Issues of corruption & integrity vital in rendering accountability for state investments – Ohene Ntow

Corruption and integrity are key elements in ensuring accountability in governance, Nana Ohene Ntow, a senior policy advisor to the founder and leader of the Movement for Change, Alan John Kwadwo Kyerematen, has observed.

His assertion come on the back of successive policy failures by both the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) and governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), despite pumping so much monies into these projects.

According to Ohene Ntow, “we are at a point where you need to bring an integrated policy which we haven’t done so well so if we are looking for a situation where the incoming government should give us better accountability for the investments in agriculture and other sectors, issues of integrity and issues of corruption also come up.”

Citing the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) and the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) for instance, under the ruling NPP and opposition NDC administrations, the former General Secretary of the NPP believes many factors accounted for these policy failures which Mr. Kyerematen has identified.

Churning out unsustainable policies, poor management of projects and lack of accountability amongst others, are part of the reasons Mr. Ohene Ntow believes, led to the failure of several policies under the two governments.

“One of the biggest problems that Alan has identified and articulated as being the reason why our agriculture for example has failed, and many other sectors have really not done so well, –short term view of the things we do, unsustainability of the policies that we put in place, poor management of the investment itself, poor public accountability of the investment we put in and the weak leveraging of the role that the private sector can’t play,” he said on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, July 20, 2024.

He was commenting on the cost of living crises which has rendered many Ghanaians hungry, partly caused by the high food inflation resulting from the failure of the government’s Planting for Food and Jobs programme.

His comments follow the Annual Household Income and Expenditure Survey issued by the Ghana Statistical Service which says “about 1.9 million youth aged between 15 and 35 years are; not educated, unemployed, or having any form of education in the third quarter of 2023.”

He explained that whilst Ghanaians are complaining over the injection of GHC3billion into the PFJ which wasn’t successful, they shouldn’t lose sight of what the citizenry were served with the SADA which equally didn’t give the nation value for money.

“According to the information I found, SADA tree planting was also supposed to plant 5 million trees and at the end of the project, they accounted for 700,000 trees having spent all the money anyway. Then you go to SADA guinea fowl, GHC15million, at the end of the project, there was no guinea fowl anywhere. This is exposing the failure of policy both of the NPP and NDC governments,” he maintained.

Source:onuaonline.com