Tackling The Corruption Problem: Is current approach a miss or hit?

In this brief opinion piece, I will touch on our nation’s recent approach to “fighting” corruption and whether this approach is likely to impact the overall corruption outlook of Ghana. First, I will describe an analogy of a country faced with the problem of jaywalking and then use this analogy to explain the flaws in our approach to the corruption fight.

Imagine that a road traverses a market or a busy shopping location. Pedestrians want to get to the other side of the road to quickly transact their businesses and catch the earliest evening “trotro” out of town before it becomes impossible to do so. Such pedestrians will naturally take the shortest route across the road and thus creating a problem of jaywalking for city authorities.

Jaywalking, according to Wikipedia, “is the act of pedestrians crossing a roadway if that act contravenes traffic regulations”. What should city authorities do to solve this?

Well, there are a few options for solving the problem of jaywalking, one of which is to employ many law enforcement officers who are then positioned at various points along the road, with instructions to look out for and arrest jaywalkers. Another option is for city authorities to build a pedestrian/foot bridge (and it is sometimes better to build more than one bridge to reduce the distances pedestrians must cover to access a bridge).

This is a popular choice, but one which does not fully solve the problem of jaywalking. City authorities also have the option to build a wall that completely blocks carriageways from pedestrian access and makes it impossible for people to jaywalk, even if they wanted to. That way, the only option left is for pedestrians to use designated pedestrian crossings. Which option, of all the available ones afore-described, should city authorities adopt?

Obviously, the best approach is the final one (i.e., building a wall that completely blocks carriageways from pedestrian access). This approach solves the problem of jaywalking, although it may appear expensive at first thought. However, experience teaches us that our financial muscle constrains us to a much smaller extent than the motivations that drive our choices and actions.

If the motivation of the fellow making the choice on behalf of the city authority is that they have ever lost a loved one to jaywalking and wish to see the problem solved permanently, then resources will be no constraint to erecting barriers that make jaywalking impossible.

On the other hand, if their motivation emanates from a desire to employ more people (including many of their relatives and friends) in law enforcement and, in addition, collect substantial amounts in fines (from jaywalkers), then they may find the option of policing the road to be the most appealing. This way, they find “jobs for the boys” and rake in loads of cash in fines.

The problem, however, still lingers because arresting some jaywalkers today does not mean there will be no jaywalkers tomorrow. Deterrence may be an overrated approach to keeping law and order after all. It does not appear to work well, especially when the benefits outweigh the risk of getting caught. The rational choice theory offers detailed academic propositions for this observation.

The actual reason why some may opt for this is that while policing the road does not solve the jaywalking problem, authorities cannot be accused of doing nothing about the situation because everyone sees law enforcement officers chasing down jaywalkers from morning to evening, 7 days a week, with extra kilometers covered on busy market days.

The situation of the corruption fight in Ghana is akin to the jaywalking analogy I have painstakingly elaborated in the foregoing paragraphs.

Ghana ranks 72nd out of 180 countries ranked most recently (CPI of 2024), with a corruption perception index of 42%. While this indicates that perceived corruption in the public sector is moderate overall, corruption is still rife in many state institutions and agencies, with front runners being the Ghana Police Service, Immigration and the Judiciary. These are institutions mandated to enforce law and to deliver justice. Ironic, huh?

There are indications that our political party (which translates to state) governance architecture is being propelled, almost entirely, by corruption. There is, for example, the issue of lack of transparency in political party financing, vote buying, the infamous 10% kickbacks which are demanded for every contract awarded, nepotism in the award of contracts to party apparatchiks and outright sale of contracts.

Most public sector jobs in this country are obtained through political patronage or through some other kind of nepotism. Job seekers without political patronage, or with no one to lobby on their behalf, have to resort to the purchase of job placements.

Even more disturbing is the fact that corruption has crept into school admission systems. Parents and guardians have to part with huge sums of money to get their children placed in schools of their choice. Like jaywalking, in the jaywalking analogy, corruption has become a problem that needs an urgent solution.

