| By Thomas A. Djan, California, USA How many ordinary Ghanaians have not witnessed a traffic police officer take a driver or a driver’s mate behind an overloaded vehicle to receive a bribe? Or snickered at that furtive handshake between the most senior officer on the beat and the willing donor? Have you ever encountered deliberate foot-dragging at the Lands Department that usually signals “bring something”? Are there ways to remedy this national disgrace and govern our national institutions like modern institutions? Official corruption by the police and civil servants, most notoriously at the Lands Department, has festered for decades, to a point where these practices have almost been accepted as the norm with very little push-back from the very tax payers who pay the salaries of these officials. By far, the most entrenched corrupt practices are found with the Police, Border Patrol, Customs and Excise, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Lands Commission. The Police swindle “trotro” drivers of fees on charges they alone know about; drug traffickers pay off corrupt police officials and smuggle narcotics overseas to mar the reputation of the country. If you report an accident to the police and you expect a quick response, God bless you. When you notice foot-dragging, that is a signal that you need to grease the chief’s palms. It’s only then that you will be attended to, and to go to the accident scene, you have to pay for your own taxi. Corruption at the Border poses national security risks. These poor patrolmen do not blink a moment if a willing criminal wants to enter the country and is willing to pay them off. At the Customs and Excise Department, well, just ship something; say a vehicle, to Ghana. With opaque regulations, lack of signage and documentation, customs officials impose exorbitant arbitrary tariffs to frighten the shipper as a strategy to skim money from him and Lord knows where the excise taxes collected go to the government’s coffers. The role of the Internal Revenue Service is ostensibly to collect taxes so the Government can govern. Unscrupulous officials team up with merchants who pay them under the table and thus evade taxes. The “taxes” collected is pocketed by the IRS worker, who has minimal appreciation of his role in national development. Of all the national institutions where corruption is legendary is the Lands Department. Not only are records misfiled, lost, tainted, and disorganized, multiple registrations of the same parcel of land are rampant. When officials take money, they refuse to give receipts. Transactions at the Lands are done on the basis of who you know. The long lines, the delay tactics (come tomorrow), are all designed to promote corruption. Worse yet, none of these officials wear name tags or badges to identify them. What can be done? There are very simple steps the government can take, with the help of the citizenry, to discourage these practices which are undoubtedly impeding national development. First is transparency: at the police department, the higher echelons should establish a set of ethical standards by which all rank-and-file will abide by. All Police Officers on duty should display their name badges and citizens who witness corrupt practices should call anonymously to a designated hotline with the name, badge number and location of a corrupt practice. Transparency measures should take place at the Border Patrol, Internal Revenue Service and Customs and Excise. At Customs, for example, personal items that can be brought into the country duty should-free must be displayed at all entry ports, including the airports and seaports. Taxable items should all be available in print, and where possible, on the internet for Ghanaians everywhere to access. This should not be an impossible task. Ghana has dozens of embassies around the world and there is no reason why this cannot be done from say the Washington D.C. Embassy. Second is modern technology: Corruption at the Lands Department can easily be nipped in the bud if all lands are placed in a database and again made available on worldwide web. Inexpensive technologies abound for this to be done. There is no excuse for hiding behind lack of foreign exchange to swindle the people. All that this leads to is governance. The Atta Mills Administration should set as a priority the effective administration of the institutions of governance: The Police, Border Patrol, Customs and Excise, Internal Revenue, and of course, the Lands Department. In this modern era, there is no reason not to have all government agencies and departments with websites, information in databases, and systems of ethical behavior in place to insure that civil servants serve rather than swindle. When such systems are in place, the citizenry will respond and report misconduct as long as they know that corrupt culprits will be brought to account. These are only a few of steps that will usher us into modernity.
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