A parliamentary hopeful of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Richard Nyamah, has bemoaned the excessive rate of corruption in Ghana.
Speaking in an interview on 3FM on Tuesday, September 12, 2023, Nyamah said that almost every Ghanaian engages in corrupt activities to get out of difficult situations.
He added that most people complain about corruption, but you see them paying bribes to the police and other public officers when they find themselves in trouble.
“99.9% of the people of Ghana are corrupt in our hearts, in our minds, in our souls. What we are good at doing is sitting and pointing fingers and telling people how bad they doing.
“I have fought it (corruption) physically, I have fought it spiritually, I have prayed. I’ve done all this and I’m saying that internally, something needs to change in our mental thinking process. You take even the cultural makeup, and the environment, it is all encouraging corruption. What we like to do is that oh, this one is corrupt and we sit down and talk about the person.
“You turn the next and you are the worst. You are bribing the policeman or you are doing something – we all do it to get out of a situation,” he said.
The aspiring parliamentarian indicated that he has taken the decision to not criticise corrupt practices till something drastic is done to liberate the minds of Ghanaians from corruption.
“… it has taken me that lonely fight to realize that I’m not different from all these people I’ve been accusing of corruption and so it’s time to just call it quits until something dramatic happens, maybe some external force drops on our heads and our minds change.”
He added that the state agencies who are in charge of fighting corruption, including the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP), know that the fight is lost and are merely engaging in pretence.
“You ask them one on one in their rooms and you finish and go into your room and cry… They know what they’re doing is window dressing. The problem is bigger than that. This country is a mess.”