The government’s ability to use funds judiciously is being called into question. John Paul Danka, a member of the NDC’s Regional Communication Team, has opined that had the government used the Ghc21 billion gathered during the fight against COVID-19 judiciously, it would not have been forced to include individual bond holders in the ongoing Domestic Debt Exchange Programme.
“Corruption is worse than any pandemic that would happen to us. When pandemics come, we form associations and get solutions for them. Corruption is geographic and institution specific. Once it affects you, if you realise that corruption is affecting you, if you don’t do anything to fight it, then you will appreciate the consequences. Nobody would come from his country to come and help you to fight corruption. If you pick the COVID-19 expenditure report alone, what has gone to waste in terms of corruption alone. If we had dealt with that, we would have solved the problem of individual bondholders. Their principals, their interests and whatever it is, we would have given it to them,” he said.
Mr. Danka’s comments were in relation to the country’s current standing on the Corruption Perception Index. He spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show.
For the third consecutive year, Ghana failed to improve on the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released by Transparency International (TI).
Results published today show that Ghana’s score of 43 out of 100 in the 2022 CPI has remained the same since 2020. The country tied for 72nd (with Benin, Bulgaria, Senegal and South Africa) out of 180 countries.
The CPI uses impartial surveys from experts and business leaders to score and rank countries by the perceived level of corruption in their public sectors. It uses a scale of zero (perceived as highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived as very clean).
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana