Pratt: Why it’s not surprising police lead in corruption ranking

Editor of the Insight newspaper and social commentator, Kwesi Pratt Jnr., says Ghanaians need no corruption perception index to affirm the state of corruption afflicting the country, for the canker is widespread enough to be real.

“Everybody knows that there is serious corruption in our society, you understand, and everybody knows that the corruption in our society permeates the very fabric of the society,” he emphasised.

Pratt made the submission on Radio Gold while contributing to a discussion of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer for 2013 which claimed that in Ghana, 54 per cent of 2000 respondents said corruption had increased in the past two years, while  20 per cent  reported that corruption had decreased. 

The police, according to the TI’s barometer, are followed by the political parties and then the judiciary as the second and third most corrupt institutions respectively.

So pervasive is the canker that Pratt said one is likely to encounter a case of corruption or another by merely driving a car from one point to the other or by visiting the ministries to conduct business or when sick and attending hospital.

“Corruption is a reality in our society,” he emphasised, pointing out that it would have been news rather if anyone doubted why the police wears the crown as the institution perceived  to be the most corrupt.

This is so because while generally corruption is not an open market activity but one engaged in under cover, police corruption happens in the open, in the full glare of everybody.

“Now if you look at this perception index which has been published, that singles out the police service as being the most corrupt in our society, I would have been surprised if that sounded surprising to anybody. It is not surprising at all. Now why is it not surprising? Because police corruption happens in the open. It is not hidden, everybody sees it. So therefore there is a tendency for people to think of the police as being the most corrupt because it happens in their face. I mean you are going to work in the morning, you are sitting in trotro and you see the driver put a couple of cedis in his license and hands it over. Everybody sees it, passers-by see it. We see defective vehicles on the road all the time…”

On the political parties, Pratt said he had a challenge with the TI’s classification of facilitation for political activists by the parties as a corrupt act and said the organisation may do well to define its parameters of corruption.

He similarly had “lingering” and “serious doubts” with the outcome that placed the judiciary at third most corrupt when the evaluating body claims at the same time that only 18 per cent of its respondents had had any dealings with the judiciary.

According to Pratt, a better and more concrete evidence of corruption backed by empirical methods, is the Auditor General’s report “which actually examines the books of government , which questions government officials and so on about their handling of state resources.”

He said since Ghana came into being, every Auditor General’s report has pointed to massive corruption in the society and this makes corruption a reality more than perception. What is sad, is that corruption is worsening by the year and wondered why as a state we cannot do anything about stopping the canker but only give it lip service.

Pratt said a solution is provided for by the 1992 constitution which calls for the setting up of a financial tribunal to deal with those cases and to punish the culpable for the massive corruption.

“Since 1992, we have not as yet established that financial tribunal. We have had occasion to raise this issue many times over. Every year the Public Accounts Committee sits in the glare of publicity with television cameras trained on them, they discuss these issues, they bring it into the open, people are called and questioned and so on and nothing happens. The financial tribunal has not been established.”

Pratt said the establishment of that tribunal can no longer wait and so whatever needs to be done to establish it must be resolved immediately.


Story by Isaac Yeboah/Graphic.com.gh/Ghana