Corruption: Ghana records worst performance in six years

Tracking corruption in Ghana

Ghana has recorded its worst performance in the last six years in its fight against corruption, the latest corruption perception index (CPI) has revealed.

The country dropped three points from its 2016 score of 43 to 40 in 2017, and ranked 81 out of the total of 180 countries.

Cumulatively, Ghana has dropped eight points since 2016, the CPI which was released Wednesday, February 21 by Transparency International showed.

The CPI score indicates the perceived level of public sector corruption on a scale of zero (being highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean).

Executive Director of the Ghana Integrity Initiative, Linda Ofori- Kwafo, said Ghana’s poor score in 2017 is a reflection of inadequate investigations, prosecutions and sanctioning of corrupt officials.

Presenting the report, she said Ghana performed “not too good”.

“Since the CPI became comparable from the period 2012 to now, this is the worst performance that Ghana has had. This year, 2017CPI, we are saying Ghana’s performance from 2012 is the worst so far,” Mrs Ofori-Kwafo indicated.

She was however optimistic the situation could improve in the next three years by which time the various government interventions put in place to check corruption in the public sector would have started yielding results.

The newly created Office of the Special Prosecutor, the paperless port system and the Ghana Post digital addressing system were some of the initiatives she observed could help Ghana shore up its ranking

“When we are able to get the gains of the new initiatives; the paperless port, the digital addressing system and the powers of the Auditor General to do the disallowance and surcharging and then office of the special prosecutor that has come on board…if all these initiatives work very well for us, we’re hoping that in a year, two years, three years to come, we should see a rise in Ghana’s CPI,” she expressed.

Generally, the 2017 CPI showed majority of countries were making little or no progress in ending corruption.

It also showed journalists and activists in corrupt countries were risking their lives daily in an effort to speak out against corruption.

New Zealand and Denmark ranked highest with scores of 89 and 88 respectively while Syria, South Sudan and Somalia rank lowest with scores of 14, 12 and 9 respectively.

Read Also: iWatch Africa participates in a three-day workshop with Anti-Corruption Call Partners

Western Europe was identified as the best performing region with an average score of 66 with the worst performing regions being Sub-Saharan Africa (with an average score of 32) and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (with an average score of 34).

Report by Gideon Sarpong | iWatch Africa

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Gideon Sarpong

Gideon Sarpong is a policy analyst and media practitioner with close to a decade of experience in policy, data and investigative journalism. Gideon is a co-founder of iWatch Africa. He is an author; a fellow of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), Thomson Reuters Foundation, Commonwealth Youth Program ,Free Press Unlimited and Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative. Gideon is the founder of Sustainable Ocean Alliance Ghana. He was a 2021 Policy Leader Fellow at the European University Institute, School of Trans-national Governance in Florence, Italy and 2020/21 Open Internet For Democracy Leader. Gideon was also a 2022 Visiting Scholar/Reuters Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK and was selected as a 2022 TRF/Trust Conference Changemaker. He is currently the Africa Regional Cordinator for Environmental Justice Foundation and a 2023 Pulitzer ORN Fellow. Email: gideonsarpong@iwatchafrica.org.

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