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Player Missing In Action: Political Will

By T. P. Manus Ulzen
Opinion Player Missing In Action: Political Will
NOV 15, 2014 LISTEN

On ascending to the Ashanti throne after the death of his great-uncle KwakuDua I in 1867,Kofi Karikari is reputed to have said “my business will be war!” This is not because he was a war monger but he understood that with the British advancing from the coast, war was inevitable. So should President Mahama say “my business will be war on corruption” because that is the only action that will save the Republic from itself.

If the first item on the agenda at Cabinet meetings is not corruption and how to defeat it systematically, then they are all ostriches and should find something else to do. This is not a new problem. Kufuor, while he spearheaded legislation to fight corruption, was famously waiting for some citizen to make anonymous reports to him. Atta-Mills was incensed enough that one day he marched down to the Tema Port to directly confront, thieves pretending to work for the people of Ghana at Customs Excise Preventative Services (CEPS). The revelations under Mahama's watch are pouring out like Musi-o-Tunya (Victoria Falls) so he simply has to allow the law to take its course. The momentum of the revelations is enough to drown us all in sorrow and shame.

In the span of a few months, The Director of the National Service Secretariat has been nabbed for allegedly managing a scam involving over 22,000 ghost workers. Most astute observers suspect that this self-enrichment scheme has ancient origins. Parallel self-enrichment programs are most probably operating in other ministries and agencies. For years, the Controller and Accountant –General has reported that about GHC 250m annually is stolen by government employees across all ministries including that of the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, which should be leading the effort to retrieve all stolen funds through vigorous prosecutions. Money doesn't dissolve in the ether, it finds its way into very specific pockets and a forensic audit of all these agencies should produce the culprits. Funds should not only be retrieved but the thieves should be punished under existing laws. Recently, the Minister of Communications remarked that citizens were unaware of how much stolen funds have been retrieved. Is this supposed to be a state secret? He also did not mention that any culpable persons had been prosecuted. Is theft of public money a protected right?

Contemporaneous with the Account-General's report, we find out that local government officials have swiped about Ghc44m from the state's coffers.We also, have the burning issue of an allegation that Ghc250m of pension funds may have been misspent by the government. Health care providers are owed so much money by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) that we have effectively returned to a “cash and carry system”; a detestable situation since health care should be a basic right and not a commodity. The poor man with no cash, is often carried to his grave as a result of a preventable death. The Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning cannot account for Ghc90m of oil money and so on. These ongoing revelations represent the narrow tip of a huge iceberg.

There are other issues yet unresolved. These include SADA, SUBAH and GYEEDA. Some folks are on trial in the GYEEDA case. In all, this plethora of cases could be a positive thing and may reflect improving investigative journalism, which functions as an effective counterweight to the three arms of government as a democracy matures. The government, if it took stock of all the losses to theft from the public purse and started prosecuting culprits and seizing ill-gotten assets, would be on track to address the deficit because the receipts from the recent Eurobond and the expected funds from the upcoming IMF dalliance would be dwarfed by what would be recovered. These are ad hoc solutions to a systemic and culturally entrenched problem.

The Chief Justice has also recently announced that the 5 courts establishedsince March 2014 to deal with corruption under the Financial Administration Act have had no work. No cases have been filed in any of them. This is “incroyable”. Whose responsibility is it to initiate these cases and why has this not happened? This represents a failure of leadership.

Let's take a look at how corruption is killing people in Africa. During this current Ebola crisis, there were reports that burial squads were taking bribes and leaving Ebola bodies for families to bury. One can only imagine how this practice has undermined the efforts to control the epidemic. Many wonder why the mighty Nigerian Army has not been able to defeat Boko Haram. If money for army supplies is constantly misappropriated, it is no surprise that soldiers are poorly armed and run for cover with the villagers they are supposed to protect when the jihadists attack them. At our own Kotoka International Airport, the port health officials still take money and let travelers not meeting health requirements in. These same workers are expected to be a line of defense against Ebola. Corruption will kill us all and we will be re-colonized in one form or another in the coming decades, if we do not get some real leadership soon. If we borrow money, it should be to strengthen our anti- corruption and enforcement institutions because the return on investment will be robust.

The nation will not be transformed until those in leadership positions are themselves transformed through a clearly articulated vision for the nation. The mission in support of that vision then has to be supported fearlessly by serious enforcement of our laws. How do we achieve this, when our leaders do not publicly declare their assets on assumption of office? For how long has the Freedom of Information Act been gathering dust? The finances of our political parties and how they fund election campaigns remain opaque. It's a thieves' paradise. Most of our wealthiest citizens have held public office at some point, so it is no wonder that in a recent poll,most Ghanaian children wanted to be politicians when they grow up. No doctors, no teachers, no engineers, no craftsmen, no farmers, no lawyers, no accountants etc. No one in the government is telling us how many well trained middle and high level professionals in all fields are needed to reach the Promised Land because the destination has not been not been defined.

To a large extent, until our leaders embrace measurable outcomes in the performance of their duties and inspire confidence in the population to embrace this change of attitude, we will continue to live on unfulfilled promises. Every head of unit; be it a school, a hospital, a ministry, must be committed to a vision articulated from the top with accountable measures which are acted on. Our leaders do not deal with issues competently. This is obvious because we lurch from one crisis to the next, indicating poor strategic planning in dealing with the issues that confront us as a nation. We are not anticipating problems; we are simply reacting to them. Our leaders largely apportion blame or make excuses and consider these responses as being equivalent to solutions.

Instead of making promises, long term plans to resolve problems like sanitation, energy and youth unemployment in a population – based sustainable fashion need to be publicly debated without the adversarial politicization we encounter frequently. Our education system needs to support our future needs as a country but at this stage, there appears to be little integration of thought and action on very fundamental issues.

On the one hand, we are supposedly promoting made and grown in Ghana products, yet each day we see loans being taken by government without any information on how these will be repaid. How about made in Ghana money, retrieved from thieves everywhere in the system? Parliament has led the way by spending over Ghc 21m on Chinese made furniture as if there are no furniture makers in Ghana capable of outfitting the chamber. Oh! Kwame of Blessed Memory, roll in your grave, over and over again!While all the export promotion noise is being made, it was reported a few weeks ago that 50% of the plantain crop in part of the Eastern Region had gone to waste because bad roads made it impossible to transport the crop to market. It says it all.

We must pile the pressure on about systemic corruption because as Martin Luther King observed during the civil rights struggle in the US, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people”

There is no reason why in this day and age, every agency of government should not have a web portal or mobile platform for the citizens to report on the quality of service they receive and on acts of extortion from identifiable public officials. If the government will not do it, then the media and private sector partners should create such hotlines and start exposing the rot in the system with reports from everyday citizens. It will take a concerted effort with strong unwavering leadership, citizen participation and mobilization to realign our thoughts and actions about corruption, greed and the cruelty inherent in national corruption.

T. P. Manus Ulzen is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the University of Alabama and Author of Java Hill: An African Journey – A historiography of Ghana
11/15/2014

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