High-level Corruption Must End If Ghana Is To Self-Finance Emergency Pandemic-Prevention-And-Containment Programmes

That Ghana lacks money to fund the prevention and containment of COVID-19 is obvious to the whole world. For a well-endowed nation that is a real tragedy. We must definitely end the high-level corruption that enables a powerful and greedy few to siphon off trillions of cedis that could be used to prevent and contain such public health emergencies, into private pockets.

The time has now come for Ghana's greedy vampire-élites to understand clearly that the era when they could get away with stealing trillions of cedis on a regular basis is over. For good. Full stop. Perhaps we can signal that by demanding that Airbus compensates Ghana to the tune of €5 million immediately to start a COVID-19 fund - for bribing Ghanaian officials: to enable Airbus' previous management sell three secondhand military transport planes (the total prices of which were padded) to our nation.

The crime against humanity that high-level corruption represents is responsible for the situation in which as we speak millions of ordinary people across Ghana have no running water in their homes. That is no longer acceptable - as that makes regular hand-washing impracticable for many: a situation that puts their lives at risk during flu pandemics, for example.

We must plan to become a well-ordered and disciplined society in which access to well-designed and well-built affordable-accommodation, is a basic human right guaranteed by the Constitution.The state must ensure that all Ghanaians can live in well-planned cutting-edge sustainable green cities, towns and villages nationwide - by making provision for them this decade. That should be our priority. Full stop.

We can fund it by ending high-level corruption and making sure that the tax net is widened - by lowering it to the point where all working adults (in both the formal and informal sectors of our national economy) can easily afford to pay their fair share of personal income tax: and linking that to access to free senior high school, free high-quality healthcare and access to truly affordable well-designed and well-built accommodation in planned green communities. Simple.

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