The General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has accused the Akufo-Addo government of trying to shift blame for a poor corruption perception record on the previous government.
According to him, the government must take responsibility for the country’s poor performance in the recent corruption perception index report put together by the Ghana Integrity Initiative, the local arm of Transparency International.
Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Asiedu Nketia challenged claims by some government communicators that the report took into account happenings within the erstwhile NDC government, noting that of the nine data sources used for the report, only two were from 2016, under the NDC government.
He said the NPP government however “inexplicably decided to play unwholesome politics with a matter as serious as this, and did the unthinkable by blaming the past NDC government for the country’s catastrophic decline in the survey.”
“The Akufo-Addo government promptly deployed a phalanx of spokespersons to churn out a most illogical and implausible spin, that events which took place three or four years earlier account for the horrible 2017 CPI [Corruption Perception Index] results.”
“According to these government spokespersons, the erstwhile NDC administration is to blame… It is either the president has not apprised himself of the CPI report or he is a conspirator in an effort to deliberately mislead the public,” he said.
“It is a matter of public knowledge that the CPI for 2017 was provided from nine data sources. Only two or 22% out of these are traceable to 2016. The remaining seven or 88% emanated from 2017. This means that an overwhelming majority of data sources used in this survey were based on happenings in the first year of President Akufo-Addo,” he added.
Asiedu Nketia argued that the party’s analysis of the report over the past 20 years showed that Ghana’s best performance in the CPI was under the NDC with John Mahama as president in 2014.
‘Corruption ranking covered Mahama administration’
The government in reaction to the report explained that Ghana’s poor performance took into account corruption cases recorded under the John Mahama administration, which left power in January 2017.
Hebert Krapa, the government’s Spokesperson on Governance and Legal Affairs
The government’s Spokesperson on Governance and Legal Affairs, Herbert Krapa, explained that the report was not an indication that the current New Patriotic Party [NPP] government was corrupt.
‘Rot in Akufo-Addo gov’t’
But the minority in Parliament insisted that Ghana’s ranking is a vindication of their position that the current government is presiding over a corrupt administration.
Minority Spokesperson on Communications, A.B.A. Fuseini
Speaking to Citi News, the Minority Spokesperson on Communications, A.B.A. Fuseini, said the drop in Ghana’s ranking on the Index proves that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government is unwilling to fight the canker.
Source: citifmonline.com
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