Political Science lecturer of the University of Ghana, Professor Ransford Gyampo, has advised political parties against promising to fight corruption during campaign periods.
Prof Gyampo believes, political parties that promise to fight corruption during an electioneering year do a great disservice to themselves.
According to the political analyst, politicians fail to recognize that they have no influence on the justice delivery system.
In an article by the academic, he explained that the politicization of the fight against corruption during campaign periods creates huge public expectations for the government when elected.
However, evidence gathering and legal proceedings in general, take time, something which cannot be controlled by the government.
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This, he explained makes people who may be previously aligned with the government, based on the campaign promise to fight corruption get disappointed if little or nothing is done in the fight against corruption without taking into cognizance that justice delivery is almost independent of the government.
Politicians do not control the pace at which the axis of justice must run. Politicizing the fight against corruption by making not-properly though through promises in an electioneering campaign, without taking cognizance of the fact that building evidence to support a case takes time, maybe unhelpful as it creates huge public expectations and heaps pressure on the government to expedite a process that it cannot control. This makes the government seem deficient in fighting corruption, Prof. Gyampo wrote.
It is that simple. If you promised to fight corruption and succeed in getting a conviction for only one case in almost four years, people will have legitimate reasons to feel the battle against the canker has been lost by your regime. But this may genuinely not be the case, as no government can fast track court processes, he added.
He, therefore advised political parties to make informed promises as far as the battle against corruption is concerned.
