The Fourth Estate

1 week ago | thefourthestategh.com | Seth Bokpe |Philip Teye Agbove

President John Dramani Mahama’s appointees who defied his directives to declare their assets and liabilities before March 31, 2025, will lose three months’ salary as punishment. The President has also given these defaulting ministers a new lifeline: May 7, 2025, to comply or be fired.

2 weeks ago | thefourthestategh.com | Seth Bokpe |Philip Teye Agbove

Fifty-six appointees in the John Mahama administration have defied the president’s ultimatum to declare their assets and liabilities by March 31, 2025. An analysis reveals that out of 56 ministers and deputy ministers, 10 have failed to comply with the law and the president’s directive. Similarly, nine out of 32 presidential staffers and 37 of the 84 heads of state institutions appointed between January 15 and March 18 have yet to meet the president’s anti-graft directive as of April 17, 2024.

2 months ago | thefourthestategh.com | Seth Bokpe |Edmund Agyemang Boateng

It remains to be seen, what steps the government will take after the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, publicly lamented that illegal miners had overran a gold prospecting concession belonging to him. He revealed that unauthorized mining was taking place on the concession without his knowledge, raising serious questions about who is responsible for the environmental destruction from the illegal mining operations which have devastated the banks of the Tano River.

2 months ago | thefourthestategh.com | Seth Bokpe |Kwaku Krobea Asante

When Joel Nunifant graduated from Bagabaga College of Education in 2017, national service was not compulsory for teachers. He never enrolled and so it came to him as a shock when he discovered that his identity, including his college ID number, had been stolen and altered for the registration of other people under the National Service Scheme (NSS). The fraudulent entry, revealed by an investigation by The Fourth Estate, did more than just make illegal use of his ID number.

2 months ago | thefourthestategh.com | Seth Bokpe |Kwaku Krobea Asante

Officials at the National Service Authority (NSA) circumvented mandatory validation processes for payments of allowances to national service personnel, enabling thousands of nonexistent names to be added to the payroll.  This made it easy to use the ghost names to drain the public purse of millions of Ghana cedis in allowances intended for national service personnel.