Dr The Executive Director of Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Mary Awelana Addah, is calling for stiffer punishment for people who deliberately work against institutions fighting against corruption in Ghana.
According to her, public officials who fail to play their part in the fight against the canker that is bedeviling the country must be dealt with.
This, she argued, will send strong signals of the state’s interest in fighting corruption.
Speaking to JoyNews, Madam Addah said, “we are all advocating that we want to see the Public Accounts Committee take up its mandate of ensuring that it makes concrete recommendation and file same to the Attorney-General for either advise or prosecution.
“And so if they have taken up this mandate and they want to carry it out, anybody in the way who is impeding this process must be held accountable.”
Her comments come days after the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, James Klutse Avedzi accused the Clerk of Parliament of refusing to refer a number of cases from the committee to the Attorney General’s office for prosecution.
While responding to a question on which of the matters referred to the Attorney General had been prosecuted so far, Mr Avedzi revealed that Parliament has failed to transmit any of the referrals since 2017 to the AG, until this year.
“The challenge we had as a committee was that when we did all these, Parliament was not communicating to the Attorney General for them to take action until one day the Attorney General appeared before the Committee and I asked him about it and he said nothing has been communicated to him.
“So I had to do a follow-up and ask the Clerk of Parliament to communicate these referrals to the Attorney General’s Office,” he stressed.
But touching on this, the anti-corruption campaigner said the development is unacceptable.
“There have been so many instances where public officers have either negligently done some of these things. But the question we should be asking ourselves is, when people do these things or sleep on duty what are the sanctions given to ensure that it does not repeat in the future?
“Anybody in the way who is impeding this process must be held accountability”.
Source: Myjoyonline
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