Creation of OSP is an act in futility-Bagbin
Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, the Speaker of Parliament, has expressed his belief that the creation of the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) has been rendered futile.
According to him, the functions of the OSP significantly overlap with those of the Office of the Attorney-General, potentially leading to redundancy and inefficiencies.
Speaker Bagbin highlighted the substantial overlap in authority between the OSP and the Attorney-General’s Office, questioning the effectiveness of the OSP in light of this redundancy.
He stated that he had previously voiced his skepticism about the establishment of the Special Prosecutor, deeming it an “act in futility.”
Despite his disagreement, the law creating the OSP was passed.
Citing the constitutional powers vested in the Attorney-General, Speaker Bagbin recommended the separation of the Office of the Attorney-General from the Ministry of Justice as a measure to enhance the fight against corruption in the country.
The Speaker made these remarks during the consideration of the “Promotion of Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values, 2021” on the floor of Parliament. The bill aims to address human sexual rights and Ghanaian family values while proscribing activities related to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+).
The chief reason why the OSP was proposed in the first place was the manifest weakness of Ghana’s state institutions to fight grand corruption.
With both of Ghana’s main political parties built atop clientelist structures, there had been a pattern of new governments fighting corruption primarily against their predecessors from the other party.
Allegations of corruption against high-ranking members of government were more often than not dealt with by removing the alleged perpetrators from public office, without necessarily launching criminal investigations.
Independent watchdog institutions were likely to unearth instances of grand corruption, but they were often kept under resourced and isolated.
The overlap between the promised functions of the OSP and those of existing state anti-corruption institutions engendered worry among law enforcement agencies (LEAs) that their already scarce resources may be siphoned away to the new organisation – prior to the creation of the OSP the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) was the main agency with a mandate to investigate corruption offences and recover the proceeds of crime.
The issue of overlap and duplication was compounded by the lack of a coherent overarching legal framework on corruption.
Instead, Ghana’s laws on corruption, bribery, causes of financial loss, etc. were scattered in myriad pieces of legislation, without a single, clear legal definition of corruption that could help to aggregate efforts across the anti-corruption agencies.
At best, as the OSP case illustrates, a new law represents a half-way point in the process of institutional reform. Implementation issues remain.
