Former Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu has raised serious concerns about the recruitment process at the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP), arguing that its current leadership has deviated from the fundamental principles that guided its establishment.
In a strongly worded statement, Amidu emphasized that the OSP was designed to be a flagship anti-corruption agency, requiring employees of the “highest moral character and integrity.”
He revealed that he had personally drafted and recommended Regulations 7 and 12 of LI 2373—borrowed from the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) regulations—to ensure proper vetting of OSP personnel.
“The letter and the spirit animating the Office of the Special Prosecutor Act, 2017 (Act 959) which established the OSP was and is to ensure that the flagship anti-corruption agency that I operationalized as the founding Special Prosecutor employed only men and women of the highest moral character and integrity without whom previous endeavours to fight corruption failed,” Amidu stated.
He accused the current Special Prosecutor, William Kissi Agyebeng, of sidestepping this rigorous vetting process by subjecting employees to unlawful polygraph tests instead of proper background checks conducted by the Ghana Police and the National Intelligence Bureau (NIB).
“Polygraphing citizens of Ghana by public institutions is illegal in Ghana and cannot be a substitute for vetting by the Ghana Police and the NIB,” Amidu asserted.
He recalled that both he and Kissi Agyebeng underwent extensive police and intelligence vetting before their parliamentary approval, including fingerprinting, background verification in their hometowns, and scrutiny of their academic records.
“William Kissi Agyebeng, when he was nominated the Special Prosecutor, was requested by Parliament to submit himself to the Ghana Police Administration and the then BNI for vetting before appearing before the Appointments Committee of Parliament for consideration for approval by Parliament,” he said.
He challenged the notion that polygraph tests could replace proper security vetting, sarcastically suggesting that if such were the case, Parliament might as well install a lie detector machine in its Appointments Committee room to test nominees.
“Parliament could have bought a huge polygraph machine and placed it in the Appointments Committee room to test our truthfulness if that was the meaning of vetting under Ghana law,” he remarked.
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