There is a growing concern over the relevance of Ghana’s foremost anti-corruption office, the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP), with calls for it to be scrapped, but a legal practitioner and other voices say no.
The debate has even landed on the floor of Parliament, with the Speaker and some members favouring the calls for the office to be scrapped.
The justification from the proponents of this argument is that the country is not getting value for money. Despite the millions of budgetary allocations to the office since its establishment, its impact, they say, has been little to nothing.
Others also cite abuse of power by the Office, while some also argue that the Office is unconstitutional.
But private legal practitioner, Professor Stephen Asare, popularly known as Prof. Kwaku Azar, says those pushing for the repeal are targeting the wrong problem, and risking a dangerous return to the past.
In a strongly argued piece, he compares the calls for repeal to “burning down the hospital because there are sick people inside.”
According to him, the OSP isn’t failing because the idea is flawed, but because Ghana has refused to give it the tools, independence, and resources it needs to function properly.
He outlines four key reasons why the OSP must not only be kept but also strengthened.
First, he says the country’s traditional justice system has failed for 60 years to deal with high-level corruption, especially political graft and elite looting. The Attorney-General’s Department, he argues, has consistently been either “unable or unwilling” to take on powerful offenders. That is the historical reality that birthed the OSP.
“For six decades, the AG’s Department has proven either unable or unwilling to confront political corruption and elite looting. This is not opinion. It is history,” he indicated.
Second, he explains that elite corruption cannot be tackled with the same methods used to handle routine white-collar crime. He notes that cases involving politically exposed persons require specialised intelligence gathering, forensic expertise and strong insulation from political pressure.
This, he says, was the gap OSP was specifically designed to fill, and hence scrapping it will be shooting ourselves in the foot.
“High-level corruption requires specialised intelligence and forensic capacity. It requires independence from the political elites. The OSP is the only institution designed for this mission,” Prof. Azar explained.
Third, he warns that scrapping the OSP would collapse Ghana’s anti-corruption architecture altogether. It would guarantee impunity for politically connected offenders, weaken institutions like the Office of the Registrar of Companies, derail efforts to recover stolen assets, and damage Ghana’s reputation internationally.
“A weakened or abolished OSP guarantees political impunity, collapse of public trust, a weakened ORAL, failure to recover stolen assets, and reputational decline internationally. It puts us back where we were when we decided it’s time for an OSP law,” the legal practitioner noted.
Finally, he stresses that a well-resourced OSP pays for itself. Corruption costs Ghana billions annually, yet improving the OSP requires only a fraction of that amount. Strengthening the office, he argues, is one of the most cost-effective reforms available to government.
“Corruption costs us billions. Strengthening the OSP costs a fraction of that. This is the easiest investment decision the government will ever face,” he added.
Although Prof. Azar admits the struggles of the OSP, he insists the answer is not abolition. The real issue, he says, is that the office has been starved of the capacity and independence it needs to deliver.
Scrapping it now, he is convinced, would not cure the nation’s long-standing corruption problem; it would simply take Ghana backwards.
