The time has come for professional negligence to be criminalized in the country, Member of Parliament for Asante-Akim North, Andy Kwame Appiah-Kubi, has said.
He explained that if road contractors, for instance, fail to deliver their work to meet standards after being contracted by the state, they should be made to face criminal action.
“Another thing is that we must criminalize professional negligence,” he said on the Key Points on TV3 Saturday, July 23, while contributing to a discussion on the 2021 report by the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ, Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime which ranked the Police to be the foremost public institution perceived to be most corrupt.
Former Executive Director of the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Vitus Azeem, for his part, also called for punitive punishments against corrupt officials in the country.
He said there should be proper investigations done into corruption allegations, and when the officials are found culpable, they should be jailed, with their properties confiscated.
Until that is done, he said, the fight against graft will be difficult.
“We have failed to investigate credible corruption allegations,” he said on the Key Points.
“Who wants to be jailed for corruption? Nobody. So if we are bold enough to jail people, nobody will do that,” he added.