Corruption Perception Index: Ghana should have been ranked lower – Casely Hayford

Financial analyst, Sydney Casely Hayford, has described how Ghana was rated on the 2017 Global Corruption Perception Index as "incorrect" arguing that the country should be "lower down the scale"

Ghana dropped 11 places from the 2016 ranking to place 81 out of 180 countries in the 2017 Corruption Perception index.

However, Mr Hayford believes what is happening on the ground is worse than what the rankings seek to portray.

He disagreed with the country dropping to just three places.

“The Perception Index is incorrect. We should be lower down the scale. We should be far lower down the scale. I think this is a very good [rating],” he stated on The Big Issue.

“If you got 43 percent one year and the following year you go 40 percent in an examination, you haven’t done too badly. Maybe some other people worked a little harder and therefore they pipped you but you don’t fall down dramatically.

"I have reached a point where everywhere I turn in this country, everything I look at seems to be wrong and they seem to be easily correctable.”

The ruling party, NPP has blamed the opposition NDC for the countries poor performance in the ranking as the index also took into account corruption cases recorded under the John Mahama administration, which left power in January 2017.

The NDC, on the other hand, has rejected the claim, saying it is an attempt by the Akufo-Addo administration to cover its failure to fight corruption by shifting blame to others.

But Mr Caseley Hayford has expressed much hope in the Nana Addo administration's performance and predicted that the 2018 score could see some improvement.

He says attempts by the Akufo-Addo administration to fight corruption could be seen more in the next rankings as that may not have reflected in the 2017 index.

“A lot of things that have been done by this current government would not have made a significant impact on the perception index. It needs time for the data sets to be complete and comparable before you can actually go ahead so we will probably see a little bit more next year.”

The report, put together by Transparency International, ranks countries annually by their perceived levels of corruption, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.

The mark was out of a total of 100 was 40, down from 43, which the country attained in the 2016 index.