Senior Presidential Advisor Yaw Osafo-Maafo has called for a review of the current asset declaration law in Ghana.
According to him, the status quo, in which public officials are only required to declare their assets to the auditor-general, lacks transparency and undermines accountability.
He added that it also prevents people from challenging the declaration's authenticity.
“In Ghana, when you become a minister of state or a public sector worker at certain levels, the first thing you do is to declare your assets and file same to the auditor general. What I personally don’t like about this law is that after you declare your asset, everything is kept confidential between the auditor general and yourself and therefore, it becomes difficult for anybody to challenge the authenticity of the declaration.
“I think that we should declare the assets but there should be a certain level of transparency in the declaration of the assets so that people can assess what is declared by certain procedures.”
During an address at a stakeholder engagement of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) at the Mövenpick Ambassador Hotel in Accra, Osafo-Maafo highlighted the prevailing cultural norms around inheritance, which he said were given in opposition during the formulation of the Declaration of Asset and Disqualification Act.
“I happened to be consulting for somebody when we were drawing up the constitution of the republic and I was championing the publication of the assets declared and the chiefs were so furious with me and said they would be killed when people knew what they had.”