The executive Director of the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), Professor Emmanuel Gyimah Boadi has challenged Government to improve its commitment to rule of law and transparency in its activities.

Prof. Gyimah Boadi, who is the lead author, Afrobarometre noted that institutional weakness still exist despite the growing democratic culture.

According to the CDD executive director, the lack of openness in government's budgets and expenditures manifests in a way that we are unable to manage the extractive resources prudently and developmentally.

Speaking to Joy News Wednesday, Prof. Gyimah Boadi noted that even though the country is making good strides in areas of election credibility and aspects of personal freedoms, there was need to for government to improve in making its transactions and governance transparent.

"we are democratic and we are happy about that but democracy is not enough and that we need better governance", Prof. Gyimah Boadi emphasized.

The executive director of CDD made the comments after the latest afrobarometre that he authored placed Ghana’s healthcare sector under scrutiny.  The survey released today by the CDD researched sampled views from people in 34 African countries including Ghana by looking at access to government provision of services such as electricity supply, education, healthcare delivery and management of the natural resource.

Though Ghana did not show up in the comparisons of the best and worst performing countries, a sizeable minority of those whose views were sampled believe healthcare delivery in the country is of average standard.

Kathleen Addy, the Outreach Coordinator English Speaking Africa, Afrobarometre told Joy News the results are not encouraging.

"We have 44% of ghanaians saying that they have to wait a long time in order to access health care. We have 32% complaining that they have to deal with lack of medicine supplies. 31% saying that service are too expensive, 29% saying that there is lack of respect and attention from service providers, a good number talking about absent doctors and also dirty facilities. All these show that even though overall, we can say that Ghana is average as compared to other countries. When you come to the details of it, it does not look too good. So you can imagine what is going on in other countries, where it's very bad", she noted.

She therefore pointed out that looking at Ghana's data, even though people say that it is easy for them to get to a health facility, there is a lot of problems when it comes to the actual services that are provided by health care facilities.

Research Officer at CDD-Ghana and co-author of the report, Awal Mohammed, said findings reveal that a ‘silent majority” in Ghana say they are not sure how revenues from the extractive industries are used.

"Afrobarometer asked questions relating to how easy is it to find out how taxes and fees that government spend. On the average about 62% said it was very difficult to find out how much government uses our revenue. In guinea, the highest is about 77% and Ghana, about 68% saying it is very difficult for example to find out how taxes and fees are spent by government.

I am also interested in finding out how accountable public officials are for example, do they respect the laws in those countries, are officials accountable when they commit some crime.  About 59% of people Afrobarometer asked says that the president does not ignore the law and that is encouraging.

But apart from that even though the president does not ignore the law in many of those countries, official impunity for example is high', Awal Mohammed indicated.