Mr Dennis Asare, a research consultant at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, has intimated that, Ghana lacks data on organized crimes and a comprehensive data plan and this is what, results in the long periods of tackling corruption issues in the country.
Speaking during a discussion on corruption and how the two main political parties intend on dealing with it, he said that, due to the lack of data, the institutional body assigned and responsible to take action, encounters difficulty in performing their roles.
“It is about the capacity of these institutions in identifying some of these wrongdoings and also identifying who the wrong parties are tracking with some of these problems.
“Because we lack a whole set of these data, especially on organized crime, we don’t have a comprehensive plan of organized data in the country, it’s not something that’s reported, it’s something that is known. It published all the time in the news but for the comprehensive national data, because we lack that, it becomes difficult with the organization such that, even dealing with it when such issues are presented, it takes a long time for them to identify the wrongdoing to be prosecuted and to also administer justice.”
Mr Asare, then urged for the building of more institutional coalitions to the extent of they having their institutional independence adding that, the timeline of the corruption related cases, need to be worked on.
“Once we address the underlying institutional problems, we will be able to deal with all of these problems. I don’t think we should create new things, what we have now is enough but let us try to coordinate, the activities very well so that they can work hand in hand, share data, share skills and improve on some key capacity building issues that, foreign agencies such as the CIA and other big anti-corruption agencies across the world are actually doing.”
Touching on government’s performance with regards to the fight against corruption, he posited that, it is was very clear, looking at the manifesto assessment framework under corruption and governance and public accountability that, they performed very poorly.
“If you look at performance under governance and corruption, they scored 23% percent out of the promises that they made to resolve corruption and public accountability. That was their worse performance, between 2017 and 2020.
“So, it tells you that under governance and public accountability, and when you even merge other governance activities, corruption alone they scored even less than 50%.”
He further highlighted on the fact that, the current government lacked commitment in the fight against corruption.
“So, you can see that, although they have this idea or they have this will to fight corruption… but the terms of their commitment to fighting corruption, we can see that, they have not performed any better and it is very sad that, between 2017 till now, from all the global corruption indicators, Ghana is performing very poorly.”
