Corruption, the Bane of our Society

Corruption, the Bane of our Society

By E. Ofori Akyea

My father is 93 years old. He is upset that I have not written anything about corruption in our society. I have always told him that each day that I open the paper there is something or the other about corruption. Citizens who are as concerned about the moral fibre of our society as people like him are continually writing and using other possible means to get the message across that the practise should stop.

The newspapers, radio and other media are constantly reporting that someone took a bribe and was caught, a public officer took money before doing his or her duty, and the police continue to be accused of being corrupt and so on. My father spends a lot of time listening to the radio. He has been particularly appalled by what he heard during the Public Accounts Committee hearings. Was all that our money that was being wasted like that, he keeps asking? I had nothing to add, I answered.

He thought there are people employed to make sure that such terrible things do not happen in our dear country. I reminded him that when the rich man went to hell when he died he asked God to send him back to life on earth to preach the good life to his fellow men. God told him that there were numerous preachers constantly telling their listeners on how to reform their lives. He cannot go back. He was to remain in his present state forever.

The man of God, of the Methodist persuasion, that my old man is, countered that I should add my voice vigorously to those who condemned the practise of corruption in our society. If I kept quiet what happened to Jonah when he refused to go to Nineveh and ended up in the belly of the whale could happen to me too. I had a duty as a “prophet” to speak up, he insisted.

I thought about the charge I have been given for a while and recalled the Jewish saying about the pogroms. They came for my neighbour and I kept quiet. Then they came for my friend and I kept quiet. Then they came for my brother and I kept quiet. Later on they came for me. That was how the millions of Jews perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other torture camps. I also remembered what our elders say that when your neighbour’s beard is on fire better get a bucket of water ready to douse yours.

Now that I have the status of a prophet, now listen to me, people.

We play political games with corruption. Yesterday we were number ten on the Transperancy International list. Today we are number eight. In fact, when our opponents were in power we were number twenty and so on. Let us then congratulate ourselves. We are doing all right. Of course, we are not doing all right. We go on and on in justifying our corrupt behaviour. We point fingers at our detractors and assume a holier than thou attitude. People extort money from you and when it is safely lodged in the palm of their hands they intone without any tinge of irony “May God bless you”.

We are consumed by avarice and greed to the extent that we have no fellow feeling left. There is an Akan proverb that sums it up very well. It goes like this, “etua woyonko ho a na etua dua”. Loosely translated it says, when a foreign object is lodged on your neighbour’s body you see it like an irritating cutlass that is left in a tree trunk and not a dangerous thing that may kill a fellow human being. We do not care or see our neighbour’s suffering as our own and so mobilize to do something about it.

We are here reminded of John Dunne’s poem, “For Whom the Bell Tools” in which he tells us that when we hear the bell tolling we should not think that it is for someone else. The bells could be tolling for anyone including one’s self. One may say that he or she is not corrupt because either he has not yet been caught or exposed. We behave like the Pharisees who built their whole life’s outlook on hypocrisy. The beams in their eyes were so big they were incapable of being humble and charitable about the specks in the eyes of other people.

The thing about corruption is that once it is mentioned finger pointing takes over. It is the police, the courts, the politicians and a shadowy group known as the leadership. We are the victims and we are at the mercy of the rich and powerful who are able to splash money about. We conveniently forget the little “dash” given to the security man maintaining order at that facility that catapults us to the head of the queue. We forget the little something that we gave to the nurse at the Health Centre to make us see the doctor before those who got there before us. We forget the large donation we gave the church that earned us the front seat, encomiums with special prayers from the priest, pastor, prophet and what other title that men of God are known. We forget the gift we gave to the head of that school that ensured that our child secured admission.

The problem with corruption is that it destroys the psyche of us all. Tolerance of wrong doing is as wrong as the perpetrator. One hears of harrowing stories of bureaucratic corruption. People who have retired from service to our country have to wait for upwards of two years before their papers are processed for the payment of their meagre monthly allowances. Such terrible behaviour is being perpetrated by officers who could be the sons or daughters of the poor pensioner. Many of these old and often infirm people come from up country to Accra despite the decentralisation of government services to “chase” their papers. Since they do not know anyone in Accra they end up sleeping rough until their documents are processed.

