Corruption in Ghana

Our VSO preparations before we left the UK involved several on-line training courses and one residential course.  Corruption was a major topic in one of the on-line courses, and it was also talked about on the residential.  It’s a topic that virtually everyone got interested in and had a lot to say about.  I think we all realised quite quickly that it isn’t a simple topic.

Since we’ve been in Ghana, we have found that it is also a common topic of conversation here.  I want to blog about it because I think it’s interesting; but also, I don’t think I can work on my next blog, in which I intend to address the question of whether aid actually achieves anything, without first getting my ideas about corruption in order.  Some people think that aid doesn’t work because corrupt people in the recipient country syphon off virtually all the money, so almost nothing is left to tackle poverty or support development – that’s a serious issue and one that I will need to address.

As a starting point, here is what I know about corruption in Ghana:

1                   I have seen traffic policemen take money from taxi drivers and tro-tro drivers at roadblocks.  The sums involved are small – typically 1 Ghana cedi (GHc1 - exchange value about 25p; buying power a small loaf of bread or half a dozen oranges) but it can happen two or three times in a 50 mile journey.

2                   A recent list of the richest people in Ghana had the President and two of his brothers in the top ten.  I don’t know whether this is actually true but it was published in reputable newspapers.

3                   I have seen a credible U-Tube video which purports to show officials in the Ghana Department of Transport accepting bribes to supply driving licences and vehicle registration documents to people who don’t qualify for them.

4                   When a friend was riding my motorbike and was involved in an accident caused by a vehicle pulling out straight in front of him, an off-duty policeman who witnessed the accident and assisted in the aftermath did nothing to detain that driver and didn’t take his name or the registration details of his vehicle.  Subsequently, despite some pestering from me, the police failed to identify the driver.  Given that police were present at the scene of the accident, that there was a prima facie case of careless or dangerous driving, and that there was both injury and financial loss (damage to the motorbike and also my friend’s mobile phone was irreparably damaged), this seems a strange outcome. 

5                   Cheating in formal exams is a significant problem.  Although we haven’t actually witnessed any cheating, we have seen the considerable precautions that are taken to keep the papers secret and we have heard first-hand and second-hand reports about attempts to cheat.

6                   Zebilla being near the borders with Burkina Faso and Togo, we are told that it is normal at election times for candidates to bus-in people from those countries to swell their vote.  Apparently a free trip plus food and maybe 5 cedis is enough, especially for candidates whose extended family includes people on the other side of these borders.   

7                   A friend recounts that he recently went to the Transport Department to convert his motorcycle licence into a car licence, and it took him eight visits in total over several weeks and cost him about 120 Ghana cedis in fees.  He is adamant that if he had been willing to slip the officials a few cedis it would have been much quicker and cheaper.  There is no firm evidence.

8                   Many of the richest people in Zebilla and Bolgatanga appear to be politicians and ministers of religion (Christian – though not all Christian leaders are rich, just those who run their churches like a business, who are in the minority.  Interestingly I haven’t seen or heard any evidence of Muslim leaders feathering their own nests).

9                   A friend tells us that his uncle was a senior local politician for just three months and in that time managed to get a very nice house built for himself (which he retained when his term of office ended).

10              The road from Bolgatanga to Zebilla has a 10-mile section where the tarmac surface has completely gone.  Whilst we have been here, during the dry season, a lot of work was done to renew some of the drainage culverts running under the road, to install roadside drainage in one of the larger towns, and to level and flatten the road surface.  This was a high-profile contract that high-up people in government from Accra were interested in and came to Bolga to view it – possibly including the President.  We were told that the contract to resurface the road had been let to the same contractor who did the road between Bolga and Navrongo – which is excellent.  But the tarmac surface was not applied.  Now the rains are once again wrecking the surface such that much of this year’s work will be undone.  We have heard that there was not enough money to complete the work (and a couple of other explanations too).

11              If a tradesman sells something to a white person or does work for a white person, they will try to charge several times more than they would charge a fellow countryman.  Two examples – I had to replace a bike tyre recently and was told that they cost 10 cedis.  The shop-keeper asked 27 cedis – I said I would only pay 10 cedis and got it for that.  I don’t know whether a native Zebillan would pay 10 cedis or less.  Our fridge broke.  We asked a friend if it could be repaired, he made some enquiries and said it would cost 15 cedis.  When I went with the friend to take the fridge to be mended, the fitter saw that I was white and the price went up to 40 cedis.

12              On one occasion we travelled from Bolga to Tamale on an unofficial bus.  This turned out to be a bus which was being driven down to Tamale for the start of a journey there.  We had what seemed to be unofficial tickets.  We assume that this was a scam involving the ticket office and the driver – they take a few unofficial passengers and split the proceeds among them.

13              When we visited a nature reserve, we paid for a guided tour.  During the tour, the guide offered to take us on an extension - this had been advertised in the ticket office and we had decided not to do it.  We and several others changed our minds and duly paid the guide the price that we had seen advertised.  We didn’t receive tickets (but we did receive tickets for the tour we had paid for officially).  Later we saw what appeared to be the guide and the ticket office official dividing money between them.  Again, we assume this was a scam and that the nature reserve received none of the money we had paid to the guide.

14              Petrol prices go up a couple of times each year (and, as a small digression, I want to take the opportunity of pointing out that price inflation in Ghana seems to be running at quite a high rate and isn’t matched by salary inflation).  I think these increases are caused by changes in the government subsidy on petrol, though it isn’t easy to find out exactly how the system works.  Before a planned price increase, the petrol stations stop selling fuel, so that they can sell their existing stocks at a slightly higher price after the increase.

15              Where we work, some funding comes from the Government of Ghana and some from NGOs and charities.  We have seen that the budgeting for the NGS work is rather approximate, that actual expenditure does not match the detail of the budget, but that documentation is carefully collected to demonstrate that the funds were fully spent and used for the purposes set out in the budget.  Money is syphoned off in this way to fund essential running costs which the Government does not seem to pay for.  We have heard hints that the Director and other officials also pocket some of the money but have seen no evidence of that.

16              As mentioned in previous blogs, teachers and other public officials we have encountered readily do non-work things in work time and exhibit no sense that this is wrong.

17              There is a culture that when an activity is funded by an NGO, the people taking part will all receive meals and travel expenses (this is referred to as “T&T” (or “TNT”) – “time and travel”).  Often people are given money rather than an actual meal, and the amount of money given is more than one would need to buy food (10 cedis is typical; you can get a plate of food for 3 or 4 cedis and a bag of yam chips for 1 cedi).  The T&T is paid as a flat sum, so people who work at the venue of the activity get the same as those who have travelled 20 miles.  When we discuss this with Ghanaians, they are adamant that it is fair (swings and roundabouts) and that any attempt to pay the actual costs would be impossible to introduce or implement and also unfair (though I haven’t heard a rational explanation of why it would be unfair).

18              Ghana ought to have a reasonable economy and there are mineral reserves including oil, and various agricultural natural resources in the country, yet the economy seems to be struggling.

19              Ghanaians talk about corruption an awful lot.  All are convinced that government and public officials up and down the land are lining their own pockets at the expense of the ordinary people.  Taking the Bolga to Zebilla road as an example, some people are convinced that the reason there was not enough money to complete the work is that too much was syphoned off by politicians, officials and the contractor – though nobody has produced any evidence of this as far as I know.

20              Continuing the point above, most Ghanaians go on to say that if they had the opportunity to make money through corruption they would grab it with both hands.  Whether they actually would, of course, is a different question.

21              Government has apparently made attempts in the past to root out corruption; and all parties in opposition make a big issue of their commitment to do so.  The electorate regard these commitments as a total joke.  An example is that a previous government increased the pay of the police so that they wouldn’t need to take little bribes from motorists – the pay increase was accepted but the practice of taking bribes continued unchanged.  I suspect that the pay increase was quite a bit less than the police were taking, and that the plan was probably doomed to failure on this and several other counts.

22              There is a joke in one of the guidebooks we brought from the UK.  It purports to be a joke which Ghanaians tell about themselves, though when I have told it to Ghanaians they don’t tell me that they already know the story, but they do laugh and they do say that it reflects reality.  It is about a business which needed to replace the fence round its property.  They invited tenders and three firms replied – one from America, one from the UK and one from Ghana.  The bidders were all invited on a particular day to view the work and bid.  They all came.  The American and the Brit inspected the site, made some phone calls, and bid, respectively, GHc11,000 and GHc12,000.  The Ghanaian didn’t inspect the work.  He spoke with the firm’s procurement representative and bid GHc31,000.  The representative asked him how he could make that bid without seeing the job.  The contractor explained that the bid provided 10,000 cedis for the procurement representative, 10,000 for himself, and that he proposed to subcontract the work to the American.

Now, I’m not going to claim that this is strong or definitive evidence that corruption is rife in Ghana.  In fact, the hard evidence I have is pretty paltry stuff and small-scale.  The evidence of large-scale corruption is little better than hearsay.

When I try to make sense of it, I think I can boil all this down to a pretty small number of observations.  These are:

1                   Ghanaians have an eye for an opportunity to make money, and they seem to take the opportunities offered.

2                   Ghanaians are selfish in the sense that themselves and their extended family are at the top of their priority list.  There is a clear and universally accepted moral and social duty to bring home as much bacon as you can – if you pass up opportunities to do this, you are letting down the most important people in your life.  Concepts like “professionalism” and “public service” come a long way behind this, possibly behind loyalty to your tribe and your political party.  These concepts also seem at best to be in the early stages of development, though I think it would be wrong to say that they don’t exist at all. 

3                   There is quite a strong sense here that what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  Other people make the most of their opportunities and so should you.  You are letting your family down if you don’t.  Most people seem to think that a teacher who works harder than he/she needs to is a fool rather than a hero.  I’m glad to say that this doesn’t extend quite so strongly to the public official who does nothing corrupt when his/her colleagues do.   There is little optimism that anything will ever change, unless it is through the arrival of another dictator (many people seem to wish for another Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, who had corrupt senior officials summarily executed!)  

4                   Ghanaians are dreadful gossips.

5                   There are some significant differences between UK (and “western”) culture and Ghanaian.  Whilst all Ghanaians seem to agree that large-scale corruption is both a big problem and seriously wrong, they don’t seem to see most of the smaller-scale things in my list as “corruption” in the same way (though the small-scale corruption of the traffic police and vehicle licensing staff seems to be universally condemned as corruption).   

I can illuminate these points from other aspects of Ghanaian society.  In previous blogs I have mentioned that alongside the elected national and local government, there is also a system of local chiefs.  These chiefs were the local rulers in pre-colonial times, and were incorporated into the colonial power structure through the mechanism of “indirect rule”.  This basically meant that provided the local chiefs acted in accordance with what Britain (in the person of the Governor General) wanted, they could carry on pretty much as before.  It was the cheapest way of running a colony at a time when Britain didn’t have the resources to do anything more substantial. 

As well as being the guardians of tradition, heritage and wisdom, local chiefs are accepted as the people who control land ownership, settle disputes, take action when crimes have been committed, declare people to be witches etc.  Particularly in rural areas, they seem to have much more real power than the democratic infrastructure.  To take just a small example, the Ghana Education Service here seems unable to initiate action to punish people (even teachers) who get teenage pupils pregnant, because by the time the GES gets involved the whole matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of all parties, with the tacit or active involvement of the chief.  It isn’t culturally possible to involve the police, even where a crime has clearly been committed.

Chieftaincy is not exactly inherited, though it does seem to run in families.  When it comes time to choose a new chief, rival parties (male descendants of the previous chief) muster support in what seems a normal democratic way and a council of elders decides who will be chief.  At this point, any sensible Ghanaian visits the new chief with a gift – a guinea-fowl seems to be a favourite for ordinary people (you can get a pretty impressive (and presumably tasty) bird for 15 – 20 cedis).  The purpose of the gift is to demonstrate to the new chief that you and your family can be counted among his supporters; and it is also an investment in the chief’s good-will in case you ever need him to resolve a dispute in your favour.  The chief has various hangers-on who are similarly “cultivated”.

Now compare this with the traffic police.  Roads in Ghana have regular “customs barriers”, where there is a gate which generally blocks off half the road and could easily block the whole road if required; these are manned by traffic police, and/or immigration and customs officials; most traffic has to slow down or stop; some vehicles and documents are inspected.  It’s a little difficult to understand quite why they do this, as you never see anything happening as a consequence.

Ghana has a full set of traffic laws, most of which seem to be ignored all the time.  There is a vehicle licensing system in place which includes a certificate of road-worthiness, but a huge proportion of the vehicles are perfectly obviously anything but road-worthy.  Ghana’s highway code is closely derived from ours, but you take a serious risk if you assume other drivers will follow it.  Motor-cyclists are supposed to wear helmets, but only a minority do.  People are supposed to have a licence to ride a motorbike or drive a car, but many don’t. 

I understand that one function of the traffic police at barriers is to check that drivers have the appropriate documents and that vehicles are safe.  As a motorist you must know that, at least in theory, you could be stopped and found to be in breach of one or more law.  So one reason for giving the police an occasional small bribe is to encourage them not to look too closely at your papers or your vehicle.  A second reason, in the unlikely event that your paperwork and vehicle are entirely in order, is as insurance against some future occasion when something might not be beyond reproach.  A third reason is that you know that a uniformed official can cause you a great deal of inconvenience even if there is nothing wrong with your papers or your vehicle – so it’s worth a small payment occasionally to encourage them not to pick on you.  It strikes me that none of this is unfamiliar territory in a society where it is normal accepted practice to make an investment to stay in the good books of the people in power.   

It’s also very easy for the policeman to rationalise his behaviour.  Everyone else does it.  Your superiors did it when they were in your position, and (apparently) they expect a regular cut of your illicit income to turn a blind eye (because the police hierarchy are aware of the corruption problem and claim to be trying to stamp it out).  You’re not costing any individual very much, and they can afford it – here in the north it seems to be the commercial drivers rather than private citizens who hand over money, so it’s more a form of business tax.  You are providing a genuine service – people would be seriously inconvenienced if you upheld the law rigidly and it would cost them a great deal more than a small occasional bribe to you if they had to get their vehicles and papers up to standard.  But perhaps at a more fundamental level, this is just the way things are here – you are in a position of power and power confers the opportunity and right, maybe even responsibility, to derive some personal benefit.  Your neighbours and your family expect you to take advantage of the opportunity and they will expect you to show your own generosity on appropriate occasions.

Of course, the fundamental point here is a nonsense – why Ghana should collectively choose to have laws but then not apply and enforce them sensibly is beyond me.  People just shrug when you challenge this issue – as they are fond of telling you, “this is Ghana” (or “this is Africa”).

Turning to my motorbike accident experience, of course I have no firm evidence that there was any funny business.  I can state from the customer’s perspective that I found it an unsatisfactory experience.  I can think of no good reason why the driver who caused the accident was not found; and I can think of two unsatisfactory explanations - gross incompetence or corruption. 

The corrupt version would involve the driver having influenced the off-duty policeman who witnessed the accident so that he was not identified.  This might have been through a bribe, though it might also have been that he was related to him I some way.  The off-duty policeman might or might not involve the officer responsible for investigating the accident in this corruption (ie give him a share of the bribe).  Leaving aside the fact that the investigation was a farce, I was treated with courtesy and respect throughout.  I was a bit disappointed at the lengths the police went to in investigating my friend – they wanted confirmation from me that he had permission to ride the bike, wanted to see his driving licence, check his helmet etc.  Maybe this is an essential part of the investigation, but it seemed to me that more energy went into it than into finding the other driver. 

I’m certain that the investigation didn’t fail through lack of resources – the investigating officer definitely didn’t have too much else to do.  I have no evidence of corruption.  But if there wasn’t corruption, then there is a serious incompetence problem.  People in Ghana think that the police are both corrupt and incompetent.

Exam cheating is a familiar topic wherever people sit exams.  The particular Ghanaian slant is that officials from the West Africa Examinations Council seem to be willing to sell copies of exam papers, or details of individual questions, to people who are either willing to pay enough or have enough leverage.  Leverage might be a family relationship – it’s your family responsibility to help Little Jonny get as good a result as he can - or it might be close kinship to your chief (implied threat that there will be trouble if you don’t help a relative of the chief). 

Once the information is out, there seems to be a thriving market for it.  I confess to not quite understanding this.  You would think that, if your objective was to give your child an advantage over others sitting the same exam, you wouldn’t want to sell or pass on the questions to anyone else, as that would give them the same advantage as your child and undermine the whole objective.

Be that as it may, the damage to the credibility of official exam results is potentially great and it is taken very seriously.  Armed police protect the exam papers 24/7 when they are delivered to the GES in Zebilla!  I haven’t heard much condemnation of the people who cheat, though the cheating itself is certainly condemned by the people working in education who form a significant proportion of our acquaintances here.

The election fraud example almost certainly happens across Africa, where the borders of modern countries were drawn in the abstract by the colonial powers with precious little consultation with the natives.  Of course it shouldn’t happen.  I haven’t seen data but I’d be surprised if the practice makes any significant impact at a national level; but it might locally.  I see it as another example of the power of the extended family here – people find it extremely difficult to refuse a request for help from a family member and don’t see it as wrong or corrupt to place those obligations above abstract rules and laws.  People are also more than willing to support a neighbour’s extended family provided it isn’t detrimental to their own – that’s an integral part of the strength of communities here.  The neighbour will of course also be a member of your tribe – and tribal loyalties are very strong.  Finally, it’s further proof, if needed, that in places where people are poor, a small financial inducement or reward goes a long way.

The examples of our “unofficial” bus ride to Tamale, the petrol traders, the unofficial tour at the national park all seem easily explicable to me as imaginative ways in which people can maximise their income.  People here generally don’t have a lot of money; we’ve already established that money gets shared around the extended family so a charge of personal greed or selfishness is neither the whole story nor entirely fair.  Why shouldn’t they take advantage of the opportunities offered? 

Although I don’t believe Ghanaians even think about such things, if they did they would find it pretty easy to persuade themselves that nobody is really suffering.  The buses are always full so the company isn’t losing out; the passenger isn’t paying any more than he/she would have done anyway, and probably has a more comfortable ride at a more convenient time, and might even have tried unsuccessfully to get a seat on a scheduled bus.  The visitor to the park has already had the opportunity to pay for the extra tour and decided against it, so the park isn’t losing out; and it’s only because you have made the first part of the tour so interesting that they’ve now decided to go for more, so why shouldn’t you benefit a little; and it’s a great deal more convenient for the visitor to do it right now than to go back to the ticket office, pay and queue again.

The Transport Department staff who allegedly take bribes to speed up your application for a driver’s licence will muster similar arguments to defend their practice.  My friend’s experience shows how long and tortuous the bureaucracy can be here – and we could probably fill a blog with similar examples, for example having to queue at one office, then walk across town to a different office to pay for something and then walk back with the receipt to the original place…  If an official is willing to make extra efforts to streamline the process for someone, what is wrong with being paid for the extra effort? 

Across Ghana, our experience is that very little thought is given to making anything easy or convenient for the end-user customer; and the customer here hasn’t yet latched on to any sense of having the right to receive good service and to complain if he/she doesn’t receive it.  I suspect that the reluctance to complain might involve a fear of upsetting someone who might turn out to be related to someone important and powerful – and thus unleashing on oneself and one’s extended family several generations-worth of unfavourable treatment. 

I’ve even heard people say in all seriousness that in Ghana it’s easy for people to kill you – blowing the whistle, standing up against what’s wrong, and the like, are seen as life-threatening risks.

The examples which involve ensuring that the rich white person pays what he/she can afford is also easy to understand and isn’t culturally out of place.  Here there isn’t a strong sense that goods or services have a fixed price.  Many food items are seasonal and the price will rise and fall more than ten-fold over the year.  Bargaining and haggling are the norm, prices are not absolute. 

Sometimes tradesmen/suppliers genuinely don’t seem to know how much something is worth – an accountant colleague at the GES recently had a problem with his laptop and got someone from Bolga to come and fix it.  When the repair was complete, my friend asked how much it would be, and was told to pay what he thought was appropriate.  That’s apparently quite common, and my friend was marginally upset about it only because he didn’t feel he had a good sense of how much the work was worth – but he offered what he thought was reasonable, taking account of the fact that the repairer had had to travel here from Bolga, and his offer was accepted. 

Jane had a similar experience when she wanted cushions made for a wheel-chair – she couldn’t get the carpenter to state what they would cost and eventually had to say she would pay GHc30; and was then negotiated up to GHc35. 

Add to this that here in the Muslim north, there is a well-understood obligation that the wealthy should contribute more to society than the poor.  White people are known to be rich.  There’s nothing seriously out of place in opening the bidding at a high level – if the white person doesn’t have good haggling skills that’s hardly the tradesman’s fault.  And in principle, what’s wrong with ensuring that they pay a price which they can afford.  I don’t think this is illegal under any race relations legislation in Ghana.

We were told a story (from someone we believe) which illustrates the point further.  A young, black friend of some previous white VSO volunteers had a motorbike accident in town – he ran into an old man who apparently was rather drunk and walked out in front of him.  The old man was slightly injured and had to be taken to hospital, and the police got involved.  The young driver was arrested and locked up.  Knowing that he was friendly with white people, a nephew of the old man made a fuss that a trial and a big fine were needed – in private, apparently he said that this was an opportunity to get money out of the rich whites.  The nephew pretended to have spoken by phone to the old man’s son, who was a lawyer in Accra, and reported that the son wanted justice to be pursued to the absolute extreme.  It was only when someone else actually did contact the son, and established that he knew his father to be a drunkard and didn’t want someone prosecuted, plus I think some involvement of the chief, that the whole matter was dropped.  It had clearly made a marked impression on the young individual concerned, who has subsequently been keen not to advertise his friendship with volunteers.

