The Executive Director of Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Professor Henry Kwasi Prempeh says Ghana as a country is flawed in its fight against corruption because all efforts are channeled into prosecution only rather than prevention.
Prof. Prempeh indicated that since the beginning of the fourth republic, Ghana has invested a lot of resources into setting up prosecutorial bodies and various law enforcement agencies where the core operations of those agencies are to detect, investigate and prosecute culprits but these investments has seen only little yields.
“Historically, in the fourth republic when we have had constitutional rule of government, we have put all of our anticorruption eggs in one basket which is the prosecuting basket. So we have spent resources on prosecutorial bodies and various law enforcement agencies where the whole purpose of fighting corruption has been to detect it, investigate it, charge culprits if you can find them, gather evidence, lunch prosecution, and hopefully get conviction.”
“If you look historically at the returns on that kind of investment in Ghana, no one has to tell you that we’ve had very little payoff from that approach to fighting corruption.”
He attributed the low impact of the prosecution approach of fighting corruption to the numerous processes cases pass through before prosecution, where each step is mostly handled by different entities. He said some of these entities suffer political interference hence corruption cases risk the possibility of it being swept under the carpet at any stage of the prosecution process.
“There are a number of reasons for that; there are so many steps along the way, not all of which is controlled by one entity. So who does the investigation, the detection often is different from the prosecutor who does the charging; there are many entities along the line… so at any one point somebody can drop the ball and the processes are also somewhat politically mediated at different points.”
The CDD – Ghana executive director went on to say he believes it is about time the country broadened its scope in the fight against corruption. He believes that if the country embarks on a more proactive rather than the now reactive approach of fighting corruption, Ghana is going to experience a more grasps on corruption than the current situation.
“We really need to expand the number of tools in our toolkit for fighting corruption and rather than fighting corruption in the backward-looking way which is the way we’ve been doing it, we wait for the corruption to happen and then go try and unravel it and find it out. We should also be trying to prevent corruption.”
Professor Prempeh made these comments as he spoke to the issues surrounding the Agyapa Royalties deal and the report from the office of the Special Prosecutor where some institutions and political bodies have called on government to prosecute some government officials for alleged foul play in the rewarding of the Agyapa deal.
