Freelance investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni has noted that the unquestioning attitude of Ghanaians towards people’s wealth fuels corruption in the country. He asserted that people worship money without seeking to know how the money was made.
Speaking at the 2020 Baah-Wiredu Memorial Lecture today, October 29,2020, Mr Azure Awuni decried the uncritical attitude towards the wealthy, saying that even in churches the rich are adored without any critical assessment of their source of wealth.
“In Ghana today, we worship money without questioning its source. In our churches, those who pay tithes with bags of cash are the ones who grace the front pews,” he said.
He lashed out at some Ghanaian businessmen and women for creating problems for society to enrich themselves instead of solving the country’s problems, excoriating society for considering such people as “smart”.
“In many parts of the world, business men and women find solutions to society’s problems and profit from it. Here, many of the top business people are actually those who find problems for society and profit from the problems. They are called smart because of their ability to cut corners. To them, the end justifies the means, so they steal their way high up and spend the rest of their lives concocting stories to convince us how they made it,” he lamented.
He explained that even though politicians are not the only corrupt people, they have the power to minimise or end corruption to a certain extent so the focus on their corruption is justified.
“Putting emphasis on the political class is, however, not misplaced because the politicians, when in office, have the power to curb the corruption. They also control a chunk of the nation’s resources. What a thousand extremely corrupt police men or women can extort by way of “road duty allowance” in their lifetime cannot match the kickback from a single contract awarded by a political office holder. The faecal matter of one elephant, our elders have noted, is definitely heavier than the combined effort of a million mosquitoes with acute diarrhea,” he expatiated.
The 2020 lecture was under the auspices of the Ghana Centre for Public Policy Options and the Multimedia Group.
