President Ghani, while speaking at an annual anti-corruption conference at the Presidential Palace on Sunday, ordered Masoud Andrabi, the acting interior minister, to arrest Zemarai Paikan, a former commander of the Afghan Public Protection Force, on charges of corruption.
“Zemarai Paikan has changed the public protection force into a source of corruption,” Ghani said: “The arrest of such as person is an order for you, mister interior minister, and it must be implemented.”
Ghani says that people like Paikan are “damaging Afghanistan’s name.”
He also said that 124 lawyers have been killed while trying to implement justice in the country, and that “judicial organizations made huge sacrifices in order to fight against corruption.”
“I hope that very soon the corruption cases of nearly 70 high ranking government officials that are in progress will be finalized so that justice will be implemented,” he said.
"Corruption is against Islamic values, the constitution and the culture of our people,” Ghani said. “The corruption issue needs work at a cultural level.”
“My estimates show that the government is losing half of its legal income due to illegal meddling, according to Ghani. “The taxes and other income sources must be impartial and professional and should not be political.”
“Corruption is not going to work for us—we seek help from other countries and lose half of our income,” he said.
The president said that technology has a key role in preventing corruption in the country and “whenever we set up a technological system, the corruption has been reduced.”
An Asia Foundation annual report released recently reported that overall 81.5% of respondents in 2019 say corruption is a major problem in Afghanistan as a whole, consistent with last year.
The report, based on a national sample of 17,812 Afghan respondents aged 18 years and above, claimed that 67.9% of Afghans surveyed say corruption is a major problem in their daily life, similar to 70.6% in 2018. More than one-fifth of respondents, 23.1%, call corruption a minor problem, and 8.3% say it is not a problem.