Private legal practitioner, Maurice Ampaw, has disclosed that he deliberately adjusted the difficulty level of his examinations to ensure some students failed during his time as a lecturer at the university after being influenced by a colleague who convinced him it would increase his income.

Speaking on GhanaWeb TV's The Lowdown show, Ampaw used his personal experience to argue that corruption is not limited to financial inducements but can also stem from influence and incentives that may come with the practice.

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According to him, he was teaching Company and Business Law at Central University in the early 2000s and initially ensured that students understood the course thoroughly, resulting in an almost 100% pass rate.

"I was teaching the students in such a way that there was a 100% pass. Everybody who did law was passing," he recalled.

However, he said another lecturer later advised him that helping all his students pass was costing him extra income.

The colleague allegedly explained that lecturers could earn extra money when students failed and had to resit examinations or attend private tuition.

"If you pass all of them, how would you make money?'" he quoted his friend.

Ampaw explained that the lecturer deliberately set difficult examination questions so that many students would fail, enabling him to benefit from resit fees and extra classes.

According to Ampaw, he eventually adopted the same approach.

"So me too, I decided to make the law very difficult. I stopped giving areas to study. I made sure that when people were failing, they failed, and then people started taking extra classes," he admitted.

The lawyer described the decision as a form of corruption driven not by direct payments but by incentives.

"That's the motivation. That's what we call corruption because you are being influenced," he said.

Ampaw argued that corruption should not always be viewed as the exchange of money, insisting that influence, personal gain and institutional incentives often encourage unethical behaviour.

"Money plays only about 60%, but 40% of corruption is influence," he stated.

He made the remarks while discussing what he believes are the underlying causes of corruption in Ghana, maintaining that the problem is deeply rooted across various sectors of society rather than being confined to politics or the judiciary.

NA/VPO

Lawyer Maurice Ampaw on judicial corruption, national issues and Christian faith