Ms Josephine Nkrumah
The Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Josephine Nkrumah has warned that the fight against corruption will not end anytime soon if the citizenry do not speak up publicly against it.
“Corruption permeates almost every aspect of the Ghanaian society and it will only take bold citizens to fight it, failing to speak up against the canker allows the practice that robs the country of its scarce resources,” she indicated.
Speaking at the second edition of the Ghana Action Series, under the theme: ‘Responsible citizenship and accountable leadership’, Ms Nkrumah pointed out that, “Corruption benefits only the individual taking it and adds up to robbing the nation of about GH¢ 3 billion annually.
“Money that can wean us off donor dependency, the dream and essence of our Ghana beyond aid, when we as citizens our leaders fail to speak against the conduct of those who have condoned corruption.
“If we as citizens lead by condemning or reporting any act of corruption, it emboldens a new anti-corruption movement, but sadly, we have collectively failed to minimise corruption which festers poverty, breaks down social justice and cripples essence of democratic governance.
“Ghana faces a bleak future as far as corruption is concerned if conscious efforts are not made to instill into the youth values that abhor corruption because the system at the moment is designed to fail the youth, a situation which must be adequately checked,” Ms Nkrumah cautioned.
Cataloguing some violent and disruptive actions across all sectors of the society, she bemoaned Ghana dropped 11 places from the 2016 ranking to place 81 out of 180 countries in the 2017 Corruption Perception Index (CPI.
The Index put together by Transparency International ranks countries annually by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.
Ghana’s mark out of a total of 100 was 40, down from 43, which the country attained in the last index.
Linda Ofori-Kwafo, Executive Director of the local chapter of Transparency International, Ghana Integrity Initiative, lamented that the country performed poorly saying “we have the CPI for 2017 and Ghana performed not too good, dropped so far as our score is concerned, the most important thing on the CPI is the score, and on the scale of 0 to 100, Ghana scored 40 out of 100 points”. –citinewsroom.com
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