Professor Godfred Bokpin of the University of Ghana Business School, has appealed to the citizenry to accept that corruption has come to stay hence measures must be taken to tackle the menace.
He decried that people do not feel any particular guilt about the menace because conscience-wise people do not feel any particular guilt in accessing proportionally to embezzle funds.
“Conscience-wise, people do not feel any particular guilt by engaging in corruption-related issues because they know they can access funds in proportion without being traced so those who have access to embezzle funds do that without feeling guilty,” Prof. Bokpin bemoaned.
Speaking at an Imani-GIZ reform dialogue series on the theme: ‘Risk of corruption to entrepreneurial and business growth in Ghana’, he called for acceptance and acknowledgment of the menace but however asked that steps are taken to address it so as to strengthen democratic governance.
“Go to the senior high schools and see how some students are trying to beat up invigilators who were strict in preventing them from copying, go to our pre-tertiary institutions and see how politicians have messed up the control channel that practically disarm their management from actually enforcing anything even if it is ethical, moral or religious.
“These are the people who, very soon, will take over and you will see how that is feeding into the politics among students and the corruption at the tertiary level and as they are exiting, they are entering the bigger corrupt society with well-rehearsed experience,” Prof.Bokpin warned.
He lamented that all the country’s leaders never institutionalised any anti-corruption culture and to the extent they were successful and assembled around themselves enough corrupt people to do exactly the opposite of what, perhaps they portrayed to society and cited the late Kwame Nkrumah, Jerry Rawlings and Atta Mills-led administrations.