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General Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) government, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah has described the Institute of Economic Affairs’ (IEA) Corruption Conference as a farce.

The IEA on Tuesday organised a seminar to engage the public on corruption. It was to among other things recommend possible ways of "strengthening anti-corruption institutions and to give them teeth to bite".

But to the NDC Chief Scribe, the Corruption conference dubbed “Purging The Nation of Corruption: Demanding Accountability from Public Institutions” failed to achieve its objective of finding a lasting solution to corruption the moment IEA paraded NPP sympathizers as speakers.  

Speaking on Okay Fm’s "Ade Akye Abia" Morning Show, Asiedu Nketiah said the impression he gathered at the Corruption conference was that all the speakers assigned to address participants were all sympathetic to the cause.

“Imagine IEA wants to talk about corruption and the way to fight it and then the speakers are Albert Kan Dapaah, Prof Kwesi Yankah, Justice Emile Short and Duah Agyeman as the main speakers of the conference….aside this, you know where the speakers are coming from; nobody needs to tell you their political orientation in this country”, he asserted.

He further described the IEA Corruption conference as a road show that is meant to demonstrate that they are working hard but far from the intention to fight corruption as it sort to propagate with the conference.

“….if this is the way to fight corruption, then we have a long way to go…..I don’t know how yesterday’s corruption conference is contributing towards solving the problems of corruption at all. To make it credible, the IEA should have allowed me enough time to express my opinion about the topic and the position of NDC about the issue”, he chided.

To him, he earlier thought the IEA corruption seminar allowed Hon Kan Dapaah to speak as a former chairman of Public Account Committee (PAC) but until he was denied the opportunity to speak to share the position of his party, NDC and in his capacity as former member of PAC, he considered the conference a fiasco.

He again mentioned that the former Auditor-General, Prof Edward Duah Agyeman who was one of the speakers at the seminar, lacked merit to address him [Asiedu Nketiah] on making the Auditor-General an independent body to check corruption.

"...Prof Duah Agyeman compromised his position when he was acting as the Auditor-General because he was appointed by former President Kufuor in his retirement age to act...and that made him weak to check corruption under Kufuor," the NDC General Secretary said.