Compared to them, we are angels: Parliament, othering and the fight against corruption in Ghana (original) (raw)

Legon Journal of the Humanities

Due to its supervisory responsibility over the executive and public institutions, including ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), Ghana’s legislature has a mandate to check and fight corruption and make its practice a high risk, low-gain activity. The commitment, urgency and the willingness to fight corruption can be seen not only in creating the legislative framework for addressing corruption, promoting governmental accountability and acting as a check on the executive, but also in how the subject of corruption is broached in parliamentary debates and discussions, an area which relatively lacks scholarly attention. First, using an interpretive content analysis, this paper studies the approaches to the fight against corruption in Ghana by examining the Parliamentary Committee report on the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP) and, the debate thereof, in order to uncover the focus of the NACAP. Second, the paper examines Parliamentarians’ use of evaluative language in ...