Was the return to democracy worth it? Tony Aidoo asks

Head of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Presidency, Dr Tony Aidoo is expressing doubts as to whether returning to democracy in 1992 after a decade of military rule was a worthy decision.

In Tony Aidoo’s view, many Ghanaians at various levels of the social and political strata had taken the democratic dispensation as a license to act with impunity.

He was speaking on Joy FM’s Super Morning Show Thursday in regard to the raging judgment debt saga.

Dr Tony Aidoo, who once said at a certain point in the Kufuor administration that Ghana was ripe for 10 coups, said the mounting crisis of piling judgment debts was “an indictment of not only successive governments, but of the 4th Republic. We may just as well sit down and query the issue, was it worth going democratic because democracy since 1992 appears to be the license for impunity, for indiscipline, for gross dissipation of public funds without regard to the interest of the general public.”

He said the nation had been caught in this quagmire of judgment debts “because of a general attitude of indiscipline” and that “people have taken [it] for granted…that democratic freedoms represent unbridled freedom to do what you like.”

According to him, some of the debts had grown to gargantuan proportions because public officials willfully ignored judicial decisions.

In some cases the judgment debts arose out of acts, misdeeds and malfeasance of persons paid to protect the public purse, he lamented.

The nation, he said, must reconcile its political differences and see the bigger picture of the threat to the country’s sovereignty which the debts represented.

Tony Aidoo endorsed calls for a “public inquiry into both the causation of the indebtedness, into acts that have allowed the indebtedness to develop from moulds into mountains and the processes by which these debts are being disposed of.” 
Ghana | Myjoyonline.com|Malik Abass Daabu