Posted Daily Guide |Friday, 28 January 2011
www.dailyguideghana.com
By Charles Takyi-Boadu
One of the men who have often vouched for the credibility of President John Evans Fiifi Atta Mills seems to be gradually losing confidence in the Head of government.
Speaking at a press conference in Accra yesterday, Kwesi Pratt Jnr, Managing Editor of Insight newspaper and a close associate of the president said, “Indeed if I ever heard that he (President Mills) has personally been corrupt, I will be completely shocked and yet this is the report the Auditor-General has written about 2009; a period in which he was President of the Republic.”
Mr. Pratt, who claimed to have known the President for well over 30years and could therefore vouch for his sincerity and personal commitment, wondered why corruption and its related incidents were so widespread in the Mills administration.
He noted that “this is the report of the Auditor General under his reign. It makes the point very clear.”
The event was organized by the once vociferous pressure group, Committee for Joint Action (CJA) which prided itself on being the voice of the ordinary Ghanaian on the street until Mills and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration assumed the reins of government.
Kwesi Pratt and his colleagues in the CJA, including Kwasi Adu, sought to expose what they termed as the maladministration and the loss of financial resources in some government agencies based on the findings of the Auditor General’s report on the public accounts of the country for the year 2009.
The said report contains payroll overpayment which amounted to a whopping GH¢2.49billion, constituting 90.3% of irregularities in the public sector.
Out of this amount, GH¢2,484,934,415 occurred mainly as a result of payroll irregularities of Ghana’s foreign missions (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) where there was failure to promptly delete the names of staff who no longer worked with those embassies.
Within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, irregularities also led to a total loss of GH¢11,993,035.
The Ministry was thus said to have no clear policy guidelines to regulate the payment of allowances to officials working with Ministers of the Ministry. The Ministry justified this by indicating that the officials involved worked overtime and some during weekends, hence they were granted standard monthly allowances pegged at the dollar rate, and which amounted to more than their gross monthly salaries.
At the Ministry of Health, the audit uncovered a huge loss of GH¢6,121,298, including the detection of non-adherence to financial rules which resulted in misappropriation of funds amounting to GH¢140,683 by hospital officials. Failure to obtain expenditure supporting documents to substantiate payments amounted to GH¢282,958.
The Director of the National Centre for Radiotherapy and Nuclear Medicine at Korle Bu was for instance detected to have awarded a contract worth GH¢10,000 to a private auditing firm without the express consent and approval of the Auditor General.
Irregularities at the Ministry of Interior also amounted to GH¢9,586,816 including cash irregularities, acts of malfeasance such as revenue misappropriation, police exhibits released without authenticating documents, un-acquitted vouchers and un-receipted transfers.
In view of these and many other staggering revelations, Mr. Pratt could not but note, “That clearly should emphasise the point that personal sincerity, personal commitment and so on is not sufficient and that something else needs to happen.”