Government is seeking technical support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to develop new Conduct of Public Officers Law in a bid to address weaknesses in the existing asset declaration regime.

A statement on Ghana on the IMF website says the move is also geared towards addressing corruption.

The need for a more robust law to regulate the conduct of public officers was first conceived 14 years but implementation has stalled.

Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, who chaired the committee that drafted the law noted that the Code of Conduct bill was initiated in 2009 when he was a majority leader.

According to him, the action “was to insist the government parliament should follow the good example of Great Britain by coming out with a code of conduct for members and staff of parliament.”

He went on to say that the House then approved and adopted the Code of Conduct bill. However, nothing came out of a second committee formed to flesh out the details of the code into a manual along with the rules of ethics.

“The code remains a paper in parliament as of today. We always draw the attention of members to that code but when they go through it, the code is creating an environment different from the environment we are operating from.

“They see that when they follow what we put in the code, their constituents will chase them out of the constituency because it talks about doing what is right, just and moral – that is what it talks about but that is not what the society is looking for. I hope that will change,” he said.

Also read: https://myjoyonline.com/occupyghana-writes-to-cabinet-again-on-legislation-of-draft-conduct-of-public-officers-bill/

Also, the peer pressure group, Occupy Ghana has written to the Office of the President to demand an update on the Draft Conduct of Public Officers Bill, 2022 using the Right to Information Law.

The RTI request dated August 10, 2023, sought to remind the presidency of its assurances to take action on the draft bill in its reply to the group’s first RTI request in May, this year.

The group’s letter in May was a follow-up to a similar RTI request they had sent in February 2023, in which they disagreed with the presidency for describing some of the information they were seeking as confidential and secret.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Attorney General, Godfred Tuah Yeboah is however optimistic the Code of Conduct bill will be passed before the expiration of the 8^th Parliament.