The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII) has cast doubts over the impact the citizens’ complaints centre President John Mahama promised to set up will make in the country.
President Mahama last Wednesday announced at a press briefing the creation of a citizens’ complaints centre to fight corruption.
This move according to the President was to actively involve Ghanaians in the fight against corruption.
However, the Ghana Integrity Initiative does not believe the initiative will be successful.
The Executive Director of GII, Vitus Azeem argues that the centre will only duplicate activities of other government agencies dealing with similar issues.
“I would not be able to tell how significantly different it will be but it might just be a duplication. We have a Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice that complains that they don’t have enough resources to carry out their work, we have the auditor general’s department which complains that no action is being taken on the findings of the audit report. We have EOCO, BNI and all that, so I don’t think it’s going to be that different,” he added.
He suggested that government should rather empower state institutions to enable them respond to the needs of society.
“We need to strengthen the existing institutions and give them the adequate resources to be able to carry out their work… If you give them enough powers and enough resources to operate the response rate should be higher. But if it is just like one of the committees that they have been setting up to make investigations and they come back and we don’t see any action then it’s just an additional bureaucracy that we are setting up.”
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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana