Rabat – Mohamed Bachir Rachdi, the newly-appointed head of the National Commission for Probity and the Fight Against Corruption, has said that King Mohammed VI urged him to “go far with the fight against corruption.”
Rachdi said the King’s direct request on the day of his appointment inspired him to work harder.
One of the founders of the anti-corruption organization, Transparency Maroc, Rachdi pledged to use an in-depth approach that reflects the national Strategy Against Corruption adopted in 2015.
Rachdi, whose appointment marks a new era in Morocco’s path toward effective governance, hopes to “be part of an era of real and irreversible changes.”
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Corruption, as the Moroccan justice minister, Mohamed Aujjar, described it, is “a plague” that needs to be exterminated.
The country annually loses 2 percent of its economic growth due to corruption, according to Lahcen Daoudi, minister delegate to the head of government in charge of general affairs and governance.
Corruption, in its different forms—abuse of power, public funds mismanagement, or administrative corruption—wastes approximately 7 percent of Morocco’s GDP every year, according to Head of Government Saad Eddine El Othmani’s speech in July 2018.
Referring to the government’s national plan to end all forms of corruption by 2050, El Othmani said that the most effective way to deal with Morocco’s enduring economic and social problems is to fight corruption in public administration.
