Former Auditor-General, Daniel Yao Domelevo, has urged Ghanaian leaders to halt wasteful expenditures on creating new anti-graft institutions.
He suggested that the country can have a single, effective anti-graft institution if well-resourced and led by the presidency.
In an interview on The Point of View on Channel One TV, Mr Domelevo questioned why the country continues to establish additional anti-graft institutions at the expense of taxpayers.
He noted that Ghana struggles to fix roads, provide quality schools and hospitals, yet keeps creating new institutions due to the non-performance of existing ones.
When asked what can be done to resolve the tension between government entities that are supposed to be pursuing the same course, Mr Domelevo stated, “The problem is that in Ghana, when we want to solve a problem, we don’t look at the available capacities in what we can do with it. Or how we can enhance it to achieve what we want to achieve. All that we think about is adding on institutions. As a result, today, we have so many anti-graft institutions.
He added, “The Constitution created CHRAJ to fight corruption or investigate corrupt activities, then we came up with EOCO, and we have the police who also do same investigations. And now we have the Special Prosecutor’s Office. The question I ask is if we’re not getting the desired results, what do we do? Are we going to build another one? Or put on another?
“If the person is not delivering after providing resources and training, you kick the person out. But what Ghana keeps doing is incurring what I refer to as fruitless and wasteful expenditure. The monies that go into building and putting on these additional institutions themselves, deny us the benefits of our public funds. Hence, we can’t fix our roads, we can’t fix our schools, we can’t have good hospitals running, because we keep creating institutions just because the existing one is not performing. That is not the normal way to go.
“We can have one anti-graft institution in Ghana. If well-resourced and with the right leadership especially from the presidency. It can be as effective as having all these institutions put together.”
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