NCCE - Abuse of Power, Corruption Depleting Resources

Josephine Nkrumah, the Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) has expressed concern at the rate of abuse of power by ministries, government departments, agencies and institutions.

She lamented that "abuse of power, as well as corruption, are depleting national resources, the rate at which some government officials abuse offices in the past leads to widespread mediocrity in the public space as well as leading to a weakening of public institutions".

Speaking at the 2nd National Dialogue on 'Public Accountability: Abuse of Office', Ms Nkrumah pointed out that "the accepted norms and practices properly constituting abuse of office have led to mediocrity and the weakening of institutions while stagnating national cohesion, growth and development.

"It costs the nation resources, money, it pronounces the vulnerability of public office that negates sound policies, programmes and takes away the objective of service delivery efficiency and effectiveness to drive socio-economic and democratic growth and development," Ms Nkrumah stressed.

Daniel Domelevo, the Auditor General, called for improvement in the laws and strict implementation of the rules to curb corruption and expressed his disappointment at what he described as the decline in the quality of work undertaken by all kinds of professionals.

"The standards in professions such as accounting, auditing, engineering and vocations such as tailoring and dressmaking have fallen low to the extent that they prefer the services of expatriate professional workers, the fundamental challenge of the citizenry as it stands now, is a lack of discipline.

"The quality of engineering hasn't improved, the quality of almost everything is going down with more professions, people want to put up a structure and they don't want a citizen, they are looking for someone else, there is something fundamentally wrong and that thing for me, is lack of discipline," Mr Domelevo bemoaned. -citinewsroom.com

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