A fellow of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) Professor Kwaku Asare has called on the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to investigate the leakage of former Auditor-General, Daniel Yao Domelevo’s social security records by the Audit Service Board.

According to him, the act was a breach of Mr. Domelevo’s constitutional right to privacy and could go a long way to undermine the trust people have in state institutions.

Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile, Saturday, Prof Asare said “I believe CHRAJ should investigate how they got the SSNIT data and furthermore how someone’s social security records were leaked so shamelessly onto facebook.

“If we’re going to be a country, and if we’re going to trust our institutions, if I give my information to the social security people, I expect that it will be kept confidential.”

He stated that even the Presidency could not breach one's constitutional right to privacy and further “shamelessly” publish such confidential data on Facebook.

“There should be consequences. This cannot happen in just about any country. It’s a breach of the constitution because this is a privacy right.”

Professor Kwaku Asare’s comments follow the forced retirement of Daniel Yao Domelevo from his office as Auditor-General.

The Audit Service had claimed that after carrying out a private investigation on Mr. Domelevo, they had discovered that he was Togolese despite having Ghanaian forbears and that his retirement date was June 1, 2020 as they had discovered he was born in 1960 and not 1961 as he claimed.

However, speaking on Newsfile, Prof. Kwaku Asare said forcefully retiring Mr. Domelevo had nothing to do with the said anomalies the Audit Service Board had discovered, but rather, a coveted attempt to prevent the former Auditor General from unearthing some government dealings and documents.

Speaking of the President’s involvement in the forced retirement he said, “The benefit to him [Akufo-Addo] from dismissing the Auditor-General outweighs any cost to him. Costs include losing some votes and voters, losing some believers in the constitutional governance, losing even some people in his own party who are sticklers for good governance, perhaps being smacked down by the Supreme Court.

“… The benefit to him is that this Auditor-General is not the Auditor-General auditing the presidency and the other executive agencies, or this Auditor-General is so effective that we don’t want to expose some government dealings and government documents to him. So it is a cost benefit analysis.”

He added that the Audit Service Board was only a tool the President used in carrying out this covet mission which has resulted in Mr. Domelevo’s forced 167 days leave and subsequent retirement.

“You know the board has three nominees from the presidency including Prof. Agyeman Dua who incidentally is a former Auditor-General. So the board was the tool. He [the President] will go through the board, and you’ll see that the board will go and dig, and dig, and dig, and find something.

“It’s one thing or the other, first, it was ‘oh, you haven’t taken your leave and so go on 167 days leave’ and then as the 167 days approached, they’d try to find something. They went to do an audit on the Auditor-General.

“They hired a private accounting firm to do an audit of the Auditor General which by the way is also unconstitutional because that is the remit of parliament, that auditor found nothing, so then they had to do something.

“I believe they hired some independent investigators and they unlawfully accessed SSNIT data…then the investigators found something, they said the citizenship, he was Togolese, very dangerous, very dangerous, here you are, you wrote a memo saying the person’s mother is a Ghanaian and you’re saying the person is a Togolese how low can we get in the country? And then they went to the age.”