Customer Corner – The Generator Files : CalBank – The Lights Stayed On. The Capital Ratio Went Negative.

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CalBank’s capital crisis gives Cummins one hell of an unintended sequel. In its generator case study, Cummins presented the bank’s Accra headquarters as a fortress against power cuts. Two diesel sets stood ready to keep the banking hall and data centre running. Sensible enough. But a bank can have enough fuel to light the bloody skyline and still lack the capital its regulator requires. CalBank’s own accounts show how spectacularly those two forms of security parted company.

Two Generators and a Very Confident Brochure

Cummins Ghana installed two C900D5 generators, each rated at 900 kVA. It supplied an automatic transfer switch, a 10,000-litre bulk fuel tank and a 2,000-litre day tank. Staff received training, and the project took 16 weeks. Cummins said the system met the headquarters’ standby-power needs, allowing it to serve customers through an outage. The case study closes with the sort of phrase marketing departments adore: “come what may”.

For a grid failure, that is a reasonable ambition. Cummins had designed an electrical safeguard for a building, and its account gives us no reason to claim the equipment failed. The trouble begins when the bright little showroom picture meets the bank’s accounts. The generators could switch on automatically. They could not make a troubled loan perform, restore a regulatory capital buffer or write the board’s annual report without apparently reaching for the good whisky.

CalBank Capital Crisis: The Grid Was The Easy Part

At the end of 2023, CalBank reported a negative 9.90% bank-level capital adequacy ratio. Its non-performing loan ratio stood at 33.20%. A year later, capital adequacy remained negative at 7.22% below zero, while the non-performing loan ratio had climbed to 47.51%. The latter figure meant nearly half the gross loan book met the bank’s measure for non-performance. CalBank reported GH¢1.65 billion in non-performing loans.

Capital adequacy is a regulatory measure of the bank’s financial buffer, rather than a count of the notes in its vault. The required minimum cited in CalBank’s report was 10%. Its result was on the wrong side of zero. Somewhere between those two numbers lies an entire fucking canyon that a backup generator cannot bridge.

The bank attributed pressure on its position to Ghana’s domestic debt exchange and credit impairments. Those were real financial shocks. Its 2024 results announcement also reported a turnaround to GH¢414.2 million profit before tax, after a GH¢946.2 million loss in 2023. Yet profit in one year did not instantly repair the capital shortfall or the loan book. CalBank’s announcement celebrated a “strong recovery” and “improved financial health” while its full accounts still displayed the figures above. Both sets of numbers belonged to the same bank. The cheerful ones simply got the better lighting.

The Board Awarded Itself a Gold Star

CalBank’s 2024 corporate governance report records that the Bank of Ghana placed it under Prompt Corrective Action because it failed to meet the statutory minimum capital requirement. That is the regulator stepping into the room. The same report then says the board assessed its governance processes as effective and was satisfied it had “successfully achieved its corporate governance objectives”.

What, exactly, was on the marking sheet? A capital adequacy ratio below zero, a non-performing loan ratio approaching half the book and a regulator imposing corrective action make for a curious victory lap. The board was certifying its governance processes; the report does not say those ugly outcomes were objectives. But that distinction does little to rescue the tone. If this was the year to announce that governance had successfully done its job, I would hate to see the fucking minutes from a year it hadn’t.

There was another item in the fine print. CalBank disclosed that the Bank of Ghana had identified breaches involving capital adequacy, its single-obligor limit and its aggregate foreign-exchange open position. The bank said the associated penalties would be computed and deferred until its financial indicators improved. Its 2025 annual report still said it could not quantify those penalties as at December 2025. The bill had not vanished; its amount remained unresolved in that disclosure. Corporate confidence, meanwhile, required no such calculation.

The Repair Came From Shareholders

CalBank did recover, and the date matters. In the final quarter of 2025, it completed an oversubscribed GH¢900 million rights issue and private placement offer. Its chairman reported that the Bank of Ghana subsequently lifted the Prompt Corrective Action restrictions on new lending. By the end of 2025, the bank’s capital adequacy and loan-quality figures had improved substantially.

The most recent published figures sharpen that change. For the nine months ended 30 September 2026, CalBank reported 18.4% bank-level capital adequacy and an 8.5% non-performing loan ratio. Those are unaudited interim results, but they plainly rule out writing as though CalBank remains stuck in its 2024 condition. The rescue involved new capital, recoveries and changes to the loan book. Nobody fixed a regulatory ratio by topping up Cummins’ day tank.

That recovery also makes the earlier self-congratulation more revealing. When the buffer was negative, the board said its governance objectives had been achieved. When shareholders supplied capital and the regulator eased its restrictions, CalBank had a real improvement to report. The two moments deserve different adjectives. Its press office treated the distinction like an optional extra.

The Lights Were Never The Whole Bank

Cummins sold CalBank protection against a power cut. On the evidence available, that is what its generators provided. This Generator Files story has no broken engine to unveil. It has something more awkward for the polished case-study format: a headquarters equipped to survive an electrical failure while the institution inside it faced a profound financial one.

The machinery could keep the banking hall lit and the data centre alive. It could even make the building look reassuring from the street. Behind those walls, CalBank’s capital ratio had gone negative, nearly half its loans were non-performing, and its board found room to applaud its own governance. By 2026 the bank had rebuilt much of what was missing. The old certificate of success remains an extraordinary little artefact, like a gold star stuck to the door of a flooded basement.

Cummins’ two generators may have done their job perfectly. The nasty joke is that the bank’s directors appeared considerably more impressed with theirs.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

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