Dean of the University of Ghana Business School, Professor Justice Bawole, has called for mandatory ethics training and a strengthened whistleblower culture as part of a national response to Ghana’s deeply entrenched corruption.
Delivering his inaugural lecture on Thursday, July 10, 2025, Prof. Bawole described corruption in Ghana as not just systemic, but normalized and deeply personal.
”Corruption in Ghana is not a distant something. It’s not an abstract force. It is personal, pervasive, and deeply embedded in our everyday lives.”
He blamed opaque bureaucratic processes and excessive discretionary powers in public institutions for creating an environment in which bribery has become a common and even expected practice.
”Bottlenecks, opaque procedures, and excessive bureaucratic discretion have created an environment where bribery thrives. It’s become a culture marked as necessity, justified by survival logic and tragically, it’s our corruption.”
To combat this, Prof. Bawole urged the government and institutions to make ethics training mandatory, especially for public servants.
”We cannot expect people to be white when we haven’t shown them what white is. Let’s make ethics training mandatory. Elsewhere in the developed world, you can’t even log into your work computer until you’ve completed it.”
Prof. Bawole noted that while Ghana is often considered a collectivist society where people are reluctant to report others, recent operations like ORAL suggest that many are ready to volunteer information if they believe the system will act on it.
He further called on media, civil society, and faith-based organizations to keep ethics in public discourse, arguing that repeated conversations help shape moral awareness.
”The conversation around ethics can subtly enter people and convict them. Let’s keep talking and our society will eventually pick it up.”
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Story by Michelle Lartey|univers.ug.edu. gh
Edited by Kuuku Osei-Baidoo
