In Ghana, Bright Simons rejects claims of relying on AI in criticism of SIGA report
In Ghana, Bright Simons, vice president of the think tank IMANI Africa, rejected claims by Michael Kpessa-Whyte, chief executive officer of the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA), that he relied heavily on artificial intelligence while criticizing the agency’s new report. This was reported by MyJoyOnline.
Dispute over the report
Kpessa-Whyte questioned how Simons had been able to promptly prepare a detailed assessment of SIGA’s 448-page document after its release. According to him, the agency’s review allegedly showed that most of the issues raised by Simons had been generated by AI.
The SIGA chief executive also claimed that the AI-assisted analysis relied on previous indicators rather than figures from the published report. He urged commentators to study the document carefully before making public statements.
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Simons called the suggestion that he had delegated his own conclusions to AI “absolutely insulting.” He said the technology had been used only to extract and process data, not to replace professional judgment. According to him, the team used Tabula to extract numerical data from PDF documents and Excel Power Query to process it.
Technical remarks
The IMANI Africa vice president stressed that the main issue was not the use of digital tools, but SIGA’s response to the specific errors he had identified. Simons claims that some expenditure indicators were repeated in aggregated data over several years, which, in his view, affected the reliability of the reported ratios.
He also questioned SIGA’s approach to foreign exchange gains and revaluation gains, as well as the consolidation of operations between entities. According to Simons, these operations were not reconciled, so the consolidation carried out is, in his view, unreliable. He said SIGA had still not responded to these technical remarks.
