Lawyer and Senior Vice President of Imani Africa, Kofi Bentil has called for constitutional amendment as a solution to ending corruption in the country.
According to him, corruption in Ghana is largely attributable to the flexibility of the 1992 Constitution, hence no matter who is president, he or she cannot change anything.
“The problem comes from our governance system and structures which ultimately goes to the Constitution.
“These governance systems and structures, because they are flawed, manifest themselves in massive corruption which makes people give up and then it also manifests in economic problems like what we are having now- leading to DDE.
“You can bring people, make president Obama the president of Ghana and he will still have problems, he stressed.
Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday, Mr Bentil asserted that until the gabs in the Constitution are addressed, the problem will persist since good leadership is lost among Ghanaians.
“So what we need to do now is to move from an open constitution to a tight constitution that does not give them[leadership] room at all, because I am not sure whether the problem is NPP and NDC or there is going to be a party …we cannot trust our leaders to do the right thing,” he said.
Mr Bentil added that although the Constitution is not entirely the problem, it is in Ghana’s best interest for amendments.
“Yes our leaders are failing us seriously, but the main thing that needs to be done is to put structures around them, starting from the amendment of the Constitution so that these things that consistently recur regardless of which government, we will at least put a handle on it and may be redirect it in a right way,” he added.
The Senior Vice President of Imani Africa said the level of corruption in Ghana has created the perception that coups are a better option.
“And when these things happen and continue to happen that is how you get the coups, because some people think the Constitution does not work.
Constitutions work, what we must do is that our leaders develop a certain passion,” he bemoaned.
It would be recalled that a report released on Tuesday, January 31, that Ghana placed 72nd in the 2022 edition of the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).
The results announced by Transparency International (TI) saw Ghana score 43 out of a total of 100.
This means Ghana has not made any progress on the CPI score of 43 for the past three years.
CPI Score relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption and ranges between 100 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt).
