The causes, consequences and control of corruption in Ghana
Empirical evidence associates extreme poverty and inequality to high levels of corruption. Corruption is major impediment to economic development. It takes away resources from the common pool and deprives a large population of partaking in the share of the national cake.
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Despite Ghana’s good governance and democratic credentials, corruption still remains cancerous in our society. Currently, we can concretely say that corruption in Ghana is not just a mere perception but inherently pervasive in the country as evidenced by the recent exposé in the Judiciary. The problem of corruption is now very worrying as different sources of data (both Transparency International (TI) and World Bank) rank Ghana higher in the corruption index compared to other developing countries.
Figure 1 compares the Graft index for Ghana and other group of countries.
According to Tl, corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for personal gain. They classified corruption as grand, petty and political depending on the pecuniary value and sector of occurrence. Grand corruption occurs at the high level of state with the connivance of politicians. Petty corruption connotes the abuse of office by low-and mid-level public officials in their interactions with the ordinary citizens. While political corruption is the manipulation of policies, institutions and rules of procedure to perpetuate the executive control of state resources.
This disaggregation is important because in Ghana, we equate corruption to only politicians. However, petty corruption is rife and this is equally deleterious to ordinary citizens. Political and grand corruption are mostly construed as perceptions which are not supported with any concrete evidence, in which the surest way to uncover them and produce the evidence for successful prosecution is only through changes in government. Corruption associated with the provision of essential services is more likely to affect poor people because they are more dependent on government or public facilities for such provision. Current research on the micro-level impact of corruption on Africa gives strong credence that poor people are more likely to pay bribe than the rich as they have limited options for meeting their social needs.
The economic loss suffered by Ghana because of corruption is enormous, and we cannot develop as a nation if we do not reduce the incentives for rent-seeking activities.
Apart from impeding economic growth, development and investments; it also exacerbates the income inequality gap especially as the poor are more adversely affected.
Rising corruption also decreases the citizens’ incentives to honor their tax obligations when they see ostentatious lifestyles by public servants.
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Similarly, corruption stifles the growth of domestic businesses in the country as a result of the unofficial payment or bribe that is solicited from them by government-mandated agencies. This increases the cost of doing business and makes Ghana uncompetitive globally for FDI.
Many businesses are expected to make unofficial payments to the agencies that are constitutionally-mandated to control their activities. For instance, the World Bank Enterprise Survey shows that a high percentage of firms in Ghana are required to pay bribes in obtaining licenses, permits and contracts.
Perception
From the Global Corruption Barometer report on Ghana by the TI, the statistics indicated that more than 50 per cent of the respondents perceived that corruption had increased and a significant 35 per cent thought it was extreme. Among the different institutions, percentage of respondents perceived the following institutions as extremely corrupt; Police (92%), Judiciary (71%), political parties (76%) and public and civil service (59%). This indicates that political/grand corruption is not the only type of corruption that has engulfed the nation. To show that these statistics are not just perception, a whopping 57 per cent of the respondents also indicated that they or a member of their household had paid a bribe to one of these public institutions. So, we cannot play the ostrich and pretend corruption in Ghana is all perception.
Successive governments have demonstrated that, they lack the incentive to fight corruption effectively, especially when the citizens are told to produce the evidence. Various anti-corruption agencies such as the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) have equally been ineffective in combating the corruption menace. These anti-corruption bodies have shown that their ineffectiveness is not necessarily because of limited resources, but rather their lack of autonomy and political will to fight corruption.
These bodies can easily be weaned-off government support in order to attain the necessary autonomy to fight political corruption as there could be many alternative sources of funding.
Approaches
Thus, for now the effective way would be a bottom-up approach, where individuals (Anas, Manasseh Azure), Civil Society Organizations and the media hold politicians accountable to the people by scrutinizing the government’s contracts even if parliamentarians otherwise would not effectively play that role.
Focusing on petty corruption, which affects majority of the people could be a good starting point as there are many of such occurrences around. us the ordinary Ghanaians.
We pay bribes to obtain passports, the nurses in our hospital solicit unofficial payments before they treat us, traffic offenders offer to pay bribes to the Police (or the reverse), private clinics making illegal claims from NHIS, public/civil servants report to work very late, etc. If we can all start demanding accountability and transparency from ourselves and the public officials, then we have moral ground to demand accountability from the politician. We have public institutions that have boards/management, which we would can hold responsible for corrupt practices rather than quickly politicizing every act of corruption even in semi-autonomous public agencies. However, the President must lead the way and show commitment in the fight as he appoints the board or management of most public institutions. It should not be too difficult to fire and hire at the same time to instill discipline in public service.
The writer is Dr. Kwaku S. Afesorgbor, Executive Founder, Centre for Trade Analysis and Development—CETAD Ghana (www.cetadghana.com)