“We don’t get a lot of time to explain what we are doing”

Ghana’s premier anti-corruption body is waging a battle on two fronts, struggling to tell its own story in a media landscape dominated by its critics, while simultaneously fending off political forces that would rather see it dismantled altogether.

Those twin pressures came into sharp focus at a national dialogue on the work of the Office of the Special Prosecutor on Tuesday, March 31, where senior officials spoke with unusual candour about the institutional vulnerabilities that have long shadowed the OSP’s work.

Samuel Appiah-Darko, Director of Strategy, Research and Communications at the OSP, opened by identifying a communications deficit that he says has allowed a distorted narrative about the office to take hold in public discourse.

“One of the problems the OSP has always faced is the lack of enough opportunity to speak. There are too many voices against the OSP, yet we don’t get a lot of time to explain what we are doing,” he said.

The imbalance, he noted, is not abstract. With calls to scrap the OSP amplified across more than 500 media stations nationwide, the office faces a reality in which its critics command far greater airtime than it does, a dynamic that risks entrenching public misconceptions about what the institution has actually achieved.

The stakes of that narrative battle are considerable. Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyebeng went further, revealing that the OSP’s very existence has come under genuine legislative threat. He disclosed that a bill had been prepared by the Majority in Parliament with the explicit aim of abolishing the office, a development he described as symptomatic of how many politicians regard the OSP not as a public good, but as a personal threat.

Agyebeng suggested that it was the backing of President John Dramani Mahama that helped the office survive that particular threat, painting a picture of an institution whose continued operation has depended as much on executive goodwill as on its own legal mandate.

“Many politicians view the OSP as a threat to their interests,” he noted, explaining why sustained efforts to curtail its authority have become a recurring feature of the office’s operating environment.

For both men, the dialogue was an opportunity to make a case that goes beyond institutional self-interest, that weakening or silencing an anti-corruption body does not serve the public, regardless of how loudly or how often that demand is made.

Source: myjoyonline