In fairness to President John D. Mahama, he was not at the helm of affairs when Mr Martin Amidu, the then Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, was dropped from the government over the Alfred Woyome judgement debt payment.
Many Ghanaians thought President J.E. A. Mills would have seen in Martin Amidu an ally who would assist him to retrieve for the state a whopping GH¢51.2m paid to Woyome, especially as a report of the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) revealed to the Ghanaian public that President Mills's orders against the payment on two occasions were defied.
The President's veno,m as was expected, should have been directed at officials, including ministers of state at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, the Ministry of Justice and Office of the Attorney-General, the Accountant-General's Department, the Bank of Ghana, Office of the Chief of Staff at the Presidency and many others who in one way or another, played active roles in making the payment against the orders of the president at the time.
Instead, party solidarity prevailed against the national interest and,therefore, the person who was defending the national purse had to pay the bitter price of dismissal, while those who made the country poorer by paying the GH¢51.2m remained intact, and who knows, to cause more damage to the motherland.
In reverence to the dead and at a time when things were still not clear, many of us were not expecting any dramatic turn of events when Mr John Mahama was sworn in as president after the sudden death of President Mills. Again, the benefit of doubt should be resolved in favour of President Mahama, who may still not be abreast of events, especially over the Woyome payments.
However, a window of change offered itself when in June, this year, the Supreme Court ruled that Waterville and others did not deserve the amounts paid to them in the execution of certain projects that had something to do with the claims made by Woyome, for which he also received GH¢51.2m.
Since that Supreme Court judgement was an affirmation of the singular crusade launched by Martin Amidu and which caused him his position in the government of President Mills, many Ghanaians thought it was an opportunity for the Mahama administration to end his isolation in recognition of his anti-corruption efforts and to establish in the strongest forms the administration's determination to fight and distance itself from state corruption.
So far there is no evidence to that effect and the government had not done more than those before it, which always made open declaration to fight corruption without doing anything more.
Those who are old enough would remember that since February 24, 1966, when the first coup d'etat brought the government of Dr Kwame Nkrumah to a premature end, all governments, especially those military juntas, used corruption in previous governments as an excuse for their rude interventions.
In the days after the June 4, 1979 revolt there was what was termed a house-cleaning exercise which claimed many victims, including the lives of seven Generals and a colonel.
Flt, Lt J.J. Rawlings, who led the 1979 revolt, returned unannounced on December 31, 1981, to continue, in his words, the house-cleaning exercise. Today, when we look back, we wonder whether those seven Generals and the colonel deserved to die for corruption when there was hardly any property recorded against their names.
Corruption continued to be a major canker in the country so the 1992 Constitution made provision for two anti-corruption bodies. By an Act of Parliament (Act 456 of 1993) the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), is to check, among others, corruption by public figures.
The second anti-corruption body, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), was set up by an Act of Parliament (Act 466 of 1993) to, among others, check fraud in institutions and organisations the state has interest in.
Incidentally, these two institutions do not answer the demands of fighting corruption because they both are more or less appendages of the Executive arm of government, where the greater number of corruption cases emanate from.
Section 4 of the SFO Act (Act 466) places the SFO under the Attorney-General, while the director and two deputies are appointed by the president. In 2010, the SFO became the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) under Act 804 of 2010, with very little
