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The executive director of Ghana’s Center for Democratic Development (CDD) says it is time for the country to explore other anti-corruption procedures, as investments in prosecutions and prosecutors have not really paid off.
Professor Henry Kwasi Prempeh said that Ghana’s over-reliance on judicial processes as a means of fighting corruption has not been satisfactory and has therefore called for a review to include other anti-corruption procedures as well.
Speaking in the JoyNews Newsfile on Saturday, the law professor said: “We have spent resources on organs of the prosecution and various law enforcement agencies where the purpose of fighting corruption has been to detect it, investigate it, accuse the guilty if you can find them, collect evidence, initiate legal proceedings, and hopefully get a conviction.
“If you look historically at the returns on that type of investment certainly in Ghana, no one has to really tell you that we have gotten very little benefit from that approach to fighting corruption.”
His comment follows calls by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and other Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) for an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the controversial Agyapa agreement and the prosecution of officials found guilty.
However, Professor HK Prempeh says that prosecutions should not always be the case when fighting corruption.
He stated that the prosecution process is not carried out within an organizational entity, “There are so many steps along the way that not all are controlled by one entity, so who does the investigation, the detection is often different from the prosecutor who does it. . the prosecution, the police, so there are many, many different entities along the line and, of course, it ends up in the judiciary. “
This, he said, slows down and sometimes prevents the fight against corruption, since “at any moment someone can drop the ball.”
He also stated that the processes are in some way politically mediated, making it difficult for investigators and prosecutors to fully carry out their work without political interference and bottlenecks.
“Basically, we have not had a good return on our investments from the approach to fighting corruption,” he said.
Therefore, he asked the government to expand the number of tools in its anti-corruption toolkit, by including tools for the prevention of corruption.
According to him, instilling a tool like the risk assessment tool would completely mitigate the occurrence of corruption by eliminating loopholes and opportunities in agreements, the law, and even the constitution that can allow corrupt practices to escalate.
He explained the risk assessment tool as: “It means we don’t have to wait for the house to burn out before we put the extinguisher on it.”
He said: “When an agreement is proposed or even when a proposed law or even a proposed constitution is proposed, it can be subjected to a corruption risk analysis because corruption, although we consider it a crime, that is where the issue of the prosecution. it is also, in a sense, a crime of opportunity.
“If there are ample opportunities created within a deal, within legislation, within a particular type of proposal for corruption to occur, then the risk, the probability of corruption occurring is really very high.
“So the idea here is that before proceeding with the project, before proceeding with the deal, before even proceeding with the law, you have an independent assessment of all the various ways that corruption can get into the deal.”
He added that when an independent assessment of all the gaps in the deal has been done, a report can be produced to show the way forward.
“Then all the possible entry points would be analyzed, all the opportunities that are created in the deal for corruption to occur and then a proposal will be made on how those loopholes can be mitigated or closed and then a base report will be formed on which we will or will not proceed with the action. “
