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Claim: A social media user claims that the Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) Committee spent GHC 75,200 on food, transport, and consultation fees, citing an audit report as the source.
Verdict: False. There is no official audit report for 2024 or 2025, and the ORAL committee was only recently established by the new government, making such a report impossible to exist.
Full Text
President John Mahama, sworn into office on Jan 7, 2025, recently established the Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) Committee. The ORAL initiative aims to address corruption, recover stolen state resources, and ensure accountability within the public sector.
A viral post on Facebook alleged that the ORAL Committee, set up by President John Mahama, has already spent GHC 75,200 on various expenses, including food, transport, and consultation fees. The post further claims that this information is based on an audit report.
Verification
President John Mahama established the ORAL Committee in December 2024. Since this committee was only recently established, it would be impossible for an audit report regarding its financial expenditures to have already been conducted and published.
The chairperson of the five-member committee, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, also announced that his team would not be receiving compensation for their work.
However, on Monday, February 10, 2025, the Committee submitted its first report to President Mahama, which contained 2,417 complaints of suspected corruption.
A key issue with the Facebook claim is that the alleged expenditure is said to be derived from an audit report.
However, DUBAWA decided to check the Auditor General’s website. The latest available audit report is dated 2023. So far, there is no publicly available audit report for 2024 or 2025. Given that Ghana is only in the early months of 2025, an official audit report on the ORAL Committee’s finances can’t exist now.
Reacting to the claim, a member of the ORAL Committee, Martin Kpebu, told DUBAWA, “I think I saw it [the claim] somewhere last week; we are not taking anything from the state.”
“You know that is the mischief. We are in a democracy with disinformation and all that. We haven’t taken anything from the government that is unfounded. How can we take 72,000 why? We said we are doing it free.”
“I won’t cheapen myself that way, no, no, no, I didn’t take even one pesewa from the government,” he told DUBAWA.
The Facebook user claims to have based their statement on an audit report, but given that no such report exists beyond 2023, the source of the claim is questionable.
Conclusion
The claim that the ORAL Committee spent GHC$ 75,200 on food, transport, and consultation fees is false. The recently established Auditor General’s office did not issue an audit report in 2024 or 2025 to support this claim.
