Dr. Kojo Asante, the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) believes the police should work to address its negative corruption perception instead of protesting.
Given multiple studies over the years that consistently place the police on the wrong end of corruption surveys, Dr. Asante suggested that the police’s defence was not justified.
“If people start seeing that those things have stopped, you would probably see a reflection in the surveys,” he said on The Point of View on Citi TV.
Mr Asante was speaking after the Afrobarometer study that noted that 65 percent of Ghanaians believe most police are corrupt, while 31 percent believe only some police are corrupt.
The police responded to the survey including the one conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service and its partners by saying the corruption tag was unsubstantiated.
The survey indicated a general lack of trust in key government institutions.
Aside from police, the presidency, legislators, judges and magistrates and tax officials rounded up the top five perceived corrupt institutions.
Dr. Asante said this spelt bad news for Ghana’s corruption fight because “that really goes to the stability and foundation of the state.”
“If you are just making a logical deduction, there is no way you are going to be able to fight corruption with the institutions you have entrusted to fight corruption.”
“If people don’t have trust in key institutions of the state then they don’t believe what they say, they are likely not to follow instruction or direction in terms of what the government wants to do so we really are in a very precarious situation,” Dr. Asante said.