An anti-corruption activist, Vitus Azeem, wants the Special Prosecutor Office to focus on chasing corruption itself instead of spending time on ranking public institutions on corruption perception.

In his view, corruption perception rankings are not taken seriously enough in Ghana and may yield no results.

“I think that having a corruption perception is not enough because anytime the Ghana Integrity Initiative releases its perception index, the government in power will say it is just perception.”

As far as corruption for the Special Prosecutor Office is concerned, Mr. Azeem said, “it is an issue of the Special Prosecutor actually pursuing serious allegation of corruption.”

“It is not enough to tell us that government institution A is highly corrupt or more corrupt than institution B but what have you done when you realized that it is highly corrupt?”

“So you need to go beyond just having a league table. You need to now identify the corruption acts, investigate them further and take action and that is what we expect of a special prosecutor and not just come out with a league,” he added.

Mr. Azeem was responding to the Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng’s plan to begin a ranking of public institutions on corruption perception from January 2022, the results of which will be published every 9th December.

Among other things, he also said his office will carry out corruption risk assessments on all major government contracts, legislations, and draft legislations dating back to 2020.

Mr. Agyebeng said this is to avoid toxic deals and the prevalence of judgment debts and arbitration awards in the country.