I have a bit more difficulty explaining why teachers and public servants seem to be so lazy and unprofessional.  Ghanaians are most certainly capable of hard work.  We have watched quite a lot of building work, for example.  Now, it’s true that Ghana is absolutely full of unfinished building projects of all shapes and sizes.  But the reason these are unfinished seems to be that nobody can save up enough money to build a whole house.  So as soon as you have enough money to lay the foundations, you get those done and then save up for the next stage.  The foundations will be laid in a couple of days – the builder mobilises a substantial workforce and they start work at or before the crack of dawn (when it’s a little bit cool) and then work pretty well all day, maybe slowing the pace a bit while the sun is at its highest, and continuing while the light lasts (sunrise and sunset here are close to 6 o’clock all year round).  If the work isn’t finished in a day, the process continues at the same pace the following day.  Of course, this appears all the more industrious because there is no mechanisation – there are no JCBs and the concrete and cement are mixed by hand.  But when you’ve seen this, you can’t reasonably say that Ghanaians are all lazy or work-shy.   The workers are paid a very small amount of money for this – ten or twelve cedis for a day would be typical.  Much of the labouring, incidentally, is done by women, and I think this is because they are cheaper and considered to be more reliable.

The public sector doesn’t seem to match this work ethic.  You get a variety of responses when you raise this as an issue.  Some people point to their job description and say that they are doing everything that is stated there.  Some (in the GES) say that in order to do more, they would need to travel out “into the field”, but the Director will not give them any fuel to enable them to do this (which is true); and what would be the point of sitting in the office doing nothing when they can occupy their time more usefully and can easily be contacted by mobile phone (which is also true) if they are needed in the office.  Some say that they work as hard as the next person and why are you singling them out for interrogation?  Some trot out what are obviously well-worn clichés founded in the belief that they are underpaid – “we pretend to work, and the government pretend to pay us”, or “our take-home pay doesn’t take us home”. 

With a bit of effort you can get a public servant to concede that the regular payment of a salary into their bank account is something of considerable value which most people don’t enjoy; and at a push you can get them to recognise that their daily rate of pay compares pretty well with what other people can earn (though they have a perhaps surprisingly high opinion of their own market worth based on qualifications and intelligence).

Despite this defence of their own behaviour, I find that the staff in the GES office are quick to criticise teachers and head teachers who “are not serious” – ie don’t pull their weight.  They are also slow to praise those who do – it is another rather unfortunate aspect of Ghanaian culture that they tend to focus on the negatives; the national cup is definitely half-empty (if that), everything is beset with “challenges” and “is not easy” (the phrases in inverted commas are heard every day, more than once).  Whilst being quick to criticise, this is done as a generality – names are almost never named, at least in open meetings.

Something that I suspect, but has never been articulated to me, is that public servants see their laziness as a victimless crime.  By contrast with the people on the building-site, their employer doesn’t have a face, doesn’t know them personally, hasn’t lived in the same community for dozens of generations.  They also have a secure job so don’t need to prove that they are worth hiring for the next one (and government isn’t good at firing those who deserve it).  On days when cynicism overtakes me, I think perhaps they also see it as a key factor in being able to charge a bit on the side when they up the pace.

What about the Director’s self-confessed misallocation of NGO funding?  For me this is revealing about several aspects of life in Ghana.  It does seem to be the case that the country is living beyond its means and has aspirations that it can’t fund - they know they need more teachers, they know the profession isn’t as attractive as it needs to be, they know they need more buildings, books and resources of all kinds, and they don’t seem to have the money.  As far as I can ascertain, it is genuinely true that the GES office on Zebilla hasn’t received any government funding for a couple of years.  The staff are paid from Accra so their salaries don’t figure in this – which unfortunately deprives the Director of the option of employing fewer people and spending the saved salaries on other things.  I have no idea how the GES management in Accra, or the GES regional people in Bolga, expect the Directors of all the regions to deal with this problem.  “It’s not easy!”    

Budgeting is highly approximate.  Not only that, it is done by the accountants in isolation rather than the people running the projects and programmes – so their knowledge and experience are not mobilised when budgets are constructed, and incorrect allocations of funding are repeated year after year.  And here is another disappointing cultural point – people here don’t step outside their job description.  If it doesn’t say that you are responsible for ensuring that the budget for your activity is correct, then you don’t.  One possible explanation is that to do so would be to criticise a colleague.  In this hierarchical society the only people you can safely criticise are those who are beneath you, and you never know when you might need the support of your colleagues. 

For me, there is once again a lack of professionalism in this willingness to live with an unsatisfactory approach and inability to harness the common-sense of the staff to achieve continuous improvement – and I would say that it starts right at the top, and that’s where change needs to be initiated.  But it will be a big job and take a long time - overall I would say that the public sector in Ghana is pretty hopeless at all aspects of management, hasn’t yet woken up to the fact, and wouldn’t know where or how to start improving.

In contrast to budgeting, Ghanaian officials seem to have got thoroughly on top of the concept of auditing.  They understand exactly how this works, and to a casual observer they do it very competently.  Perhaps a more thorough observer would be surprised that the auditors can be satisfied with invoices and receipts which don’t seem to bear close relation to the activity they purport to fund (how exactly did you spend GHc600 on fuel for a workshop for 120 teachers when the teachers’ travel costs were paid as T&T under a different budget heading?)   Clearly the individual auditors are not idiots and can recognise such inconsistencies.  I haven’t asked why they don’t challenge them – it’s something I might do over the next month, just for devilment.  This behaviour seems so ingrained that I suspect it is something that was going on under the colonial administration and has simply been taken over intact after independence. 

