“As you fight corruption, corruption fights you back.” That’s the saga of the recent motherland corruption fight of intrigues. My compatriots, especially the anti-corruption crusader individuals and organisations in the motherland, are shell shocked. It’s much about whether we should wait for perfection in the corruption fighter before we can seriously fight corruption or we should begin from somewhere using whatever we have to get to somewhere, where perfection in the fighter would be higher than human.
On Monday, January 15, 2018, this column cheered the arrival of Kaiser, the prosecutor extraordinaire. The caption was, ‘The Corruption Demolition Man.’ He would team up with a then muscle-flexing procurement scrutiny man. Together, they would kill the motherland’s longstanding corruption woes. No one expected an Agyapa and birthdate troubles scatter. A duo making an impactful dent in corruption arrogance in the motherland is now a dream.
I tried a bit of a background trace to our current predicament of a massive setback in our corruption fight. A nexus of means and end, or a clean means that lead to a clean end is what we need as a people to leap and not crawl to development. From that stand, lesser evil will forever frustrate and delay our forward march to prosperity, as a people.
The appointer of the birthday blues man had stressed an effective accountability checker as a condition for ‘good’ governance. At the swearing in, a point had been made that a checker appointed by one government functions better checking a different government. The reverse is an appointed checker cannot effectively check his appointer government.
Appointed not effectively checking appointer has been so with all our past attorney general appointees. It’s been a reason why those who know have been advocating for a split minister of justice who serves a government and an attorney general who serves the motherland Republic, freed from government encumbrances. If we weren’t going to get that, then, the novelty of an appointed special prosecutor should cure that gaping hole in our corruption fight.
At the time of an auditor general’s appointment, an ‘above board’ impression was created. So, then, the question should have been posed: ‘Whose board?’ However, as soon as a question like that is put, no matter which way it may be answered, it lowers the standard of strength one can approach that difficult task.
Article 70(1)(b) assumes the Council of State would filter the appointment of the Auditor General to ensure the person of the highest standard possible would be appointed by the President. After December 10, 2016, the sitting President had long lost re-election and by law the term of the Council of State he had appointed, was ending on midnight January 6, 2017. A dutiful Council of State would have been diligent enough to advise the President to resist the temptation to appoint a new Auditor General.
Many criticised the appointment as inappropriate, poorly timed and unethical. Others defended it as constitutionally right and lawful. Today, we know which of those positions was of wisdom. It is clear in the governance of this motherland, what is lacking is strong ethics. We, therefore, must rise above what is lawful. Like they say, the lawful must be the minimum, the lowest bar of compliance. The game changer for accelerated development would be leaders who would be lawful in the minimum and of the highest ethical standards.
The appointer ought not to have appointed. It was a bad decision at a wrong time. His adviser, the Council of State, ought to have detected the birthdate and birthplace revision and advised against appointment. Above all, the appointee ought to have advised himself by anticipating possible damaging controversy, especially if he meant to apply the law strictly as he did, and not to have taken the position.
Let’s remember how the Kaiser man struggled to get his own people to do right. Until, and unless, we get a president’s own appointee holding him to account, we can only dream accelerated growth and development. We will not achieve development without aid anytime soon. The problem is not a president appointing an auditor general to probe or hold his successor accountable. It is an auditor general holding the president who appointed him (or her whenever it happens) accountable.
For now, we cannot hope to ever achieve much when we have no opportunity to choose between good and better, instead of only-choice option of lesser evil only. Corruption’s chance of fighting back, as we fight against it, must be neutralised by the moral uprightness of the lead fighter.
Meanwhile, anyone eager to save the motherland must begin with recouping lost dirty procurement money in Ameri and all the cooked up judgment debt money. In fact, even before that, someone must cough up the 20 million American dollars that was used to construct a party headquarters. The motherland’s progress in the fight against corruption would be very effectively waged by a successor of liver quality action without a bile birth and nationality controversy. Find that person or risk deepening corruption.
Let never again be the bile punctured to ruin the delicacy of the liver. We only need to remind ourselves constantly about that. It’s the only way to make progress; conscious that the most tasteful liver has a bile to be managed so as not to let the bitter taste of the bile to destroy the saporous taste of the liver.
By Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh