Resign if you can’t do your job – Kofi Bentil tells Auditor-General

Private legal practitioner and Senior Vice President of IMANI Center for Policy and Education, Lawyer Kofi Bentil has advised the current Auditor-General of the country, Mr. Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu to leave his office he if can’t do his job.

This call from the lawyer comes at a time that some Civil Society Organizations  (CSOs) as well as prominent individuals in the country are mounting pressure on the Auditor-General to respect the constitution and the Audit Service Act that empowers him to disallow and surcharge persons and institutions implicated in the mismanagement of public funds.

According to these CSOs, they cannot fathom why with all the needed legal backing, the current Auditor-General has turned a blind eye as billions of cedis of public funds continues to be lost in financial irregularities on regular basis.

In order to demonstrate their displeasure over the attitude of the Auditor-General, the group declared Monday, September 5, 2022 as Red Monday where they walked on the principal streets of Accra and picketed at the Auditor-General’s office to submit their petition to the office.

Speaking to Nuong Faalong on Spotlight on MX 24 TV after the picketing, Lawyer Kofi Bentil said the Auditor-General has been given all the needed resources to retrieve public funds misused by officials hence has no excuse in carrying out his duties.

He therefore emphasized that if Mr. Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu, for any reason, feels he cannot recover lost public funds  he must resign from office.

“It is not good enough just to be recommending things when you are the person who have been given the power to recover. There is no better person to recover funds. You have the legal authority to recover and you need to recover. In article 277 of our constitution, it is clear that when power is given to somebody to do something, that power also implies that he can go ahead and do whatever is required to do that work which is why part of what we were saying today is that  the present Auditor-General, Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu is refusing to obey the orders of the court and refusing to do his job.,” Lawyer Kofi Bentil explained.

He added that, “for any reason he does not want to do the job or anybody does not feel sufficiently capable of doing that job when you have been given every resource including law and an order of the Supreme Court, he should just leave the office.”