In matters such as this, the old ways do seem to die very hard.  I haven’t quite worked out why – possibly Ghanaians aren’t naturally very creative or good at thinking of better ways of doing things (though as I’ve already explained, they are very adept at seeing and seizing ways of capitalising on “opportunities”); maybe they still revere their colonial masters to an unhealthy degree and find it difficult to abandon the processes and procedures they inherited from them; maybe this is another manifestation of their culture’s reverence for the traditional ways of doing things – people here have a sense of being part of living communities which include their ancestors; traditional beliefs would say that the ancestors can actively influence what happens here and now, including inflicting harm on individuals; rejecting a way of doing something which was good enough for your ancestors is tantamount to criticising them and is clearly a dangerous practice.  

I have two final thoughts on this point.  First, I don’t know how high this particular scam goes.  Does the GES nationally know that it is happening here (and I don’t believe it can be limited to only one District).  Do the NGOs who are providing the funding know and condone it?  Secondly, I haven’t made up my mind whether the Director should be condemned or praised for what she is doing.  If she wasn’t doing it, the work of the GES would probably have ground to a halt through government inability to manage its affairs properly.  But it is clearly not the right solution.  

I have now mentioned T&T again in passing, so will turn to that next.  It comes as a very considerable shock, when you first see it, that the largest items in any bid for charity/NGO funding are “lunch and snack” and “T&T” (travel and time).  A bid that involves 1-day workshops for 100 people will include GHc100 for room hire (2 days of 50 people each); GHc100 for the speaker/facilitator; GHc150 for stationery; GHc1000 for lunch, snack and water, and GHc1500 for T&T.  Out of a total budget of GHc2850, GHc1500 goes straight into the pockets of the attendees, a further GHc1000 also benefits them directly, often in cash (to buy their own water, lunch and snack – this saves work for the organiser), and probably GHc100 of the stationery budget takes the form of a notepad and pen for each person.  It is a shock because this money is either foreign governments’ aid or it’s charity donations – and if you asked those people what they thought their money was being spent on, you can be well nigh certain that they don’t expect it to be enriching the people who attend workshops intended to help them acquire new skills or knowledge with which to help themselves.  They particularly won’t expect this if all the attendees are public servants who are already receiving a regular salary from their government.

Once you’ve started to recover from the initial shock, you can rationalise that maybe this isn’t so different from what happens back at home.  When you attend a training course you expect to get free coffee, biscuits and lunch, together with a pen/pencil and paper, and you expect your employer to pay your travelling costs.  Why should it be different here?  You conclude that maybe you over-reacted.  But the T&T bit still doesn’t feel right.  The travel money surely ought to reimburse people’s actual travel costs, so people who haven’t travelled ought to get none; and people who are employed are being paid to attend as part of their employment, so why do they need any further payment for their time?

Let’s start with the payment for time.  When I’ve challenged this, the best answer I have received is that T&T is a package – for some people all the money will be needed for travel costs, so really it’s just an administratively simple way of sharing out roughly the right amount of money.  I’m not persuaded, and since these payments are such a large fraction of the overall budget I can easily see how two workshops could be afforded where currently only one happens. 

Many of these workshops are what people here call “sensitisation”, which can mean community consultation and includes things like School Performance Appraisal Meetings and sessions where people are subjected to persuasion that sleeping under a mosquito net is a good idea, that girls should be sent to school, and what AIDS is really about.  I can, just, accept that it might be reasonable to pay people who are not attending as part of their employment; and I can accept that there will (or should) be a lot of instances where the beneficiaries of this kind of workshop are ordinary members of the community taking time out of their normal activity and not immediately or directly benefiting – here 80%+ are likely to be self-employed/subsistance farmers.  I still struggle where this is about training which is intended to help people better themselves – why should they want to be paid as well?  I can’t find any reason to accept it as right for employees.

The travel costs do seem reasonable.  Travel here costs real money and isn’t a luxury experience – usually a bumpy ride on a mechanically marginal motorbike.  What isn’t right is that this also is paid out as a flat rate – so people who have literally walked from one office to another and incurred neither cost nor inconvenience get the same as people who have come 30 miles.  I’m certain that if the actual costs of travel were reimbursed, the amount of money spent would be cut considerably.  This is an argument which incenses my GES colleagues.  How can you possibly accurately cost each person’s journey?  Individual motorbikes consume different quantities of fuel, side-oil etc, and what about a contribution to tyres, brakes and general wear and tear?  How do you even know how far people have come (and it’s totally true that they don’t have the faintest idea themselves!), and what about the people who are tacking on some other essential business whilst here?  The very possibility that the calculation would be flawed immediately and absolutely rules out any suggestion of “actuals” as grossly unfair.  The only fair thing is to give everyone the same.  And in any case, the Director doesn’t have authority to introduce such a change, it would need at least Regional Approval if not Blessing from Accra and has no chance of either.  And hasn’t the Director been benefiting from the existing system throughout her career so what possible right can she have now to institute a change which would represent a detriment for some people compared to what she herself has enjoyed?  She would set everyone against her; she would never get away with it; she would have the sense not to try.

At first I thought people were being deliberately obtuse when we had this conversation – why can’t they see that it would be much fairer to use even a fairly rough approximation of actual costs, even if I accepted all their pleading about the potential inaccuracies (which I don’t for one minute)?  And why can’t they see that making the money achieve more would be good?  But the reaction is so consistent and made so vehemently and without even the flicker of a smile, that I have to conclude that for some reason that eludes me, this is how Ghanaians think about this issue.

