<<Print>>

Minister of Communications, Dr Edward Omane Boamah says calls by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) on President John Dramani Mahama to walk the talk on corruption are an indication of their confidence in the presidency�s resolve to fight corruption. According to him, President Mahama is leading the fight against corruption and that it was evident in his directive to the Ministry of Communications to improve the efficiency of the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General�s Department. Speaking on Accra-based Radio Gold, Dr Boamah said, �For me, the noise is rather a confidence-building posturing that says that we know that you can do it. And clearly, President Mahama is leading the fight against corruption. Between the Ministry of Communication and the Attorney General�s Department alone, he gave a directive that we should improve on the efficiency of the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General�s Department. As a result of that, we escalated the e-justice project and we are injecting $5 million into the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General�s Department and that of the judiciary.� He said that President Mahama�s determination to fight corruption was also evident in the commissioning of the first ever video conference and telepresence facility at the Supreme Court, making it easy to track cases ongoing in the various courts and the digitization of records at the AG�s Department. �We are doing all these things so that it is not going to be that we cannot find this report or we cannot find that report. And President Mahama is ensuring that we bring all these things to a halt,� he said. Dr Boamah noted that in a constitutionally democratic country it was not right for the executive to interfere in the undertakings of the judiciary and that is why it may seem that the president is not determined to fight corruption. �What else should the president do? Should he be tying people to the stakes and shooting them? We are in a democracy and in a democracy, we must respect institutions. We should not be destabilizing the harmony that exists between institutions. The executive must respect the judiciary and vice versa, the executive must respect the legislator and vice versa and the legislator must also respect the judiciary and vice versa. This is the only way that we can have harmony in the governance path that we have chosen �which is constitutional democracy,� he stated.