The Bushy Growing Hedges Of Corruption

We Still Radically Need To Trim The Bushy Growing Hedges Of Corruption And The Rule Of Law In Ghana

ATTITUDES TO THE RULE OF LAW IN GHANA :

Official And Unofficial Corruption according to the Afrobarometer. Citizens are most likely to be law-abiding when they believe that their political leaders and authority figures are honest. Regrettably, the Afrobarometer survey discovers a broad public perception that corruption in Ghana is widespread, especially among officers of the law itself. One of the survey’s most disheartening findings is that many Ghanaians think that bribery among public officials is quite commonplace.

Specifically, Ghanaians are most suspicious of officers of the Ghana Police Service, with 79 percent of respondents judging at least some police personnel to be corrupt. Indeed, more than half (53 percent) are of the view that most policemen are corrupt. Customs officials run a close but unenviable second to the police, with 74 percent of all survey participants saying they believe at least some, and nearly half (48 percent) perceiving most or all, border guards to be corrupt.

When asked about “government officials” in general, 62 percent feel that at least some government officials are corrupt, with 23 percent believing that most or all are. Other identifiable classes of public officials also have a poor image in the eyes of the Ghanaian public. More than two-thirds (70 percent) of respondents think that at least some judges and magistrates are corrupt, and 49 percent think the same of teachers and school administrators.

There is obvious reluctance on the part of some respondents to comment on their perceptions of corruption among some categories of authority figures. This seems to have contributed to a relatively high rate of abstention when interviewees were asked about corruption in the Office of the President (24 percent) decline to offer an opinion), and among elected leaders (22 percent abstain) and government officials (21 percent). The highest rate of abstention though, is observed with regard to perceptions of corruption on the part of NGO leaders (39 percent). This figure most likely reflects a genuine lack of information.

THE PERCEIVED LEVELS OF CORRUPTION IN GHANA : More than half (51 percent) of respondents think there is some corruption going on among elected leaders (i.e., MPs). The Office of the President is considered to be the least corrupt of all the official categories tested, with just 37 percent of respondents saying they think at least some of the President’s staff are corrupt. On balance though, this figure actually emphasizes the severity of the problem, as it is only against a background of abysmally low expectations that any comfort can be drawn from a finding that more than one-third of Ghanaians believe there is corruption at the very heart of government.

The public impression appears to be that most officials of the state, especially those working for the principal law enforcement agencies, are concerned primarily with illegal self-enrichment. The fact that the Ghanaian populace perceives the very agents of law enforcement to be so thoroughly corruptible does not augur well for the drive for good governance. At the same time, as mentioned above, almost half of all respondents judge corruption to be less prevalent than before, and 63 percent of all respondents say they think the current administration is doing fairly well at battling corruption in government. However, while this rating appears impressive, it is no better than the average rating for the government’s handling of a range of issues.

Nor is the perception of endemic corruption confined to the public sector. Some classes of people in the private sector are also perceived to be fairly corrupt, albeit generally less so than public officials. Many respondents think that at least some Ghanaian businessmen (63 percent) and some foreign businessmen (50 percent) are corrupt.

Official corruption often takes the form of a demand for, or acceptance of an offer of, a cash bribe or a favour in exchange for a service that ought to be provided by a civil servant to a public service client without the payment of that extra consideration. Opportunities for this form of “petty” corruption stem from a variety of sources, but frequently government officials placed in “gatekeeper” situations will create artificial bottlenecks in the delivery of public services in order to draw offers of bribes.

The Afrobarometer survey tried to locate some of these bottlenecks by asking respondents how much difficulty they had experienced, or expected to experience, in obtaining a variety of services. According to the responses, the greatest difficulty is with obtaining household services (typically electricity and water supplies and telephone service or fault repair), which is described as difficult or very difficult by 49 percent of respondents.

There is also significant difficulty with obtaining money (salaries, allowances, reimbursements, scholarships and entitlements) from state institutions (40 percent), identity documents (passports, birth certificates and driver’s licenses) (36 percent), and help from the police (36 percent). The degree of difficulty reported by respondents in obtaining entitlements from the state, police assistance, identity documents, and household services is particularly noteworthy since another one-third to one-half of respondents simply report that they have never tried to obtain these services. In other words, the numbers reporting that obtaining each of these services is easy is quite small, ranging from 5 to 26 percent.

Obtaining a voter’s registration card presents the fewest problems, with just 10 percent reporting any difficulty. Only 20 percent had difficulty obtaining a primary school placement. Even so, it can be seen that opportunities for corruption, and the motivation to engage in corruption, are rife in Ghana.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, only a minority of respondents admit to paying bribes to any of these public officials. Thirteen percent of respondents say they paid a bribe to obtain a licence or permit during the previous year. However, this represents the limit of the sample group’s willingness to confess to complicity in official corruption. Needless to say, unless the sample group’s perception of the scale of corruption among government officials is wildly exaggerated, these officials would have to be engaging in their corrupt practices with a substantially larger number of Ghanaians than this last statistic would indicate.

Given the breadth and depth of perceptions of corruption, it is surprising that a good many Ghanaians think, perhaps mistakenly, that there is a fairly high rate of actual observance and/or enforcement of the law. Very large majorities of respondents feel there is a high probability that the law would be enforced in cases of serious crime (92 percent), tax evasion (88 percent), and the illegal use of services (82 percent).

Respondents are evenly split about whether the government’s ability to enforce the law has improved, and just over one-third report some difficulty in obtaining help from the police when in need. Interestingly, perceptions of corruption in the judiciary seemed to have fallen since the last survey. In sharp contrast to the 1999 survey, when 60 percent of respondents felt a fair measure of trust in the courts, the corresponding measure in 2002 is 78 percent, and 65 percent of respondents are fairly satisfied with the government’s efforts to combat crime.

FRANCIS TAWIAH ( Duisburg- Germany )