Corruption Ranking Proves Rot in Nana Addo Gov’t – Minority

The Minority in Parliament has said Ghana’s ranking on the 2017 Global Corruption Perception Index is a vindication of their position that the current government is presiding over a corrupt administration.

Speaking to Citi News, the Minority Spokesperson on Communications, A.B.A. Fuseini said the drop in Ghana’s ranking on the Index proves that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government is unwilling to fight the canker.

“It is a vindication of us in the Minority; that we had said consistently that there has been so much corruption in this government. In the one-year-old government of President Nana Akufo-Addo, the corruption has been stinking to the high heavens,” he said.

He cited the $2.25 billion bond saga, which he said “the government was not even interested” in looking into.

Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta was accused of cronyism by the Minority in the bond issue, although the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) cleared him of any conflict of interest.

Mr. Fuseini noted other allegations of corruption which have been made under the current administration saying, “we have had the occasion to talk about the five million contaminated litres of fuel which were sent out under corrupt and opaque circumstances. We’ve had premix fuel issues. We have had issues coming from Korle Bu. We have had issues at the Presidency itself.”

Ghana dropped 11 places from the 2016 ranking to place 81 out of 180 countries in the 2017 Corruption Perception index.

Ghana’s mark out of a total of 100 was 40, down from 43, which the country attained in the 2016 index.

Index factored in Mahama government

The government has however argued that Ghana’s poor performance in the 2017 Global Corruption Perception Index also took into account corruption cases recorded under the John Mahama administration, which left power in January 2017.

The government’s Spokesperson on Governance and Legal Affairs, Herbert Krapa, stated that the report was not an indication that the current New Patriotic Party [NPP] government was corrupt.

The Ghana Integrity Initiative’s (GII) also noted that Ghana’s score of 40 points was likely a reflection of the insufficient investigations, prosecutions and sanctioning of corrupt acts, per data sources from 2016.

“It is important to remind ourselves of the plethora of corruption exposés during the period in question which might have influenced the perception of the respondents to the surveys as well as the business experts – examples include the 2016 election-related corruption issues, Bus Branding scandal, Ghana Standards Authority $1.2m Corruption Scandal, Central Medical Stores Arson Saga, National Lottery Authority bribery and numerous adverse findings in annual Audit Reports on the Public Sector,” the statement accompanying the current index stated.

It should be noted that only two of 13 data sources were from 2016, the Global Insight Country Risk Ratings and the African Development Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment.

Ghana’s past performance

The report, put together by Transparency International, ranks countries annually by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.

In the 2016 Corruption Perception Index ranking, Ghana dropped four percentage points, scoring 43 out of a clean score of 100.

In 2015, Ghana improved slightly on 2014’s figure with a rank of 56 out of 168 countries and a score of 47.

Thus, Ghana slid back by one percentage point from the 48 points scored in 2014.