Government has rubbished reports that Ghana has been ranked the second most corrupt country in Africa.

One of the indicators in the latest survey by Transparency International puts Ghana among the three worst performing countries with the highest perception of corruption. Ghana came second to South Africa followed by Nigeria in third place.

The majority (58 per cent) of Africans in the surveyed countries, say corruption has increased over the past 12 months. In 18 out of 28 countries surveyed a large majority of people said their government is doing badly at fighting corruption.

Despite the worrying findings, the bright spots across the continent were in Botswana, Burkina Faso, Lesotho and Senegal. Citizens in these countries were some of the most positive in the region when discussing corruption.

However, government believes some parts of the report have been twisted by a section of the media to paint a bad image for the Mahama-led administration.

Speaking to Nii Arday Clegg on the Morning Starr Thursday, Presidential Adviser on Corruption Daniel Batidam said the report rather suggests that the Ghanaian government is serious about the fight against corruption.

“The survey is actually not a comparative type of survey where you can use one common benchmark to make a conclusion.

“The report is not about corruption per se, it is about allegations of corruption and in any case, I think perception is important so we should not discard it. What the report is talking about is 28 countries but the Ghanaian media just took it as yet another opportunity to bash ourselves.

"This is not helpful and not good for our resolve to fight corruption. We should all help to resolve this because government is rolling out anti-corruption policies across the country because we believe this is not who we are. If we don’t have an honest discussion about this issue, and we continue playing politics with it, we will harm ourselves. Even though this survey is not ranking countries, we have decided to rank ourselves, and that is bad,” he fumed.