The 2016 presidential candidate of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom, is skeptical about plans by President-elect, Nana Akufo-Addo to create the office of an Independent prosecutor to fight corruption.
According to Nduom, this will not necessarily be an efficient way of dealing with the canker in the country.
President-elect Nana Akufo-Addo had argued that such office will be devoid of political influence and will help him fight corruption which had plagued the country.
But addressing a press conference in Accra on Thursday, Dr. Nduom reiterated his previous call on government to decouple the Ministry of Justice from the Attorney General’s office saying that is a first step to winning the fight against corruption.
“When you have an Attorney General who is a cabinet member and is the most powerful person in terms of fighting corruption, how is that possible in our part of the world that you sit there with your colleague and you are the one who will look at your colleague and say you are a thief, you have stolen money from the state and you have done something against us? How does that happen? What we are asking for is a separation. Let the Minister of Justice become the President’s lawyer while the Attorney General’s office becomes the people’s lawyer and let’s bring that independence there.”
“I hear from time to time somebody has been talking about us letting the two remain; but we will have an office of an independent prosecutor. That is not what we are talking about here; we are talking about separating the two by law and changing the constitution to make it happen,” he added.
Dr. Papa Kwesi Ndoum at the press conference also charged Nana Akufo Addo to fulfill his promise of making the National Identification card system workable by the end of 2017.
“PPP believes that the mandatory use of the resultant national identification number by all citizens from birth until death, will help greatly to bring about greater discipline into all aspects of our national lives. So all areas; banking, broadening the national revenue base, criminal justice, voters registration and all others will benefit from the implementation of the national identification system.”
“It is our understanding that a lot of work was done and progress made in this direction by the National Identification Authority, therefore we are asking the incoming administration to provide adequate financial, human and technical support to the national identification authority so that this work can be completed by the end of 2017,” he added.
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