The Member of Parliament (MP) for Adenta in Greater Accra, Yaw Buabeng Asamoah has bemoaned lack of effective and efficient fight against corruption by the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) over the years.
He noted that the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) needed more investment in order to live up to expectation in the graft battle.
“We’ve experimented with CHRAJ, it hasn’t worked, we still have to invest in CHRAJ, we’ve experimented with EOCO, it hasn’t worked, we still have to invest in EOCO, we have the Police Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) among others adding that “the country’s challenges with corruption fight is mainly institutional.
“Sometimes we create too many institutions to deal with the same challenges, we’ve been frustrated by corruption challenges for a very long time, and we have so many institutions across board.
“There is the need for the country to invest in up-to-date modern crime laboratories with forensic capacity in order to win the crime fight and we sometimes take the ability to investigate for granted.
“In the era of cross border cyber-crime, you will need somebody really on top of his game in all the arts and maybe we are not doing enough of that” he noted.
On the Office of the Special Prosecutor not being adequately equipped, Mr Asamoah stressed “the president has fulfilled, not only the biggest promise on anti-corruption which is the establishment of the Office of the Special Prosecutor, but has gone beyond it by appointing Martin Amidu as the special prosecutor.
“This is not a man that if you are not willing to fight corruption you will give him an instrument as powerful as the office of the special prosecutor, that singular act of the president gives me a lot of belief and a lot of hope that the president is serious about fighting corruption.
“The special prosecutor will be equipped to deliver on his mandate, having established the office, as a first step, the second step is to operationalise it within the constraints of our economy, I believe that Martin Amidu will be adequately resourced since he knows the law that gives him a lot and great deal of power,” Mr Asamoah assured. –starrfmonline.com