised micro-financial sector with grass-roots participation in ownership, management and control.