Last week, Professor Maxwell Owusu of the University of Michigan, a political scientist and researcher, at a public forum in Accra, expressed the view that, after 50 years of independence, Ghana seems to have made little progress. He blamed this largely on the corrupt actions of political leaders and public officers. SOME BACKGROUND Really, this opinion is not new; over the same 50 years of our independence (in fact, even before independence) corruption has always been known and cited as an enemy to our progress. In particular, we have been very good at telling our political leaders and public servants they are corrupt. In 1954, corruption accusation against Nkrumah (then head of government business) and his colleagues became so frequent and intense that the colonial governor set up the Korsah Commission to investigate various allegations. The unfavourable findings against some of the members of government became political ammunition for the opposition. Since then, there have been several such official enquiries. The findings of each of them seem to have strengthened views that political leaders are corrupt and the cause of our comparatively slow development. Indeed, in 1979, leading figures in previous governments suffered violent punishments on allegations of corruption. And there was public support for these punishments. Within less than a decade, the person who supervised those punishments had become the head of government and was under constant allegation that he and his political appointees were corrupt. There is even a generational dimension to this. I can imagine that, two decades after independence, many young men and women in Ghana were very vocal in criticising their national leaders for corruption. Today, that generation are in state management, and are being criticised for corruption and blamed for our relative underdevelopment. A NEW APPROACH The fact that allegations of corruption against state managers are as loud now as they were at independence is perhaps signal to us that we need to do more in the corruption fight. And doing more against corruption includes going beyond the branding of leaders and sections of the public service as corrupt. Of course, it would be naive to expect that politicians would ever stop accusing each other of corruption for the purpose of vote winning. Nor is it realistic to expect that the media would not sensationalise issues of corruption for sales and profit reasons. However, our academicians and research community should not join the fray. By their training and practice, they are observers; observing to provide answers to the whys and the hows of problems and solutions to problems. It is a noble mandate, and must be discharged in a dispassionate and forward-looking way. Human nature as it is, people would always like to be told that their situation could have been better but for the greed and bad faith of their leaders. That seems to provide a simplified understanding of our circumstances. But national problems and nation building are more complex than that, and we should resist the temptation to play to the gallery. MICRO SOLUTIONS It may be useful to consider that corruption is not a macro phenomenon or some general disease that affects people in a collective way. Corruption and misappropriation of public resources result from the actions and inactions of individuals sitting in their offices and closets. Often, it is a minority few who have the opportunity to, and are responsible for the most part of misappropriated public resources. That happens because people are able to go round internal controls, and sometimes, because those controls are inadequate. Therefore, the way to tackle corruption is to strengthen internal controls in resource management at the individual levels and ensure compliance. If public officers violate such controls, it should be easy to detect it early. And detected wrongs ought to be punished. AREAS OF CURIOSITY I recognise that these ideas are not new. Discussions about strengthening internal controls in public finance systems have always been heard. And that is precisely why and where we need our researchers and institutional reformers. There have been many interventions since independence at improving financial controls, perhaps the most notable and recent one being the Public Procurement Act (2003) and the work of the Public Procurement Authority. What are the results in these 50 years? What are the lessons? Which measures can be improved for better outcomes? These obviously should be attractive areas for academic curiosity and research. If we would (kind of) move on from the broad condemnation of corruption, and pay more attention to specific things that must be done at the micro levels in public finance management, we are likely to achieve better results than we have so far been able to. Author: Kwaku Kwarteng Govt Spokesman (Finance & Economy)