It is said that contractors have to pledge a good percentage of their contract payments to a whole army of officials before they even start work. There is, therefore, nothing to be surprised about when the results of the contract is shoddily executed or abandoned. In the middle of the year 2007, I saw work being done to repair the road from Asikuma by way of Kpeve to Have or so I thought. This is the section of the road that leads to Kpandu and also to Hohoe and to Dambai. A lot of the yams that come down south from the north go by this route. It was gratifying to see the professional looking workers with work clothes and hard hats to match working to make driving a bit more pleasurable. One by one the gaping pot holes disappeared. The school children and the youths in villages along the road lost their jobs filling the potholes with sand and soliciting handouts from motorists. Well they are back with a vengeance. They now erect road blocks to make motorists pay!

As soon as the workers got past Todome the contractor packed his machines and left leaving behind an old broken down articulator truck that is still sitting by the roadside. No one has explained to the road users what the problem is. In less than a month after they left new and bigger potholes began appearing in the sections of the road that had been previously repaired. Drivers have taken to slaloming and zigzagging along the road. It was one such manoeuvre that nearly cost the life of the just crowned Best District Farmer. While he escaped with his life he lost all the prizes that he won. It is painful to drive this short distance. The same destruction is happening on the mountain road from Kpeve to Akrofu on the way to Sokode and to Ho. Just imagine having to manoeuvre around cavernous holes on a steep mountain road when one side of the road is a gaping chasm. Try driving like that on the Akwapim range or on the Kwahu mountains and you will begin to see what I mean.

Corruption permeates all facets of our lives. Churches that are founded and run on fraudulent foundations, all to the glory of the founder are one such example. Clothed in sumptuous ecclesiastical vestments these characters invoke the name of God and credit a spurious spirituality for their actions. They corrupt the institution that is the universal church and lead their people astray. The majority of the people they tend to control and manipulate are women. Unfortunately, many of these women are illiterate and struggling to make something out of their lives.

Men dupe them, have children with them and then shirk their responsibility of helping to look after the children. The men then move in with another woman, who is desperate for companionship and begins another cycle of irresponsible life. Such behaviour tends to corrupt the social fabric that holds society together. The idea of being responsible one to another gets thrown out of the window. Children grow up in an insecure and destabilising environment. Invariably they do not go to school and the social net is non existent to hold them. We are perpetrating poverty and poverty breeds corruption. In a situation such as this the idea that hard work will be rewarded becomes irrelevant and so short cuts are resorted to in order to get at what one can get for him or her.

It is in such a situation that our police come in. If everything can be arranged at any level why not at the law enforcement level. Arranging things is something that is convenient. The results of the arrangement may not stand up to societal scrutiny but when the arrangement is indulged in by a substantial number it acquires a status of its own. When a driver is stopped by a police patrol and the policeman or woman stands behind the vehicle the driver knows immediately what he drill is. Without any prompting he joins the police officer at the back and hardly a word is spoken by either party. The driver then returns to his seat, the policeman turns his attention to the next oncoming vehicle and no one is any more the wiser or foolish.

I do not believe that improving police salaries alone will wipe away the reputation that the service has of being corrupt. The total culture of policing within the context of our societies has to a total transformation. A visit to any police barrack and the police station will reveal a serious social situation that needs radical surgery to excise the problem. Living conditions are not only bad. They are primitive and filthy. We short change our police officers as we do our prison officers. I have a suspicion that when the police officer comes out of the barrack in the morning and sees all the people riding in their flashy cars and well dressed people looking down on the officer there is a seething anger that informs all his or her actions. If we are unable to provide decent accommodation for the officers let them seek accommodation within the community. It may improve police community relations. After all the same situation where the police live in the community occurs in many other countries.

Rumours abound about how much bank officials take in percentages in order to approve loans. Of course, no one will give one any details

Similar radical action is needed if we are to make our public services also respond in a responsible way to serving the needs of our society. Apart from infusing into our public officers the great marketing skills that commercial organizations impart to their employees in order to see higher positive figures in their bottom lines they need to be radically educated to feel that they are a critical part of Ghana Inc. Appeals to nationalism will get us nowhere especially if the person making the appeal is not respected by the officials.

We need to go deep into our traditions to extract those values and norms that informed the pre-colonial societies. Two or three indicators of our societies are religion, language and the arts. At school we were forbidden to perform local dances or music. We were taught American square dance. Some of us went on to learn ballroom dancing and sang Scottish airs. When Kwame Nkrumah set up the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Legon the Institute was derisively called Dondology or the place that one learnt to master the hour glass drum. Thankfully the latest list of courses for Cape Coast University Arts Faculty includes courses in African Dance, Theatre, Music, Literature, Art and Fine Art. We need to go out and add African Philosophy and Bases of Morality. These studies would help us on the road to self discovery and improvement.

Things have changed today but we have a long way to go to go yet. We are only scratching the surface. The journey of a thousand miles start…