The Member of Parliament (MNP) for Asante-Akim North in the Ashanti Region, Andy Kwame Appiah-Kubi, has suggested that it is time for professional negligence to be criminalised to curb corruption in the country.
“If road contactors, for instance, fail to deliver their work to meet standard after being contracted by the state, they should be made to face criminal action so that when we criminalise professional negligence it will reduce the spate of corruption,” he explained.
Mr Appiah-Kubi insisted that there were some professionals who become negligent in the discharge of their duties and needed to face criminal action because involvement in criminal action was a form of engaging in corruption.
Contributing to a discussion on the 2021 report by the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime which ranked the Police to be the foremost public institution perceived to be most corrupt, he indicated that people engaged in negligence of professional conduct must face sanctions.
Vitus Azeem, a former Executive Director of the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), called for punitive punishments against corrupt officials through proper investigation done into corruption allegation, and when the officials were found culpable, they should be jailed, with their properties confiscated to the state.
He noted that until that was done, the fight against graft would be difficult to tackle when the fight against graft was not punitive enough to deter others from engaging in it and bemoaned failure to investigate credible corruption allegation and questioned whether people wanted to be jailed for corruption, adding that “if the state is bold enough to jail people for corruption people will not engage in it with impunity”.
