A legal practitioner, Mr. Yaw Poku, has described jailed former Youth and Sports Minister Mallam Isa as a sacrificial lamb who was imprisoned in the name of zero tolerance for corruption because he had no godfather in the New Patriotic Party (NPP). Lawyer Poku believed against the background of recent allegations against ministers of state, that if Mallam Issah, a.k.a Insha Allah, had been a member of the NPP he would not have been charged to court.
"For me, it was easy to sacrifice him, more especially because he belonged to a different political party", Mr. Opoku said in his contribution as one of the speakers at the third in a series of lectures on corruption organized by the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) in Accra at the weekend. The theme was: Corruption in Ghana: What is the way forward? Mallam Isa, a member of the PNC who was appointed Minister of Youth and Sports by President John Kufuor was charged with causing financial loss to the state and jailed four years after he lost $46,000 meant as winning bonus for the Black Stars.
Mr. Opoku noted that if the recent news paper allegation against Ministers of State were true, the charging and jailing of then Mallam Isah who is a member of the People's National Convention (PNC) was unjustifiable.
He recalled that there are over 200 expressions in the various Ghanaian languages which give indications that corruption has eaten into the fabric of Ghanaian Society since independence.
"The impression is often created that when we talk about corruption it is only within the public sector; not at all but it includes the private sector as well, he stressed.
He explained that the criminal code of 1960 Act 29, section 239 - 247 dealt with various definitions of what constituted corruption which stated that the person must be a public officer.
And when we talk about a public officer we mean anybody who receives his salary at the end of the month through the government consolidated fund. It also includes jurors", he said.
Mr. Poku further explained that under the law a private person who receives money and takes a decision to influence the giver does not come under criminal law.
So if a private contractor induces or influences someone in a job, he cannot be prosecuted under our criminal code because he is private person and the law limits each three categories of persons who can come under the criminal office or corruption.
In his contribution, Mr. Hudu Yaya, a former National Democratic Congress General Secretary, observed that corruption is a historical factor and the only way to fight it is through a conscious organizing of the ordinary people in the society who can change it. Contributing, Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Editor-in-Chief of "The Insight", said the only way of fighting corruption was to build a new society anchored on the principles of democracy, society justice and the equitable distribution of the National wealth.
