My thoughts have often been that, man was born to live and not just exist. In living, you do good or you do bad. No one lives good only or bad only. We all live both; just that one lives more of one than the other, to various degrees in different ways. It’s like fakyɛ (forgive) and gyae ma ɛnka (let sleeping dogs lie); a see no evil. A bygone conclusion may energise a joint effort towards movement ahead.
But atoning sin so easily in simple ‘I’m sorry’ is no disincentive for public misbehaviour. It might even contribute to the thievery that characterises governance. So easily allowing bygones to be bygones strengthens the hands that take from where they are prohibited from touching.
Mr. Joe Appiah, a progressive Ghanaian politician, who found himself in the company of conservatives, once said the development of the motherland was being constrained by a culture of let sleeping dogs lie ‘gyae ma ɛnka.’ That’s where people entrusted with public responsibility are never held accountable. He felt, and spoke the words to express it, during the Acheampong redemption years.
Since then, the motherland has been taken through a turbulence of military juntas cleaning house in the AFRC and revolutionising the system in the PNDC. Neither succeeded in putting in the kind of structures of accountability, the lack of which formed the basis of their coups, and Joe’s lamentations.
The PNDC’s attempt was a farce from the beginning. After they have grabbed whatever, they thought they should legitimise their loot with the constitutional transition clauses. Those clauses neutralised whatever Article 41 could have achieved. And they wanted to be sure the assets declaration would never happen as a way of accountability.
Layer upon layer of legislation and the creation of structures have led to nothing. CHRAJ and EOCO appeared side by side. The Kufuor administration introduced a number of public procurement guiding instruments. More recently, an office of special prosecutor was created. None of that has recouped loots by Woyome or judgment debt payments or zoomwaste, or dirty oil or Agyapa.
Standards of public service behaviour are measured in terms of who is worse than the bad and not who did better than the good another did. Is there any motherland in this world that progressed on that kind of tangent?
I once wrote that I have heard banks pursue assets tracing as one way of monitoring possible theft by their employees. It hasn’t stopped their staff from thieving company money. But it keeps the thievery under reasonable control.
As things stand, we may never know the truth about Embraer or Airbus. We may never get to know the profit and loss of dirty oil and Agyapa. We may never get back the Woyome and other dubious judgment debt paid monies. Neither will the truth of the Zoomwaste District Assembly dealings be known.
When one party is in opposition and eventually wins power, we hear ‘By the time we finish with you …’ in 2001 by a senior minister or ‘We will jail 40 ministers’ by a woman attorney general in 2009. Then everything goes silent. So now, the word is ‘dukadaya’, the value is the same. That is, the poor value is the same. The practice has condemned the motherland to lag behind others in progress and advancement.
It appeared an auditor general would sort things out. The next thing was that he had fallen foul of the forever challenging procurement trouble.
It’s such a troubling ‘spare me I spare you’ arrangement. Otherwise what happened to the simple issue of double salary? What exactly happened to that issue? Were the monies paid back? Or were they fairly collected? Why hasn’t any MP posed the question to the Minister of Finance for answer before Parliament?
If we can’t get answers to these questions, I say everything is a joke. There would be no hope for development.
Sometime ago, a newspaper speculated a minister had squandered GH¢33 million. When investigations were conducted, it turned out to be GH¢3 million stolen. At least that was something. Today, we are rather obsessed with speculating to blackmail for witness evidence. They want a ruling that will send people to court because they think; a carte blanche for every election result to be disputed!
Leading others has got to do with morale and goodwill. You may not be able to stop people from thinking. But if perception is almost everything that matters in governance, then you would have to mind what people think.
An audit board at odds with the auditor general (who fails with the devil of procurement) will never succeed with accountability. I went searching for ‘bycomes,’ because if we keep letting bygones keep going the way we so freely do, troubles would never stop ‘bycomes’.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh