The Inspector-General of Police (IGP) has been admonished to take the recent corruption survey in good faith and work on it.
To Foreign Policy and Security Analyst Adib Saani, the issue goes beyond Dr George Akuffo Dampare.
“I think it’s important the IGP realises one thing,” he stated on TV3‘s Ghana Tonight on Wednesday, July 27.
“This is not about him. He is the IGP alright but he should understand that the issues in the [Ghana] Police Service is bigger than him. It is structural. It is systemic.”
After the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released their joint research on bribery and corruption, putting the police Number 1, the IGP wrote to the three bodies to question the methodology.
He described it as “selective”, citing why the GSS and CHRAJ were also not subjected to scrutiny.
“. . .we have read your report and after a review, we wish to state that we have serious concerns with the research and its findings,” Dr Akuffo Dampare wrote in a letter dated Wednesday, July 27.
“However, before we delve into these concerns, we wish to indicate that taking your research and its findings at face value, it is evident that all the institutions surveyed came up as corrupt. Our discomfort therefore is the use of a selective ranking methodology to project the outcomes in a manner that puts an unfair focus on the Police service with all the others in your corruption index escape public scrutiny.”
But Mr Saani thinks the response by the IGP was not the way to go since the perception about the Service is an open secret.
He advised that the IGP should have rather issued a statement to concede the findings of the research and assure the citizenry of work being done to rid the Service of corrupt officers.
“So, I would have, as a professional communicator myself, issued a statement and take it in giant strides and assuring the general population that work is in progress to at least mitigate it to some extent.
“It is not something you can completely deal with or completely nip in the bud hook, line and sinker.”
