Special Prosecutor warns against calls to scrap office, rejects claims of failure

Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyabeng has warned that recent attempts to abolish the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) amount to a direct threat to its existence, describing the second half of 2025 as one of the most difficult periods since the Office was established.

In the OSP’s Half Yearly Report for the second half of 2025, Mr Agyabeng said the Office faced “extreme resistance by those justly threatened by accountability”, including a private member’s bill introduced in Parliament to scrap the OSP and transfer its mandate to the Attorney-General.

“The second half of 2025 tested the OSP in existential and continuity ways few periods have,” the Special Prosecutor stated. “It was a time marked by extreme resistance by those justly threatened by accountability.”

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The bill, which was later withdrawn, sought to subsume the powers of the OSP under the Attorney-General’s Department. Mr Agyabeng credited President John Dramani Mahama with intervening decisively to halt the move.

“The Office highly commends the President, and the nation has His Excellency to thank, for the swift and decisive call for the withdrawal of the bill,” he said.

According to the Special Prosecutor, the President’s intervention reaffirmed the fundamental reasoning behind the creation of the OSP as an independent anti-corruption body, separate from the Attorney-General.

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“The establishment of the Office as a gold-standard independent anti-corruption agency was based on the very obvious and practical consideration that the Attorney-General, being a member of Cabinet and chief legal adviser to the Government, is not well-suited to investigate and prosecute members of a government to which he belongs,” Mr Agyabeng stated.

He rejected claims by sponsors of the withdrawn bill that the OSP had failed to deliver value for money or had duplicated the work of the Attorney-General’s Department.

“The reasons advanced for the intended abolishment are bare statements that the Office has not performed as expected and that it is a drain on national resources, without any examination of what it was expected to have achieved by December 2025,” he said.

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Mr Agyabeng stressed that the OSP does not shy away from oversight, pointing to its regular engagement with parliamentary committees and accountability institutions.

“The Office does not avoid accountability. It welcomes scrutiny,” he said, adding that efforts to abolish the OSP were unfair, unsupported by evidence, and risk undermining Ghana’s anti-corruption framework at a critical time.

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He further insisted that, despite persistent budgetary constraints, the Office has worked within its means to achieve results in the fight against corruption.