The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has chastised President John Mahama’s recent comments about his fight against corruption, saying he is clearly out of touch with the scale of corruption in the country.
[contextly_sidebar id=”CEgHetgCWnSqdcJ7rDGJrPlw0f6RZfxD”]The President at a ceremony to mark a global anti-corruption day on Wednesday, touted his government’s achievements in fighting the canker.
He described as false, accusations that Ghana was ranked as one of the corrupt countries in the survey.
“There was no ranking in that report and it is absolutely false that Ghana is the second most corrupt country in West Africa. We reject it completely.This report was not an index and did not seek to rank countries in order of perception of corruption as the CPI normally does. The simple and straight forward question that respondents to the survey were asked was how has the level of corruption in your country changed over the past year? Has it increased, has it decreased? Or has it stayed the same? Suddenly in our highly charged partisan political environment, this survey was wrongly interpreted as placing Ghana as the second most corrupt country in West Africa,” said the President.
In an interview with Citi News, however, the NPP’s Director of Communications Nana Akomea said the President can win the battle against corruption if he wants to but, so far, he is only pretending to be fighting it.
“Well it is clear that the President is out of touch on corruption in Ghana. Afrobarometer reported that Ghanaians perceive the office of the President to be the second most corrupt public institution. Then about four, five months later, the IEA, the Institute of Economic Affairs also did a corruption survey and reported that indeed Ghanaians perceive the office of the President to be the second most corrupt public institution in the country.
“Then you have the Afrobarometer collaborating with Transparency International survey done in Africa recently also reporting that 76 % of Ghanaians reported that corruption was a major issue and that was the second highest percentage in Africa.”
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By: Marian Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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