Member of Parliament for Ho West, Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzrah, has urged the Parliamentary Committee set up to probe the COVID-19 expenditure to expedite action on its investigations.
The report of the Committee, he said, will give some confidence to the Ghanaian populace on accountability by the government.
He warned that Ghanaians may completely lose trust in the political class because of how corruption has become endemic and systemic in the country’s politics.
Hon. Kwasi Bedzrah made the call in a statement he read on the floor of Parliament on Wednesday, July 13, 2022, to commemorate African Anti-Corruption Day.
He stated the outbreak of the Coronavirus in Ghana created a condition in which corruption flourished with government officials using the cliche ‘we are not in normal times’ as an excuse to circumvent procurement irregularities
This, he said, heightened corruption risk associated with the government’s response to fighting the pandemic.
Mr. Bedzrah lamented the culture of Ghanaian society has also made almost every citizen more prone to corrupt activities.
According to him, the basic factors that, however, engender corruption in Ghana include inequality in the distribution of wealth, using official public office and political office to have access to wealth, weak enforcement of the laws and absence of a strong sense of nationalism.
He disclosed that Ghana loses more than 30% of its GDP to corruption every year and that between 2015 and 2020, the country lost a total of GH¢13 billion in financial irregularities covering poor procurement, tax, rent and contract irregularities.
He stressed that Ghana ranking 73 out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2021 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is clear indication corruption is basic in Ghana.
“This statistic is a worrying trend how corruption has become common in Ghana’s politics and if urgent measures are not instituted to address it, the populace will lose trust in us the politicians,” he said.