Former Executive Director of the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Vitus Azeem has 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 on TV3 Saturday, July 23 with Alfred Ocansey.
“Who wants to be jailed for corruption? Nobody. So if we are bold enough to jail people, nobody will do that,” he added.
Mr Azeem was reacting to 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 the most corrupt.
The Programmes Director of the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Mary Awelana Addah, also observed that hospitals and health centres, in general, have become places where bribes exchange hands in Ghana.
She said though the Ghana Police Service ranks high among institutions perceived as most corrupt, the health sector is also becoming known for the canker.
Ms Addah made this known in an interview on TV3‘s News 360 on Wednesday, July 20.
“You realised that [with] health institutions, citizens said they engaged with health institutions even more and they pay more bribes there,” she pointed out.
“So, it is not like they are saying that because citizens encounter the police on our roads, it is there they pay bribes.
“They encounter nurses, they encounter doctors, they encounter teachers, they encounter utility service providers, they encounter tax agents, they encounter people at the lands department and some of these bribes, if you quantify are even more than what the police [take] but yet still the police came up tops.”