Perhaps to their credit, in all the times I have run this argument nobody has said, “What’s wrong with us poor, underpaid and overworked public servants getting a small share of the NGO money which, after all, is supposed to be benefiting the people of Ghana – aren’t we included amongst those?”  But I’m afraid I can’t help thinking that they are thinking that; and I fundamentally don’t agree with them! 

I am not really able to write much about the various examples which involve contracts, as this is something I have not had any direct involvement in, and I’ve only observed what happens for small scale, low value contracts.

Ghanaian bureaucracy requires competitive tendering in a way similar to the UK public sector, though of course without the requirements imposed by the EU (unfortunately for African countries generally, there are currently no pan-African trade conventions which would almost certainly be a real boost for inter-country trading and continental economic development).  I have witnessed small-scale fraudulant behaviour in the shape of one supplier supplying estimates/invoices under three different names (rather as, in the UK, if you’re relocating at your company’s expense, each removal firm who quotes will offer to get you a couple more quotations).  I’ve also seen that a surprising number of work is done by to family members of people who work in the GES (though I concede that I might be wrong to be surprised about this, as extended families do extend a long way here and it’s possible that if family members were excluded from tendering for contracts, almost everything would have to be sourced from outside the District).  I can state with conviction that there is minor abuse at the small-scale level.  But the bigger contracts I don’t really know anything about.

I do know that people who are involved in politics, both local and national, are more than averagely wealthy, and I have heard many people assert that those who become involved do so for monetary reasons.  I find this entirely plausible – looking only at Ghana, one can see that the local chief isn’t exactly indigent.  The local “chief’s palace” is generally the most impressive local edifice (though here in the north they are built in the traditional way and don’t compete with the newer concrete-block constructions in terms of electrical infrastructure, air-conditioning, garage space and the like).  The “Ashantihene” (Paramount Chief of the Ashanti Kingdom) is one of the five richest Kings in Africa, according to a recent newspaper article.  This is a society where power and wealth go hand-in-hand.  More than that, it is a society where people with money command respect – and nobody asks how they came by the wealth.

I am told, by people I believe, that at the local level, government contracts are awarded to people who are members of the governing party.  I have been given a couple of specific examples where the work done under those contracts was substandard – one involves some school buildings which virtually fell down within a year of construction.  Of course it would be corrupt, using “western” standards, if contracts were allocated on the basis of favouritism or nepotism rather than proper and objective evaluation of the tenders.  It is a separate question whether money is syphoned off from the contract and finds its way back into the pockets of politicians or officials, or the contractors themselves, and whether that results in the work being skimped.  I really do not know about this, though I will permit myself the observation that it is not easy to see how some people could have become as rich as they have without some kind of sharp practice.   

The example of the Zebilla to Bawku road invites another question – whether public officials here are competent to manage big contracts.  Having seen their performance in other matters, I can’t express any conviction that Ghana has many competent project or contract managers. 

Our experience in Zebilla has been that this is a land where people don’t have diaries, where it’s virtually impossible to arrange anything more than a week in advance, where it’s totally impossible to make an appointment to see anybody (for example, a doctor), and where even when you think you have arranged something carefully and informed everybody several times about the time and place of something, you can guarantee that a proportion of your invitees won’t attend at all and that many of the rest will show up late.  So much for the “time” aspect of project management. 

I’ve already explained that the cost of things tends to be what was initially budgeted rather than what was actually spent, and that kind of thinking is clearly also inimical to good project management.  The “quality” aspect suffers from people’s inability to look into the future, because it limits their ability to anticipate what is actually required and therefore to produce a clear and realistic specification. 

This kind of forward planning just doesn’t seem to be valued here.  Instead, great store is placed on being able to improvise, cope with unexpected set-backs and eventualities, bodge a job which would otherwise have gone totally wrong.  The culture here leaves you feeling surprised that anything at all gets done, not that things occasionally come a cropper!  So, there is part of me that doesn’t need to infer from the non-completion of the road that corruption was all or even part of the cause.  But I don’t just know.

Specifically regarding the President and his brothers, I do not know whether they are actually as rich as the press report said, and if so, where their wealth came from.  I have heard that every President builds himself at least one large and luxurious house during his term of office, and keeps it when he leaves office.  I haven’t looked to see whether this is provided for in the constitution, or justified officially in some other way, or whether a judicial blind eye is turned.  However my feeling is that the judiciary in Ghana has enough independence and sufficient teeth to challenge the practice if there were good grounds.  But that isn’t taking account of extended-family loyalties and the like.

Finally, there is the big question of whether the Ghanaian economy is performing as well as it ought, and what the reasons are if it isn’t.  Here again, unfortunately, a stay in the rural north of Ghana doesn’t provide the answers.  From what I can ascertain, the Ghanaian currency has been losing value on the international markets and the impact of that is visible in the inflation I mentioned earlier – and I could rail eloquently at a mechanism which inflicts apparently arbitrary suffering on ordinary people who are totally powerless to influence whatever it is that the markets are reacting to.  I think if I was looking for things that need reform to protect ordinary people in developing countries, currency exchange rates would be near the top of the list – I imagine it’s been consigned to the “too difficult” box and I’m not sure that that is any worse than being under active management in the way that banking has been!

