Accra, Feb.20 GNA - Mr Yaw Opoku, a private legal practitioner, on Friday said corruption was endemic in the capitalist system of government through out the world.
He noted that the emergence of 'property owning democracy' also had to a large extent contributed to dishonesty.
Mr Opoku was speaking at a public discussion organized by the Socialist Forum of Ghana, under the theme: "Corruption in Ghana: What is the way forward" in Accra.
He said power should be given to people at the grassroots to enable them apply legal and simple procedures of society to fight corruption.
Mr Opoku added that dishonesty was not about morality but it depended upon the way people in authority perceived the canker and their ability to deal with it when it surfaced.
He also called for the replacement of the current system of governance with a social system that was more humane to the people. Mr Opoku said: "We can come out with the best code of conducts for our public officers but if we don't change our system of governance this would not succeed" and urged the authorities to expedite action on the "whistle blowers bill" since that could assist in the fight against corruption.
Mr Kwesi Pratt Jnr, Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, observed that those who were corrupt were the most powerful people in the society.
He, therefore, called on Ghanaians to change any system in which a privilege few people allocated to themselves a chunk of the country's resource to the detriment of the mass of the people. "The only way of building a society where there is social justice and equity is by distributing the country's resources fairly to everybody" he added. 20
