Firefighting corruption in Ghana

"Public financial behaviour in Ghana is so deliberately loose and frail, that even if a hen were to lean on its frame, the whole edifice would come tumbling down in a heap."

I corked my ears with pillows when l heard that Ghana's bankruptcy ratings as a result of official corruption has now attained the heights of Mount Afajato!

Frank details of how offending officials outwit our system of checks and balances and divert monies meant for development into private accounts left me in a fit of bewilderment and instant vexation.

Public financial behaviour in Ghana is so deliberately loose and frail, that even if a hen were to lean on its frame, the whole edifice would come tumbling down in a voluminous heap.

And guess what the scoopy-looters did with their gallant wealth! They feasted on wrist watches, houses, hotels, smart vehicles, airport lands, luxury handbags and necklaces, and anything fanciful to the imagination!

By jove, we are talking about billions and millions of moneys freely obtained by individual crookery and stratagem that must be lavishly and liberally dissipated to the gratification of greed.

Ghana would be a paradise by now, but for corruption which has left us economically bedridden, stagnant and poor. The continent loses over $50 billion annually to corruption by conservative estimates. Corruption is indeed the number one dissipator of public good and development in Africa.

The government spokesperson, Felix Kwakye Fosu recently disclosed that some 80 former government officials are cooperating with anti-graft authorities in the on-going "purge of the purse" investigations.

By the time we coagulate all these individual deviations and perversions into a chargeable magnitude, even Mount Afajato would be inferior in height and stature on the scale of our deprivation, devastation and plunder.

Unfortunately, no government is audacious enough to clean its own house of the canker, unless the object of inquiry is a referral in the opposition's camp. Then all guns would go blazing in a public show of toughness that lingers a little while before it is snuffed out at night.

And this malaise of soft-padding corruption and yet pretending to be fighting it after every change of government allows the deviation to fester long enough for mansions to be bought and for lands to be acquired with reckless appetite.

Until governments muster the courage to haul their own deviant appointees before the courts to explain the source of their suspicious wealth; until we plug the gaping loopholes in public accounting; until we make corruption an enterprise of woe for all tresspassers and frown upon creepy wealth, this charade of enthusiastic prosecutions would remain inconsequential, a hokus-pokus, a waste of everyone's time and expectations.

The prosecutions are too little too late! They won't attain much. They are but a drop in the might ocean of corruption.