Govt officials are looting state coffers -Koi Larbi

A former New Patriotic Party (NPP) Member of Parliament for Akropong, now the Akwapim North Constituency, Mr. Agyare Koi Larbi, has said that the pattern of corruption going on in the government is symptomatic of organized looting of the public treasury via the unusually high inflated contract prices.

"There is ample evidence that government officials are inflating government contracts to enrich themselves," The Enquirer quotes him in an interview.

Mr. Larbi warned that the current notion that government officials could loot the country and retire peacefully is unprecedented, observing that upheavals are inevitable in such circumstances.

He said that people in authority should keep in mind that they could not run away from the reckless misuse of public funds.

"Those exercising executive authority in the country now should know that one day they will have to account for the financial bleeding going on around us, and live up to expectation," he said.

Mr. Larbi said the silence of civil society groups and even opposition parties is quite strange, and urged them to call those in authority to order.

"Those who are supposed to talk about the rot in the system are behaving as if they do not exist whilst the financial bleeding continues unabated” he added.

He observed that the 1992 Constitution is part of the current corruption canker because it ensures very little institutional accountability.

"The nature of powers given to the President is such that other institutions will not be able to hold the President and his Ministers to account for any misconduct," he said.

Touching on the new currency which is expected to take effect from July 1, 2007, Mr. Larbi said the whole exercise amounts to abuse of trust and fiscal recklessness.

He said that the explanation by the Ministry of Finance that only the Bank of Ghana could give the cost of the exercise was not the best because Ghanaians have a right to know the cost of printing and quantum of currency to be printed.

"The fact that the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Ghana are not prepared to tell the country the cost of printing the new currency notes and other related matters only heightens suspicions that something has gone amiss," he noted.

Mr. Larbi who is also a legal practitioner, intimated that if figures that are making rounds in sections of the media turn out to be true, then the entire government from the President, ministers and Bank of Ghana officials should be held liable for abuse of trust.

He quizzed; “Why would any normal government have to spend public funds of such magnitude at a time of near-economic collapse?”

He said that there is no way the government could justify the printing of the new currency when it has officially acknowledged that the country would move into the new ECOWAS currency Zone (ECO) in about three years time, rendering the new currency unusable.

Mr. Larbi who is set to launch a new book, "Wailing In My Native Land", told The Enquirer that government officials would be uncomfortable with his position but said he would continue to caution them as far as economic plundering is concerned.