Govt to carry out comprehensive audit of state institutions to reveal levels of rot
A comprehensive audit of various state institutions has been rolled out to determine the true extent of corruption in the public sector, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has said.
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The exercise, he said, would enable the government to come out with an all-embracing strategy to deal resolutely with the menace of corruption.
He said although the audit was ongoing, initial findings had revealed the depth of rot that had engulfed those institutions.
He was speaking at the launch of a book entitled: “Making Africa Work”, authored by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, Dr Creg Mills, Major-General Dickie Davis (retd) and Mr Jeffrey Herbet, in Accra yesterday.
The book launch was organised by the Brenthurst Foundation, in collaboration with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Private Enterprise Federation.
Fighting corruption is one of the signature programmes of the Nana Akufo-Addo-led government, and in its efforts at doing so, the government is working to introduce a new law to establish the Office of a Special Prosecutor.
It is also working on the implementation of an e-procurement platform to enhance transparency in procurement processes in the public sector.
President Akufo-Addo said success in the fight against corruption would ensure the creation of more jobs to address the national challenge of youth unemployment.
He said corruption undermined the ability of governments to create jobs because many of the needed resources were stolen by state officials.
“Therefore, a major opportunity for job creation is by dealing with corruption,” he added.
Fighting
The President said corruption had almost become the character of the way people treated public resources and the way public duties and services were performed and delivered.
He said those who had been given the privilege to lead their countries were constantly grappling with the question of why Africa, a continent endowed with so much wealth and natural resources, continued to lag behind other continents.
Making Africa work
He wondered why things were not working in Africa the way they were doing in other parts of the world, noting that how to bring about the changes required to make Africa work was the topical matter of consideration.
“Making Africa Work”, he said, was, therefore, a major contribution to the discourse on African economic development.
President Nana Akufo-Addo said it was not often that any continent, including Africa, produced a statesman of the calibre and stature of former President Obasanjo.
“It is also not often that such a statesman takes the time to capture his experiences, thoughts and ideas in a book as a gift to all who care about the development of Africa,” he stressed.
He said the most important issue facing African countries today was unemployment, especially youth unemployment.
According to him, of the 1.2 billion people aged between 15 and 24 in the world, 200 million of them were in Africa, with about 75 million of them looking for work.
The greatest challenge to Africa’s development
“Africa has the youngest population in the world and about 10 to 12 million young people join the labour market each year. This means that even to keep unemployment at current levels, African economies have to create some 10-12 million jobs a year. To reduce the current levels of unemployment, many more jobs would have to be created.
This is the challenge of the century for African countries,” he added.
The President said the issue of youth unemployment was not just an economic issue but had become a security issue, citing the Arab Spring, where youth unemployment and discontent provided the spark for the uprising in Tunisia.
In Ghana, he said, “about 60 per cent of the unemployed are in the 15-24 year group. The interesting aspect of unemployment in Africa is that it is occurring within the context of under-development, with so much work that needs to be done”.
President Akufo-Addo lamented that most African countries were endowed with great wealth in the form of natural resources such as oil, gas, gold, diamond, timber, bauxite, iron ore and others, but that notwithstanding, African economies faced the challenge of creating jobs.
He said employment was created only when goods and services were produced for which there was a demand.
Generating employment locally
“This means that you must have the ability to produce the goods and there must also be a demand, either internally or externally, for the goods or service,” he said, adding that “in an era of global competition, a large number of countries are trying to find markets for their goods and services abroad to generate employment at home”.
“Let us not make any mistake about it: in the global marketplace, every other country is a competitor. That is the mindset African countries must have. There is no separate global standard reserved for African countries because they happen to be African. The competition is ruthless. We cannot enter into this competition with a mindset of dependency. We must build economies beyond aid,” he advised.
On the key issue of job creation, he said the government recognised that its ability to create jobs on its own was limited and that job creation was largely a private sector phenomenon.
“It is for this reason that we have set out to build the most business friendly economy in Africa. We are, therefore, moving quickly to create an environment that will unleash the innovative and entrepreneurial instincts of the Ghanaian people to drive rapid growth and job creation,” President Nana Akufo-Addo said.