Corruption in Ghana

How Corruption Started in Ghana

Tuesday, 23 August 2011 01:52
Written by ghanapolitics.net
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Corruption is any act undertaken with the aim of personal pecuniary or financial gratification. It is an illegal, unethical and bad behavior which is unprofessional, unpatriotic, unchristian and inhuman.

It involves soliciting for bribes, kickbacks or acting deliberately to delay service delivery in order for the recipient of the service to do something, to speed up the process by offering something by way of gifts or kola.

In some cases involving women, it may end up as ‘bottom power’ where sexual favors are sought in order to award contracts or obtain a job or get promoted or obtain a high exam mark or obtain a passbook to obtain goods for sale. Corruption in Ghana is of old because in the Gold Coast era, our first black civil servants engaged in bribery when giving import licences or passbooks to women traders, be it SCOA, Leventis, PZ, UAC, UTC, CFAO and the like. Under the first Republic of Kwame Nkrumah, there was corruption but be that as it may, it was very low in scale as the Osagyefo was very severe with himself and he was a role model par excellence. His secret service ticked and the thought of being locked up behind bars at Nsawam Maximum Security Prisons was enough to scare the daylights out of culprits.
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Causes of Corruption in Ghana

Tuesday, 23 August 2011 01:55
Written by ghanapolitics.net
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Our extended family system in Ghana means we have a heavy dependency load. This is because we lack national institutions to take care of the unemployed, aged and destitute. Our SSNIT and Pension Funds are full of heavy doses of corruption as the workers there are now the supposed beneficiaries and the actual beneficiaries are relegated into limbo. A poor worker in Ghana with meagre pay has to fend for himself and a host of dependants whose expectations are high, especially among the Akans who practice matrilineal inheritance. The annual trip home to celebrate Afahye, Fetu, Aboakyir, Odwiraa, Ahobaa, Hogbetsetso, Homowo, Kundum, Okyir, Ohum, Dagbon, Akwambo, Akwesidae and Kotokro festival is a nightmare because you have to go on a shopping spree at Game Stores or Shoprite or Accra Mall to buy presents for all your loved ones or else they will brand you a bad boy or girl and they may curse you or practise witchcraft or juju you. In this scenario, who will not succumb to bribes at the workplace?

Coupled with this is the mad Ghanaian materialistic craving to build extravagant mansions and to buy expensive cars and clothing to show off. We forget that real happiness lies within and if we go by platonic absolutes, the real world is the spiritual or abstract world and that is in accord with our Christian aspirations. I think to combat corruption in Ghana, we need to douse our flame and knack for excessive material things. I enjoin Ghanaians to read more spiritual and philosophical books, especially the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell and others. It is important to fight corruption by breaking the cycle of the dependency syndrome. Everybody should be up and doing rather than relying on remittances from relatives working abroad. It is however, not out of step to bend backwards to help our relatives whenever we can but then this should not be overdone as it reduces our marginal propensity to save and to accumulate capital for investment.
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How can Ghana learn from the Singapore Model

Tuesday, 23 August 2011 01:59
Written by ghanapolitics.net
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One can state that abject poverty and poor service conditions of workers in Ghana are heavily and positively correlated with the incidence of corruption. This is why the Millennium Development Goals which are targeted to be achieved by 2015 are cardinal. Poverty reduction and intervention mechanisms need to be intensified to minimize the inclinations to be corrupt. Now that Ghana has discovered oil and gas in commercial quantities, we should be very careful in not contracting the contagious Dutch Disease of complacency and reckless spending. We need to be circumspect in our marginal propensities to consume, import, and tax. To alleviate poverty and bridge the wide income gap, there is need for tax reform to broaden the tax base and also close up the tax leakages in the informal sector.

Workers’ tax burdens need to be made light so that they have more take-home pay or disposable income. We need to increase domestic production to reduce inflation and help reduce government expenditure and debt service burdens so that national savings can be used to mitigate dire poverty by providing adequate social and public infrastructure such as quality schools, hospitals, roads, water and electricity supplies, among others. Our oil, gas and mineral resources are finite and non-renewable so we should ensure that their exploitation does not mortgage or jeopardize the interests of future generations by ensuring sustainable development.
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