We can defeat corruption – Presby Moderator

The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Rt Rev Prof Emmanuel Martey has said Ghana can defeat corruption if the country commits itself to the fight.

“We can defeat corruption. Let’s hoot at corruption,” Prof Martey told a congregation in his Christmas Day sermon.

According to him, if the forebears of current Ghana were able to marshal forces to defeat famine, as the Ga ethnic group did in history, then Ghanaians can also rally forces to beat corruption.

Ghana recently scored 48 points to place 61 out of 175 countries in the 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released by the Transparency International early December.

It was a slight improvement from the 45 points scored in 2012 and the 46 points scored in 2013.

The CPI is the leading global indicator of public sector corruption, offering a yearly snapshot of the relative degree of corruption by ranking countries from all over the globe.

Ghana, which shared positions with Croatia, came below seven African countries - Botswana - 63, Cape Verde - 57, Seychelles - 55, Mauritius – 54, Lesotho – 49, Rwanda – 49 and Namibia - 49.

“The score and rank of Ghana shows also that the country performed much better than several other African countries, including South Africa, Senegal and Tunisia. Thus, although scoring lower than seven African countries, Ghana has scored higher than all the rest of the African countries included in the CPI 2014,” the report said.

The report, however, noted that: “This does not mean that corruption is not a serious problem in Ghana because, like two-thirds of the rest of the 175 countries/territories ranked by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, Ghana scored below 50, on a scale of 0 (perceived to be highly corrupt) to 100 (perceived to be very clean).

“This is especially so as not much appears to be done with regards to the high profile alleged corruption cases, from judgment debts to the sale of public assets, the GYEEDA and SADA sagas, scoring below 50 only serves as another reminder that we have not marshaled enough resolve in tackling corruption. Except boasting of 2 prosecuting one top NDC official, nothing else seems to be done.”

It continued: “Even the enforcement of court judgments to recover monies wrongly paid have been left hanging. The 2014 CPI made use of eight data sources out of the 12 data sources to compute the index for Ghana.

"These sources that have assessed Ghana with regards to corruption are the African Development Bank Governance Ratings 2013 (55), Bertelsmann Foundation Sustainable Governance Indicators 2014 (49), the Political Risk Services International Country Risk Guide 2014 (41), the World Bank - Country Policy and Institutional Assessment 2013 (58), the World Economic Forum Executive Opinion Survey (EOS) 2014 (37), the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2014 (37), Economist Intelligence Unit Country Risk Ratings 2014 (54) and the GlobalvInsight Country Risk Ratings 2014 (52).

"The Ghana score is, therefore, an average of the scores from these data sources. The institutions are independent institutions with a high level of credibility and their assessments are considered credible.”