Ghana commended for fight against corruption
Ghana has been praised alongside Senegal in the latest Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by the anti-corruption body, Transparency International (TI), for the effort in the fight against corruption.
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The CPI report, which was launched yesterday, singled out Ghana and Senegal for praise in the fight by those respective governments against the canker.
A statement from the local chapter of TI, the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), said the CPI 2015 scored Ghana 47 out of a clean score of 100 and ranked the country 56 out of 168 countries.
According to the latest report, Ghana slid back by one percentage point from the 48 points scored in 2014 but did better than its performance in 2012 when it scored 45 and in 2013 when it scored 46 points.
According to the report, Ghana scored below six African countries - Botswana - 63, Cape Verde - 55, Seychelles - 55, Rwanda – 54, Mauritius and Namibia which scored 53.
Government response
Responding to the report, the government said it had rededicated itself to the implementation of the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP) with the commitment to continue to strengthen the relevant state institutions and work with civil society to win the fight against corruption.
A statement signed by the Minister of Communications, Dr Edward Omane-Boamah, said the report belied the spurious claims of certain media outlets a few months ago that Ghana had been ranked as the second most corrupt nation in Africa by TI.
“We note that though this performance is one point lower than that of 2014, it can be viewed within the context of the general performance of all countries. Ghana ranked 7th in Africa which means that apart from six African countries we performed better than all other countries on the continent and 112 countries worldwide,” it said.
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The statement said given that the report was a perception survey, it stood to reason that the views expressed by respondents were based on perceptions about the subject in the year under review and the intense media focus on allegations of corruption in the Judiciary, as well as the repetition of some obviously false allegations against the government in 2015.
It indicated that the government was mindful of the “paradox of exposure” which created a scenario where the government’s efforts to expose and punish acts of wrongdoing such as the National Service case that generated discussions among the populace creating a misleading impression of pervasive corruption when the opposite was in fact the case.