Politicization of corruption must stop - MP

Member of Parliament for the Gomoa West Constituency, Alexander Abban is calling for the depoliticization of corruption to nip the canker in the bud.

The MP believes associating the two parties, New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) with corruption without equally holding citizens to account only worsens the problem.

“We tend to politicize crime and corruption and in doing that we try to do a crime score of what NPP has done and what NDC has done and put it side by side. Do a balance sheet to see who was more corrupt than the other. If that is where the argument is then we are trying to say someone is more corrupt than the other.”

“That seems to be the kind of conversation we have. We allow the civil servants…to go untouched and we rather talk about politicians. The issue of corruption must be tackled from the roots. If you tell NDC, NPP go away and we bring a new set of people and our thinking is still the way it is, they also can be corrupt. We must rise to accept the problem that corruption is not an NDC problem, corruption is not an NPP problem. If that is all that we are going to do, we will not solve the problem.We will just be comparing negatives just to see who has more negatives ”

Mr. Abban’s comment follows corruption accusations and counter accusations between the government and the opposition.

President Akufo-Addo in defending his record on fighting corruption had previously said that his government had been able to protect the public purse better than the previous government.

He stated that his administration had saved GHc2.75 billion by reducing sole-sourcing contracts from January 2017 to July 2019.

The main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), clapped back at the President, saying he was deluding himself, and disagreed with his statements.

They dared him to publish lists of the projects the President claimed that money was saved from.

Source: ghanaweb.com