Fighting Corruption: Ghana records worst performance in six years

In the 2016 edition of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) scored Ghana 43 points out of a possible clean score of 100 and showed that Ghana’s performance has dropped by four percentage points from its 2015 score of 47 points.

A release by the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), the local wing of Transparency International (TI), a civil society organisation focused on fighting corruption worldwide, said this score was the lowest in Ghana’s CPI scores since 2012 when CPI scores became comparable.

It said that although Ghana performed better than many other African countries, including Lesotho and Burkina Faso, Ghana also performed below eight other African countries including Botswana – 60, Cape Verde – 59, Mauritius – 54, Rwanda – 54, Namibia – 52, Sao Tome and Principe – 46, Senegal – 45 and South Africa – 45.

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.

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).