We must uproot corruption from roots — Prof. Bawole
“If we are to uproot corruption and restore integrity in our society, we must begin not at the top, but at the roots,” the Dean of the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), Professor Justice Nyigmah Bawole, has said.
He also proposed that periodic integrity audit be made a key criterion for promotion of public officials going forward, adding that since incentives shape behaviour, such a move would help to provide the level of ethical leadership needed to transform public institutions for sustainable development.
“Let us move beyond assessing competence alone; let integrity be a measurable criterion for advancement.”
“Those who serve with honesty, transparency and self-restraint should be visibly rewarded, just as those who compromise ethics should face clear consequences,” Prof. Bawole said.
Event
The professor of public administration and management was speaking at his inaugural lecture at the Great Hall of the University of Ghana, Accra, on the topic: "Our corruption, our ethics, our public administration: Wicked citizens, wicked problems and stagnating development."
Among the attendees were the Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, Apostle Eric Nyamekye; Chairman of the Public Services Commission, Prof. Victor Kwame Agyeman; the Registrar, Medical and Dental Council, Dr Divine Ndonbi Banyubala; the Principal, National Banking College, Gloria Darline Quartey, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Robert Dzato, and the Paramount Chief of Saboba, Ubor Mateer John Bowan Sakojim IV.
The lecture examined the country’s ethical reckoning; framed the development trajectory of the country — showing how there has been stagnation on a number of fronts; and provided a theoretical explanation of what the author described as “the duality of the African ethical persona.”
It also examined the issues of corruption, ethics and public administration.
Context
While corruption is often defined as the abuse of entrusted power for personal gain, the lecture contextualised the phenomenon as “the decay of the shared moral fabric of a society— a collapse in the generally accepted norms of right and wrong, which is not merely perpetuated by a few bad actors, but exploited by all who find advantage in the system’s ethical erosion.”
The lecture posited that corruption did not only manifest in government contracts and procurement processes, but in “the quiet acceptance of bribes for basic services, the silence of those who know the truth but say nothing, and the exhausted wave of citizens who have stopped believing that integrity is even possible.”
It is estimated that Ghana loses approximately US$3 billion annually to corruption.
However, Prof. Bawole said that figure was conservative because “the corrosive impact of corruption extends beyond the public sector into the very heart of private enterprise.”
He established that the development failures of the country were not simply due to bad policies or inadequate institutions, but the result of a profound ethical collapse that cut across the fabric of our society.
Re-education
Prof. Bawole further proposed a comprehensive civic re-education strategy that embeds ethical formation at all levels of education in the country to help uproot corruption.
He stressed that the re-education strategy must go beyond abstract moral instruction to encompass case-based pedagogy that presents real-life ethical dilemmas, integration of indigenous wisdom, to revive values-based education.
Additionally, he said the re-education strategy must be anchored on continuous ethics modules across disciplines “so that engineers, doctors, accountants, and public administrators are not just trained to be competent, but to be conscientious.”
