Surveilling The Corruption Perception

Corruption in Ghana has been common since independence, and even though successive governments have made one effort or the other to fight it, there is still a growing perception that government-related corruption is high.

Ahead of the 2016 general elections, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo pledged to fight the menace, when elected as president. And soon after being sworn into office, he vowed to disown any public official found to be engaged in any act of corruption or malfeasance.

In fact, he charged Ghanaians to act as citizens, and not spectators; and promised his government would remain committed to making corruption unattractive on a sustainable basis.

True to his word, he put in place a number of anti-corruption measures that had been described as unmatched in the Fourth Republic.

These include online systems to check corruption at GPHA, DVLA, Passport Office, and at the Registrar-General’s Department.

Then came the passage of the Right to Information Act, the introduction of e-procurement and e-justice programmes, all aimed at enhancing transparency and reducing human interface in government businesses.

Apart from that, the government introduced the land digitization process to check corruption at the Lands Commission, established the Office of the Special Prosecutor, rolled out the National ID programme, and implemented a Mobile Money Interoperability policy to consolidate a cashless public sector.

But in spite of all these, civil society groups, such as CDD-Ghana are raising serious concerns about ‘the creeping normalization of corruption among the Ghanaian populace’.

In fact, majority of the citizens still believe the country has not made the needed strides in the fight against corruption. Some have bluntly said that the trend has been the same over the last 10 years. STAGNATION is what they call it.

While the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) observes that the country is losing the fight, the Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu, is crying that his office is being frustrated by government appointees and heads of institutions.

And as if to add insult to injury, the horizon has been further blurred by the appointment of Mr. Kwame Owusu as chairman of the board of directors of the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).

Today, even New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters openly admit they are yet to see the prosecution of corrupt politicians that they were promised in 2016.

THE NEW PUBLISHER will like to remind government that for as long as the NPP rode to power on the back of corruption, much would be expected of them on that score.

The paper wishes to stress that corruption is not only the stealing of government money, but includes wanton misappropriation, reckless dissipation and willfully causing financial loss.

We may shrug and call it MERE PERCEPTION, but government will be shooting itself in the foot if it fails to heed the sensibilities of the masses.