On campaign platforms, political parties have raised issues against corruption and have always promised to deal with it. The most concrete of these promises yet is the establishment of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) in 2018 by the government of HE Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo. The office has since become our flagship anticorruption crusader.

The OSP, by the way it operates, is mainly a policing approach to the problem of corruption. One only needs to take a cursory look at the OSP’s half-yearly reports to come to a quick realisation that the Office has been busy mainly chasing down “jaywalkers” and, except for school visits and typical talk shops, hardly any concrete steps to prevent corruption. Part of the problem is that the Office has been set up with an actual “fighting” focus.

Note that the key difference between “fighting” and “preventing” is that we fight what already exists and prevent that which is yet to come into existence. Successfully preventing something renders nonsensical the need to fight it.

Yet, we chose to put more relevance to the fighting approach, which may be no accident because the Office, as alleged in some quarters, was intended to be used as a tool for political witch-hunting.

A fighting focus is clearly seen in the setup of the OSP. There is, inter alia, a division for investigation which is packed with policemen, a division for prosecution, which is packed with prosecution attorneys and a division to manage seized properties. None of the 7 Divisions has an auditing or policy and institutional framework review focus.

However, auditing and policy reviews that plug loopholes in institutional and policy frameworks are far superior to policing when it comes to corruption prevention. In the jaywalking analogy, arresting a jaywalker today does not mean there will be no jaywalkers tomorrow as long as the carriageway remains unblocked to be crossed at various unauthorised locations.

Similarly, arresting a corrupt person does not mean we shall have no more corruption. As long as those loopholes remain to be exploited, there will always be corruption.

Instead of chasing down “jaywalkers” and sometimes with massive collateral damage and cost to the taxpayer, what can help our dear nation is to find ways to plug loopholes that are exploited by corrupt public officials. Let me use the sale of public sector jobs as an example. How is it possible to prevent the sale of jobs if jobs are distributed like candies among people of the political class to be handed to job seekers of their choosing?

Let’s say a minister gives 100 slots to friendly colleagues (e.g., other ministers, MPs, party executives, etc), is it not possible that some of those jobs could be offered to people who have no need for them and for that reason, they get sold? The enemy of the state is not the fellow who paid for the job and perhaps, not even the one who facilitated the sale of the job (regardless of the specific provisions of the law).

The true enemy is the fellow with the authority to give slots to whom they please (whether or not it is for financial gain). The greater problem is the loophole in the policy framework that allows duty bearers to be able to share slots and for the job seekers to be reduced to a beggars. Sadly, it is always people who may themselves be victims of institutionalised corruption that are caught in the wide-sweeping net of the law.

There are established protocols for recruitment auditing that can directly hold duty bearers accountable. However, bottom-up approaches may be preferred by law enforcement agencies that have other objectives other than just holding the top hierarchy to account.

For example, the bottom-up approach allows for the OSP to target many people whose assets can be declared as tainted and liable for seizure, keeping their asset management division alive. But does this approach yield the desired results of holding people who are truly abusing their offices for personal gain? Well, let’s all ponder over this.

We may be busy chasing down “jaywalkers”, but our current approach will not have any significant positive impact on the corruption outlook of Ghana. We need to change gears by shifting focus on our policy and institutional frameworks to ensure that weaknesses and loopholes that allow people to abuse their offices are found and plugged.

Former President HE Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo chose his path to the solution. If President John Dramani Mahama were to, in my wildest dreams, ask me what he should do as his contribution, I would advise him to gather experts in policy auditing to work on putting barriers that would make it (nearly) impossible for public officials to abuse their offices for profit even if they wanted to.

Isolated examples can be cited of a few places where even the death sentence has been handed down for high-level corruption involving public officers. However, the vast majority of countries with low levels of corruption did it by putting in place fortified barriers to prevent abuse of public office.

Rather than investing in wasteful duplication of law enforcement, let us learn from the success stories of others. Let us fortify our institutions through policy reforms.