Centre For Freedom And Accuracy Bemoans Declining Economy

Centre for Freedom and Accuracy (CFA) has bemoaned the current state of the country’s economy, attributing the situation to the corrupt practices of some government officials.

In a statement delivered in Accra on the first anniversary of the launch of the centre and the National Anti-Corruption Campaign, the centre said although the crusade against corruption in Ghana continued, the problem had gone from bad to worse.

“Every single day, the Judgment Debt Commissioner, Justice Apau, weeps for the nation as he sees clear cases of organised plunder of the public purse. Another Supreme Court Justice was so appalled with the plunder that in open court, he declared that we are now in an era of what he described as create, loot and share,” he said.

Cases of perceived corruption

The Executive Director of the centre, Mr Andrew Awuni, delivered the statement. He cited the GYEEDA, SADA, ASONGTABA scandals, and the infamous sale of Merchant Bank as cases that would go down history as some of the most incredible instances of “the flagrant abuse of power and impunity backed by political power”.

“The sad thing is that the men and women who are directly responsible for these scandals are walking not just as free men and women but as men and women still in the driving seat,” he said.

Mr Awuni observed that exactly a year after CFA, in partnership with Tiger Eye, launched a campaign against corruption, efforts to address the situation were yet to yield any fruit because those responsible for the problem remained unpunished.

He said when the Scandal newspaper, which served as a platform to publicise some of the acts of corruption in Ghana, was launched, it had uncovered and named people and institutions that “we thought were responsible for those acts.

“Unfortunately, however, the shaming did not take place apparently because the people and institutions that were named were simply not perturbed and those who were expected to do the shaming were not interested in carrying out their duties.”

Mr Awuni recalled Anas Aremyaw’s cocoa smuggling story and the case of how the assets of the infamous Quality Grain, worth over $8million, were passed on to another American company, Parrie Volta, in 2008 as some of the issues the centre dealt with but nothing meaningful came out of it.

He, however, assuredthe public that the CFA would continue to carry on with the crusade against corruption but “this year, we will be paying more attention to our core business of ‘working for a free enterprise’, and hope that someday things will change”.

Source: Graphic Online