In Ghana, the ceremony is always solemn. A public official steps forward, places a hand on the Bible or the Qur’an, invokes God, pledges fidelity to the Constitution, and promises to serve the people faithfully. It is supposed to be sacred. It is supposed to mean something. But after decades of scandals, audit queries, missing records, unexplained payments, ghost names, abandoned projects, and vanishing accountability, Ghanaians must ask an uncomfortable question: what exactly does that oath still achieve?
Let us be honest with ourselves. In this country, too many people swear before God and then govern as if the real altar is the public purse. They kiss holy books in public and then sign off on dodgy contracts, tolerate payroll fraud, look the other way on inflated claims, and leave assemblies, ministries, and agencies unable to explain how taxpayers’ money is spent. The problem is no longer merely moral hypocrisy. It is a national mockery.
We have seen this pattern too many times. The Woyome judgment debt saga became a byword for how huge public sums can be paid out and then clawed back only through years of legal struggle; as recently as April 2024, the Deputy Attorney-General said the state had still not recovered all of the roughly GH¢51.2 million the Supreme Court ordered refunded in 2014. The GYEEDA scandal led to convictions in connection with a GH¢4.1 million deal. The SADA affair became a national symbol of waste and unseriousness. Then came the National Service ghost-name scandal, in which the Attorney-General said more than GH¢548.3 million was siphoned off through a criminal enterprise. If sacred oaths were supposed to restrain greed, the historical evidence is devastating.
Even the Airbus scandal reinforced the same unease: Ghana was again associated with allegations of corrupt influence in high places, only for the Office of the Special Prosecutor in August 2024 to say it had concluded its investigation without instituting criminal proceedings. Whatever one’s political loyalties, the public takeaway was grim: scandal is constant, closure is murky, and the moral theatre of public office keeps colliding with weak consequences.
And this is why the latest Public Accounts Committee (PAC) hearings matter so much. They show that the problem is not only spectacular national scandals; it is also everyday leakages in the districts and municipalities where ordinary Ghanaians expect roads, classrooms, sanitation, markets and clinics. In April 2026, the PAC began its second zonal public hearing in the Ashanti Region, specifically to examine the 2024 Auditor-General’s findings on Metropolitan Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDA) and public schools, with officials called to justify discrepancies and other irregularities. That is not abstract corruption. That is local governance under question. The details are telling. This month, the PAC ordered the Yunyoo-Nasuan District Assembly to recover GH¢30,759.16 from a former officer for salary payments he allegedly was not entitled to after vacating his post. This is not a billion-cedi scandal. It is, in some ways, worse: it is the normalisation of quiet administrative theft, the kind that happens in pieces until the nation bleeds in silence.
The wider Auditor-General data should trouble every taxpayer. In the 2024 report on district assemblies, the Audit Service said Ghana had 261 assemblies in operation and that the total value of irregularities from the audit of those assemblies was GH¢18.88 million. Of that, cash irregularities alone accounted for GH¢15.31 million, payroll irregularities for GH¢1.50 million, contract irregularities for GH¢1.21 million, assets and stores management irregularities for GH¢431,364.84, and tax irregularities for GH¢429,477.71. One assembly, Builsa South, also failed to submit financial statements by the statutory deadline. These are not rumours. They are audit findings.
And the pattern is not new. A Daily Graphic review of ten years of Auditor-General reports on district assemblies found GH¢242.84 million in MMDA irregularities over that period and noted absurdities such as some assemblies spending more on revenue collectors than those collectors actually brought in. That should shake any serious country. It means we are not dealing with isolated bad apples. We are confronting a culture of administrative carelessness, impunity and institutional weakness.
Recent PAC hearings have exposed another layer of the problem: poor documentation and gaps in the records themselves. The PAC’s chair, Abena Osei-Asare, said in early April that documentation and record-keeping remain a major challenge in public finance management. Earlier, on March 3, 2026, Parliament reported that the PAC had raised concerns about gaps in the special audit report on government outstanding claims and commitments, especially the absence of key integrity details in parts of the report. So even where the state is trying to scrutinise the books, the books are incomplete, weak, or insufficiently reliable.
