NDC followed Kufuor, NPP's monetisation path - Rawlings

Former President Jerry John Rawlings has said the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has lost the moral high ground to fight corruption in the country.

According to him, the NDC as a party failed to put in place the machinery to investigate the corrupt activities of the previous New Patriotic Party (NPP) officials adding that the party has abandoned its moral framework and taken what it was not known for.

In an interview on Accra-based Asaase radio, the founder of the NDC said the party followed former President John Agyekum Kufuor and the NPP's down the path to "monetization".

He said the Mills-Mahama led administration lost the moral high ground to fight corruption.

"Plus, I think they [Mills-Mahama] may have decided that if they can't go along with my kind of neat, clean politics…they would like to do it the Kufuor and his NPP way: monetise it.

"So, naturally, he would have to leave Kufuor and all his sins alone and engage in the same type of politics, monetizing the whole program, the whole process. That is why corruption has gone so deep … since I left office," he stated.

Rawlings said the inability of the late Prof. John Evans Atta Mills' government to investigate corruption against NPP former government officials had emboldened others in strategic state institutions, to engage in massive corruption that is causing the country millions of cedis.

He noted: "He was unwilling to touch any of those things.

"It's as if he doesn't understand basic psychology, about right and wrongs. In his refusal to halt, to investigate…and to clean up some of those wrongs, some of those injustices, the wrong would end up perpetuating itself.

"That's how come we went downhill…How can you hate people in their brilliance to the extent that you would want to jail people like Tsatsu Tsikata?

"But you’ve got to understand the nature of capitalists: how cruel, how vicious they can be. I'm not too sure socialists go that far."