Checks in financial administration systems must work — Kan-Dapaah
THE former Member of Parliament (MP) for Afigya Sekyere West, Mr Albert Kan-Dapaah, has said the fight against corruption cannot be won unless the checks and balances in the financial administration systems of the country are made operational.
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He said although Ghana had adopted mechanisms in its public financial management system (PFMS), they were deliberately not being made to work.
The result, he said, was that public funds had been left unprotected and at the mercy of corrupt public officials.
“If these checks and balances or accountability mechanisms are respected and upheld, corruption is difficult and public funds are effectively protected,” he said.
Mr Kan-Dapaah said this when he delivered an address at the sixth Audit Service Annual Accountability lectures in Accra.
It was on the theme: “Management, Protection and Accountability of Public Funds – Who is Responsible?”
Stealing not surprising
He said the tendency of public officers and politicians who had been entrusted with public funds to steal from the state purse ought not to be a surprise to anyone.
“The surprise should rather be that we have not enforced the checks and balances in our administrative systems which would have made it impossible for public servants, including politicians, to steal from the public purse,” he said.
He said the thievery in Africa, in the main, had been the result of manipulating the public financial management system.
“The developed world manufactured an effective vaccine for this type of corruption years ago and this vaccine continues to be potent in the developed world. We have imported this vaccine in very large quantities into our country. Deliberately and regrettably, we refuse to administer the vaccine. This is the cause of the thievery in our country,” he said.
The framers of the 1992 Constitution, he said, recognised the need for effective oversight over public resources in the hands of the Executive and designated some institutions to act as accountability institutions.
Examine accountability institutions
Those bodies, he said, were the Auditor-General, the Parliament of Ghana and the Judiciary, adding that in the search for lack of accountability in the country’s financial governance, the first task ought to be to examine the effectiveness of those institutions.
The protection and accountability of public funds, he said, depended upon the country’s PFMS and the institutions charged by the Constitution to act as the accountability institutions.
Mr Kan-Dapaah said all the safety nets in the country’s PFMS had deep holes and were totally unable to hold together the crucial checks and balances required to protect public funds.
The result, he said, was that the regime that should discourage people from stealing public funds had become lax, thereby providing the fertile avenue for unbridled theft.
But he asserted that the country could not lose hope for the simple reason that it could not afford to correct the systemic anomalies.
“In addressing this problem of protecting and accounting for our public funds, let us reinstitute the checks and balances in our PFMS and let us free the accountability institutions from the present state of inaction,” he suggested.
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