Let’s work together to fight corruption

Ghana has had a long-running battle with corruption, either perceived or real, under many governments.

It is in this context that many Ghanaians, including anti-corruption campaigners, keenly followed the country’s ranking when Transparency International (TI), on Tuesday, January 25, 2022, released the 2021 Corruption Perception Index (CPI).

Ghana had a score of 43 out of 100 and ranked 73rd out of the 180 countries included in the index for 2021.

The 2021 CPI score indicates that Ghana failed to make progress in the fight against corruption in 2021, as it was the same score of 43 that it obtained in 2020.

At a round table last Wednesday the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) responded to the latest ranking, describing the current performance as still below 50, which is the expected average.

We cannot but bemoan Ghana’s stagnating state on the score, against the backdrop of government’s efforts, including the passage of various laws, such as the Right to Information Act, the Witness Protection Act, the bipartisan adoption of the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP) by Parliament and the establishment of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP), and civil society advocacy.

Civil society organisations (CSOs) in the anti-corruption space have also advocated, trained people, facilitated conversations on the canker and how to get rid of it.

Some of these anti-graft organisations have gone a step further by initiating court actions to push for disallowances and surcharges to strengthen the hands of the Auditor General.

At the discussion, the consensus was that the cut-throat cost of vying for political office in Ghana was inflating the cost of government.

The loose supervision of institutions charged with ensuring that politics was done without the excesses, and the fact that such institutions were not resourced, and the unregulated sector of political party elections had all fed into the system of corruption experienced and perceived by people, and that is captured by CPI 2021.

At the forum on anti-corruption last Wednesday, speakers and participants did not mince words when they detailed how corruption could erode the legitimacy of leaders and cause civil disobedience when it persisted and the few rich people got richer, while the poor got poorer.

It is heartening that the organisers of the forum, the GII, intends to collate the views for a policy paper for concrete action subsequently.

The Daily Graphic will watch that space and hold the feet of civil society organisations to the fire to ensure that they lobby with the policy paper for tangible results.

It is evident that in spite of NACAP, Ghana is making no progress in fighting corruption. Evidently, although NACAP is supposed to ensure collaboration in the fight, it is not achieving that — not yet.

It is clear that the actions and efforts by the government and the advocacy by CSOs are not aligned. It is important because a reviewed asset declaration regime will stem illicit gain by public officials who sometimes advertise such gain when vying for elective political positions.

The Daily Graphic believes that apart from the policy paper on strategies for Ghana to progress in its anti-corruption drive, the government must revisit some of the proposals and work on them.

Indeed, an open asset declaration regime, robust laws on political party financing and campaigning, the depoliticisation of recruitment into the public service and empowering citizens to speak up on corruption, while we build strong public institutions to facilitate government business, are necessary steps that must be taken.

We fervently hopes that the fight against corruption will gain the deserved momentum in order to ensure the accelerated development of the country for the sake of our generation and generations unborn.