In a letter to the president in which she denied any wrongdoing, Ghana’s sanitation minister Cecilia Abena Dapaah announced her resignation on Saturday in response to accusations that staff members had discovered stolen stashes of local and foreign currency in her residence.
After two former home employees were charged in court on Friday with stealing money and other items from the minister and her husband between July and October 2022, Dapaah made headlines.
The defendants used the stolen money to purchase homes and a car, and they also gave some of it to family members, the prosecution told the court. They haven’t responded to the charges yet.
However, newspaper stories about the allegedly stolen money from Dapaah’s residence, including $1 million, 300,000 euros, and millions of local cedis, generated fury against the minister on social media and calls for her resignation.
In a nation where several members of President Nana Akufo-Addo’s government have been implicated in corruption scandals, many have questioned the source of such large quantities of money.
“Whereas I can state emphatically that those figures do not represent correctly what my husband and I reported to the police, I am very much aware of the import of such stories around someone in my position,” Dapaah said in her resignation letter.
“I do not want this matter to become a preoccupation of government,” she said, adding that she would “no doubt” be exonerated.
Without addressing the accusations, the presidency accepted Dapaah’s departure and praised her achievements.
When Akufo-Addo came to office in 2017, he named Dapaah minister of sanitation and water resources, and he kept that position when he was re-elected in 2021. The president has committed to fight corruption aggressively.