General News of Saturday, 24 March 2018
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
2018-03-24
Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia
Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has warned public officials to stay away from state funds to avoid the “wrath” of the Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu.
According to Dr. Bawumia, government is keeping a close watch on public servants, particularly those handling state funds in order to protect the national coffers from “the thieves”.
He reiterated that government’s commitment to protecting the public purse and fighting corruption is no joke which explains why it saved the country a whopping GHC5.4b from bogus claims which would have been paid to contractors.
Enumerating the achievements of the one-year-old Akufo-Addo led NPP government at the Youth Entrepreneurship Forum organised by the National Youth Authority in Accra Friday, the Vice President said, “We say we were going to tackle corruption. We have been able to save quite a lot of money when we asked the Auditor-General to do an audit of the various claims on government for payment of contractors. We had claims of almost GHC11 billion and we asked the Auditor-General to do an audit and at the end of the day he found that GHC5.4 billion of those claims were bogus.”
The appointment of the Special Prosecutor, according to Dr. Bawumia is yet another success of the Akufo-Addo led administration and an indication government will not pardon any public official caught in corrupt deals.
He stressed that Martin Amidu is very keen and passionate about fighting corruption, hence he will handle all “thieves” equally irrespective of their political affiliation.
“We said we will appoint a Special Prosecutor to deal with corruption and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo again fulfilled his promise and has appointed the Special Prosecutor to show he’s very much concerned about corruption. He didn’t appoint someone from his party but he appointed someone from the opposition, Martin Amidu with integrity and passion to fight corruption,” Dr. Bawumia affirmed.