The Chair of the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), Richard Ellimah, has criticised Ghana’s failure to consistently sanction public officers for wrongdoing, warning that years of accountability reports have not translated into meaningful consequences for breaches of the law.
Mr. Ellimah said the country had made progress in transparency and established several institutions to promote good governance, but weak enforcement continued to undermine their effectiveness.
Speaking at a Media and Stakeholder Accountability Forum on October 21, he cited PIAC’s 15 years of monitoring the management and utilisation of petroleum revenues as evidence of the gap between identifying wrongdoing and holding those responsible to account.
“15 years of PIAC’s statutory reports on the utilisation of petroleum revenues have produced little or no accountability. In fact, I cannot recall a single occasion in those 15 years when a public officer who breached the Petroleum Revenue Management Act was held to account, not even once,” he said.
The PIAC Chair argued that Ghana’s accountability challenges stemmed less from the absence of institutions than from the failure to act on their findings.
He pointed to institutions such as the Auditor-General, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee and the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which are mandated to help safeguard public resources and address financial misconduct.
“The real question, therefore, is not whether we have the right institutions. It is why having them does not reliably produce the right outcomes,” he added.
Mr. Ellimah also faulted successive governments for placing emphasis on passing legislation and establishing anti-corruption bodies without ensuring that the laws were effectively enforced.
He extended the criticism to the fight against illegal mining, questioning whether tougher penalties introduced through the 2019 amendment to the Minerals and Mining Act had achieved the intended results.
He said authorities needed to investigate allegations of involvement by politically exposed persons and other prominent individuals in illegal mining rather than relying on the existence of legislation as evidence of progress.
“We cannot keep pointing to the existence of legislation when we have not even taken the basic step of investigating the involvement of politically exposed persons and other prominent members of society in illegal mining,” he said.
Despite his concerns, Mr. Ellimah highlighted PIAC’s contribution to public oversight, noting that the committee had published 29 reports since its establishment, comprising 14 annual and 15 semi-annual reports.
He said the reports had helped expose irregularities in revenue payments and contributed to efforts to recover outstanding funds.
However, he raised concerns about PIAC’s limited enforcement powers and uncertainty over funding, describing the committee as a “toothless bulldog” because it lacks the authority to prosecute people found to have breached the law.
Mr. Ellimah called on stakeholders to move beyond discussions about accountability and commit to specific measures, deadlines and designated officials responsible for implementing recommendations.
He said Ghana already had substantial evidence of weaknesses in public procurement, expenditure and financial management, but lacked a dependable mechanism for ensuring that findings led routinely to consequences.
“Ghana does not lack evidence of what is going wrong in how public money is procured, spent, and accounted for. What we have not reliably built is the mechanism that turns that evidence into consequence as a result, as a matter of routine, rather than as exceptional political will in an exceptional year,” he said.