This is where the Bible and the Qur’an enter the debate. These books are not the problem. Their moral teachings are plain enough: do not steal, do not lie, do not exploit, do not abuse trust. The real problem is that in Ghana, public oath-taking has become too easy and consequence-free. A person can swear by scripture in the morning and still preside over losses, diversions, padded claims or unexplained balances by afternoon. The oath has remained sacred in form, but hollow in enforcement.
So yes, it is time to take a second look. Not because the Bible and Qur’an have failed, but because we have turned them into ceremonial props. If public service in Ghana is to mean anything, the oath must stop being treated as a substitute for systems. Sacred language cannot replace asset declaration, real-time expenditure tracking, clean payroll controls, procurement transparency, public access to district accounts, enforced disallowance and surcharge, and swift prosecution where theft is proven. Scripture may prick the conscience, but only institutions can restrain the shameless.
Perhaps the time has come to add something more concrete to the symbolism of the office: a binding public-integrity covenant, annual forensic lifestyle audits for high-risk officials, automatic publication of assembly-level audit responses, and direct sanctions for finance officers, chief executives, and heads of department who fail to account for public funds. Let an official still swear by the Bible or Qur’an if he or she wishes. But let that sacred gesture be followed by a secular certainty: if you steal, we will trace it; if you cannot account for it, you will repay it; if you engineered it, you will be prosecuted.
Ghana does not need more holy performances from public officials. Ghana needs fewer excuses, cleaner books, faster recoveries, visible sanctions and leaders who fear both God and the law. Until then, every oath taken on the Bible or the Qur’an will continue to sound noble at the podium and hollow in the audit report.
Ghana should also learn from countries that have been more successful in checking corruption without depending on religious symbolism as the foundation of public accountability. Singapore, for example, remains one of the world’s strongest performers on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, and its Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau says its anti-corruption framework rests on four pillars: laws, adjudication, enforcement and public administration, backed by political will and leadership. That is an instructive contrast for Ghana. Singapore did not build a reputation for a cleaner government by assuming that an oath on a sacred book would tame greed. It built institutions meant to detect, deter and punish corruption.
New Zealand offers another lesson that is directly relevant to this debate. The Oaths and Declarations Act expressly provides for affirmations as an alternative to religious oaths and states that an oath is not affected by the absence of religious belief. In practical terms, that means public duty is treated as legally binding whether or not an official invokes scripture. The state does not confuse personal faith with public integrity. Ghana can learn from that distinction. A public servant should be accountable because the Constitution, the law, the audit trail and the public demand it, not because a holy book happened to be present at the inauguration.
Sweden reinforces the same point from a different angle. One of its fundamental constitutional principles is public access to official documents. The Swedish Riksdag explains that anyone can request official documents from public authorities and does not even need to state why. That level of transparency does not eliminate wrongdoing entirely, but it makes concealment harder and public scrutiny stronger. Ghana’s districts, municipalities, ministries and agencies would be harder places in which to hide financial irregularities if contracts, payment records, procurement decisions and audit responses were far more accessible to the public.
The lesson from these countries is not that religion is unimportant. It is that religion cannot do the work of institutions. A deeply religious official may still steal, while a person who makes a secular affirmation may serve with honour and discipline. What restrains corruption in practice is not the ceremony of assuming office but the certainty of oversight, documentation, exposure and sanctions. That is why Ghana’s reform conversation must move beyond symbolism and ask harder questions about enforcement, transparency and political will.
In that sense, the real challenge before Ghana is not whether the Bible or the Qur’an should disappear from public oath-taking. The real challenge is whether the Republic is prepared to build a system in which sacred words are matched by secular consequences. Let those who wish to swear on holy books continue to do so. But let Ghana finally imitate the countries that have understood a basic truth: corruption is checked not by ritual, but by rules; not by ceremony, but by systems; not by appearances of holiness, but by the hard architecture of accountability.
Until Ghana fully learns this, the pattern will continue: solemn words at the inauguration, troubling figures in the audit report, and citizens left wondering how so much reverence at the beginning of office can end in so little accountability at the end.
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The writer, Dr Gervin A. Apatinga (PhD), can be contacted via email at gervinapatinga@gmail.com
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