The President-elect, Nana Addo Dankwa
Akufo-Addo has indicated one of his initial priorities would be to establish the
Office of a Special Prosecutor as part of measures to deal with
corruption.
The move, according to him was intended to "separate politics
from criminal investigations."
Nana Addo won last week’s Presidential
Elections convincingly by a 54 per cent margin as against incumbent President
John Mahama’s 44 percent, a first time a President has failed to win re-election
in Ghana.
In his first media interview with the BBC’s Akwasi Sarpong
which was monitored by Graphic Online, Nana Addo talked about his top priorities
as President.
Tackling corruption
A big part of Nana Addo’s
presidential campaign was about uprooting corruption and when Akwasi Sarpong
asked him how he intends to deal with that and does he intend to prosecute
people from the previous administration, Nana Addo said: “We have decided that
as much as possible we want to take the politics out of it.”
He said they
have put out a number of ideas which were in their [NPP] manifesto and in the
things that “I’m saying about institutional reforms, personal examples that
myself and leaders of our party and government have to give, it’s a mix of ideas
that we believe will go a long way to reducing the incidents of corruption in
our national life.”
Special Prosecutor
This, according to Nana
Addo was to ensure that, “screams of witch-hunting etc. don’t arise by
establishing an Office of Special Prosecutor of somebody who will be independent
of the Executive and somebody whose remits will be to investigate and tackle
issues of corruption.”
“… and hopefully that person is going to be
somebody who commands respect of the society and at the same time has an
independent mind to make the decisions.”
“What we have to be careful of
in our situation is, one, to witch-hunt, but at the same time, we ought not to
give the impression that those of us in political life are somewhat have some
sort of immunity from investigation merely because we are politicians, I don’t
think that will be right, we are citizens of Ghana first and foremost," he
noted.
Economy
Nana Addo also indicated his plans to tackle the
economy saying turning around the economy would be his top priority.
When
asked how he felt about winning the elections, he said, “First of all I was
grateful to Ghanaians for giving me the opportunity and also for the fact that
the issues that I thought were the issues facing our people have been endorsed
by them, that I was right in my analysis of where we are and what we needed to
do and what the problems were.”
“I don’t want to sound smart but it is a
certain satisfaction for a politician when your analysis is proven right by
events.”
When asked what were his top priorities, Nana Addo said, “It has
to be to get our economy moving again. The Ghanaian economy has been in a
nose-dive for the last five years, low growth, widespread unemployment, huge
debts, that’s the reality of our situation in Ghana, and especially the
unemployment among the youth has reached alarming proportions and if we don’t
find a method of dealing with it, our country will … be running towards all
kinds of problems along the line.”
Appointees
Giving hints of who
was likely to be part of his government, Nana Addo said his appointees have to
have the fundamental connect to the group of ideas that are set out in the
manifesto.
“Secondly of court, their competence, their capacity to master
the briefs that are going to be given to them and carry them
out.”
“Thirdly the commitment to the Ghana Project, the loyalty to Ghana,
you are coming to work for the people of Ghana and not for
yourself.”
