Corruption Here, Corruption There

Corruption

The state of public corruption in Ghana is alarming. The socio-economic contagion is stretching its toxic tentacles to all facets of society, threatening the quality of democracy and governance.

The damage it is doing our image in the comity of civilized nations, as a result, is beyond compare, not forgetting the cost it is exacting on our national purse.

No wonder the sincerity to combat it especially at the level of the presidency is competing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the free SHS signature policy of Nana Akufo Addo, the flag bearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), as factors worth considering when December 7 is due.

Nana Akufo Addo, when he broached the subject last Wednesday at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, dealt with a national sore whose treatment, as he pointed out, rests in the state, with the president leading the crusade. This is a constitutional requirement and not something left to the whims and caprices of an individual politician at the helm. It is a task that must not only be done but be seen to be done effectively.

It is significant that one of the two leading contestants for the president, in the person of Nana Akufo Addo, has continued to open, as it were, his cupboard to show that it is without skeletons.

He told Ghanaians that he is not venal, has never been and would never be. For a presidential candidate to show his plumage this way for the umpteenth time, we can only conclude that indeed he is of an outstanding social pedigree.

If only his NDC counterpart could call his bluff by doing same, we would have made headway in our quest to have only citizens without corruption etched on their bones vie for the highest office of the land.

It was heartbreaking listening to Nana's narrative of the tales of corruption, most of them high-notched, which have been perpetrated in the country these past three years or so. It is significant that the narrative was made by the man who has so far not been challenged on his four decades of political and public life record.

The protection of the public purse, as he noted, is an obligation incumbent upon all good presidents. Those under whose watch this purse is recklessly managed to the detriment of the country's financial fortune as being witnessed have no business vying for the nod of the people to remain in the cockpit of state.

Ghana does not deserve another trial-and-error session with the critical occupation of governance in which corruption in public office is a convention.