So, now that I am coming to the end of this blog, I am not sure I am much closer to really knowing whether Ghana is riddled with corruption or not.  I’m probably not surprised at that.  I’m also conscious that I’ve not tried to address the question of whether Ghana is more or less corrupt than other places – my excuse is that I’m not remotely qualified to do that.  Perhaps I can go as far as saying that I think, if Ghana had been absolutely corrupt and rotten to the core, I would have been more conscious of that than I have been.

The big-money items are also outside my knowledge though what evidence I have been able to assemble suggests that all is not well.  It is clear that even if the real problem isn’t all that big, the perceived problem is huge and there is a real hunger among the ordinary people here to see it tackled decisively.  I think I’ve persuaded myself that this is the type of corruption that matters most and needs to be addressed first and hardest.  One reason is that, if there is a real problem of corruption, most of the “lost” money probably disappears in big items so solving that would have the biggest impact on the country.  A second and equally strong reason would involve setting a visible example to everyone in the country that things are changing and that the change is for good.  A third reason is that the concept of public service is really important, as is the idea that the role of a politician is to do good for the whole of society and everyone in it – not just yourself and your family (extended or not), and not just the people who voted for you.  Ghana is and rightly should be proud of its democracy, but I don’t think the country has quite reached the end of its journey yet in this respect. 

The small-money items also definitely have a strong whiff of impropriety about them.  But they exist in a cultural context which makes them entirely understandable, if perhaps slightly ambiguous, within society here.  I do think that these are a significant problem, primarily because they shore up the bigger examples.  However I’m not optimistic that they could be easily changed, because, as I hope I’ve demonstrated, they emerge quite naturally from Ghanaian culture and nobody should delude themselves into thinking that that is going to change quickly.  I think the best that can be hoped lies in the distinction which Ghanaians already seem to draw between “high-level and official corruption” one the one hand and “ordinary Ghanaian behaviour” on the other.  If this becomes stronger and results in more and better organised public refusal to accept the high-level stuff, that can only be a good thing. 

It is clear that civil society and the rule of law are less evolved here than in the UK, and that is an obstacle to “good governance”.  However, I don’t think that is the whole story.  The system of values in this society places more weight on family, relationships, friendships and personal allegiances than on abstract concepts such as “professionalism” and “public service”; and even “honesty”.  I suspect that most “westerners” would say that Ghana needs to change its culture so that it is possible to have a more transparent society that everyone, both within and outside the country, can have confidence in.  I’m not sure that is actually correct in any absolute sense, but as long as people with that view are in dominant positions in international financial institutions I think it’s probably true in practice, and I don’t think that a shift in that direction would totally wreck Ghana’s culture or undermine Ghanaians’ identity. 

I think Ghana is a long way from even initiating a debate about its culture – all the signs I see are that Ghanaians believe their traditions to be of high value to their society and need to be sustained.  Maybe one could ask what else is to be expected in a hierarchical society where the people with power have a strong vested interest in the status quo.  But if you stand back and recognise the tribal and cultural diversity within Ghana and the extent to which Ghana’s culture has enabled this “made-up” country to function reasonably successfully for 57 years, then perhaps you have to accept that there could be some truth in this belief.  In any event, I haven’t seen anything that people of a different persuasion could mobilise around, and I haven’t seen many people of a different persuasion attempting to mobilise. 

My hope is that as part of the ongoing journey of developing countries across the globe, we in the “developed west” become more aware that some of the things that we hold as absolute truths and values are actually just our cultural norms; and that other societies’ cultural norms also have value.  I recognise that this is a real long shot; but, for example, we seem reasonably comfortable that Japan is “ok” even though some of their traditional values are radically different from ours.

If it is true that people in high positions in government here rake off money to enrich themselves personally, then they need outing and condemning and subjecting to massive pressure to change their ways.  Ghana wouldn’t be the only country with people who need this treatment.  Whether that is an issue that foreign governments should lead on or even be involved with is a very difficult question – personally I think that corruption is worth serious discussion amongst world leaders in the context that it is almost certainly a huge obstacle to development in many countries; and as a by-product it would do no harm for “developed countries” to take a good look in the mirror.  But it’s also a “turkeys voting for Christmas” issue and I can well understand why world leaders would be more than comfortable to talk about easier things, of which there is a ready supply.

I don’t personally feel inclined to condemn ordinary Ghanaians too severely and when I look back at the society I’ve now been out of for a few months, I find I can detect more than a few things that I’m not totally comfortable about - and I don’t just mean in relation to politicians’ duck-houses, and I don’t limit my thoughts to public life.  There is a relationship between money and power in our country too; and if we scratch the surface just a bit we will find instances where individuals in our society identify and exploit the opportunities which present themselves, and where we all tacitly condone that and would do it too if we had the chance.  I think there might be more of it in Ghana, though it might only be that it is more visible here.  I think the human instincts which drive it are every bit as strong elsewhere, and find their expression in ways which blend in equally seamlessly with the local culture.

And we should remind ourselves that we have a lot more than they do, and try to imagine how we would behave if we were as poor as Ghanaians.

Overall verdict:

·        almost certainly a problem of corruption among senior public figures both nationally and locally;

·        probably more corrupt than the UK;

·        probably only moderately corrupt compared with some other countries;

·        definitely more corrupt if you apply “western” standards - but “western” standards are a culturally determined construct and aren’t the right yardstick; 

·        Ghana as a whole has its norms and values which apply pretty consistently throughout society, aren’t corrupt in their own terms, and do enable ordinary Ghanaians to recognise “real corruption” pretty consistently when they see it;

·        A pair of VSO volunteers can live for a year in Ghana without running into any major issues of corruption.