Statement from the Special Prosecutor on the launch of the Ghana Corruption League Table
On 5 August 2021, upon being sworn in as the second Special Prosecutor, I remarked that we were confronted with two pandemics – the first being that icy death virus and the second being corruption. It appears that both maladies have every intention of staying with us unless we take action.
On 22 July 2021, during my approval process before Parliament, I declared my resolve to render corruption a costly adventure on all accounts. I intimated that, as part of the charge given to the Office of the Special Prosecutor to take steps to prevent corruption under Section 2(c) of the Office of the Special Prosecutor Act, 2017 (Act 959), I would institute a corruption league table intended to drive down corruption in the public sector. Today marks the commencement of the realisation of that vision.
The project, which we have christened the Ghana Corruption League Table, is akin to a combination the corruption perception index programme of Transparency International and that of Afrobarometer. It is a research-based model designed to assess real and perceived levels of public sector corruption. In aid of this, public sector agencies would be ranked against each other on a corruption barometer and the results would be published annually on International Anti-corruption Day. The results would form the basis for enhanced pragmatic suppression and repression of corruption in the public sector.
To this end, and as required by regulation 31(2) of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (Operations) Regulations, 2018 (L.I. 2374), the project would identify the causes that advance corruption in the public sector including deficiencies in regulations and procedures, deficiencies in the administration of instructions (including lack of internal control mechanisms), individual interest (including greed, lack of ethicalness and legal awareness), and external influences (including public attitude, culture and traditions) – to facilitate the prevention of corruption.
Further, all public institutions, departments, agencies, and companies would be required to prepare and submit Integrity Plans intended at assessing deficiencies in their regulations, procedures, policies, guidelines, administration instructions and internal control mechanisms to determine their vulnerability and exposure to corrupt practices and the prescription of curative measures to manage such susceptibility to corruption and corruption-related offences.
In sum, we will be documenting corruption, measuring corruption, ascertaining the breeding of corruption, naming and shaming peddlers of corruption, accessing the impact of anti-corruption initiatives and taking curative and remedial measures to crack down corruption.
It is time to move beyond the composite annual ranking of countries on a corruption drop list to own our local narrative and fashion and retool our reformation by prodding our public sector into real and concrete action against corruption and corrupt practices.
Our strategic partners on the project are Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) and the Afrobarometer Directorate of the Center for Democratic Development (CDD) – two institutions that have matchless reputations in the field.
It is my honour to present to the Republic – Ghana Corruption League Table.
God bless us all.
God bless Ghana.
We recognize there are various rankings, scorings and surveys going on. But it all comes down to what information you are gathering and what to do with the said information. For us at OSP, such information will provide us with data to actualize reformation, prevention, investigation and sanction as our laws mandate us to do.