CHRAJ saga: Public servants need loans to rent houses - Okudzeto

A veteran Lawyer Sam Okudzeto has said the State must stop worrying its head over accommodation for public servants and rather encourage officials to access private mortgage facilities for their housing.

The former president of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA) decried the alarming rate at which public officials are looting State funds in the name of renovating official residences.

Lawyer Okudzeto sides with a former Rector of the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Professor Stephen Adei, who is proposing that apart from the President, the Vice President, Speaker of Parliament and Chief Justice, all other public servants must not be accommodated by the State.

His comments come after it emerged that the commissioner of CHRAJ, Ms Lauretta Vivian Lamptey, was paying the Cedi equivalent of 456.25 dollars per day at a hotel while over GHc180,000 has been spent on renovating her official residence.

Lawyer Okudzeto told STARR TODAY Thursday that Prof Adei “makes sense,” adding: “I’d rather if a person is young and in good condition, he rather be encouraged to take a loan and be given a guarantee.”

He said the existing situation where official residences ought to be renovated anytime a public servant moves in, is a recipe for corruption. “We don’t know the extent and cost to the State of these expenditure.”

The former legislator flayed public officials who “are squandering hundreds and thousands of State money”, arguing it will be erroneous to politicise the panacea being brought forward to nip corruption in the bud. “We have politicised everything and lost sight of reality,” he added.

The former chairman of the Public Accounts Committee said backing public servants to go for loans to look for accommodation does not require “any constitutional amendment” but a directive from the Presidency. “This is an administrative matter and a policy decision that should be taken,” Okudzeto pointed out".