By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
Year in; year out, reports from Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) have been showing that the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) is downright corrupt at best and incompetent at worst—or to be euphemistically euphemistic: recklessly reckless on fiscal matters!
Never mind the charades which the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) Commissioner, Francis Ben Kaifala, has been consistently performing at their Tower Hill “Integrity House” headquarters in Freetown; the factual fact is: corruption appears to have been legitimized by the Bio-led administration as seen in the reckless manner in which public funds are being unaccounted for by Presidential appointees since 2018 to date.
That fact is not lost on Lawyer Basita Micheal who notes, in her “Lesson from 2024” on social media, that: “The much-vaunted war on corruption often feels like a staged performance rather than a genuine effort”. Well, she might have been icily sarcastic because she might not want to ruffle some Paopa-ian feathers. But for someone like me who does not care a hoot if I’m damned after publishing; Francis Ben Kaifala’s charades of parading “recovery monies”, either stolen from or not deposited in the state’s coffers, could be likened to Josef Stalin’s “show trials” with him playing the role of Andrey Vyshinsky (the State Prosecutor of those trials)!
What successive ASSL Audit Reports, since 2018 to date, have succeeded in doing is to show that President Julius Maada Bio is seriously unserious about fighting grand corruption; while at the same time they have been presenting the ACC Commissioner as a clown who has repeatedly been missing his way to the circus! Most times, when it comes to the issue of fighting graft genuinely, Bio and Kaifala provoke laughter in situations where humour is regarded as a sign of bad taste! Imagine the seemingly countless examples of “rages-to-riches” and “unexplained wealth” which most Presidential appointees now personified; yet the ACC appears to be only prosecuting the small fishes and leaving the sharks to freely lord the Paopa-ian waters!
And what is laughably painful is the seemingly often repeated joke told by President Bio each time he is given an opportunity. On Tuesday 6 August 2024, at the “State Opening of the Second Session of the Sixth Parliament of the Second Republic of Sierra Leone”, he told the nation in the Chamber of Parliament that: “My Government has consistently scored high marks in international anti-corruption indicators… due to our dedication to fighting and minimising fraud [and] waste….”
But the ASSL Audit Report for 2023 has given an alternate fact to President Bio’s own fact about “fighting and minimising fraud [and] waste.” In this document, which is now at the House of Parliament, we are informed that: “A review of withdrawals from selected MDs imprest bank accounts revealed that transactions totaling NLe18,129,006.37, US$3,004,387.25 and €3,615.48 were not supported by relevant documentary evidence. We [ASSL] therefore could not ascertain the purpose of the expenditures”. This is a euphemistic way of saying that the Bio-led administration is seriously unserious about “fighting and minimising fraud [and] waste.”
And a brief look at the Offices of the President, the Vice President, and the Chief Minister will give one a synopsis of how the SLPP government is being run. According to the ASSL Audit Report, under review, when auditors audited President Bio’s office, they found “discrepancies between fuel records maintained by the Office and the fuel dealer”; “lack of documentation in respect of arrears for vehicle repairs and outstanding debts”; “lack of supporting documentation for payments”, and “assets not available for physical verification”. The auditors’ opinion is that, “This lack of documentation could raise doubt over the authenticity of the claims submitted”; so these issues are “partially resolved”. In my opinionated opinion, it is like telling a man that though he is not being accused of thievery; yet, he was the only one who passed by after which the cookie jar disappeared!
And next in line is the Vice President’s office where they “did not maintain an updated assets register….[as] evidenced by the fact that assets procured in 2023 worth NLe312,160 were not recorded in the assets register”. And the cliffhanger is that: “three names recorded on the payroll obtained from the Accountant General’s Department were not on the Office of the Secretary to the Vice President staff list”. The assumption is that there are ghost workers in the Vice President’s office!
And mentioning ghost workers; the Chief Minister’s office appears to have them aplenty. According to ASSL, “In a bid to ensure that salaries were paid to eligible employees for FY2023, we [ASSL] requested for the verification of staff whose names were on the staff list and payroll for the period under review. During the exercise, we observed that in spite of repeated requests, the names of 14 staff on the staff list did not make themselves available for verification. Of utmost concern is that the staff personal files containing copies of the employment records and payroll vouchers were also not submitted for audit inspection…” And as if to make the transition from the gas chamber to the crematorium complete, we are told that, “A review of the cashbook and payment vouchers revealed that withholding taxes totalling NLe503,154.80 were deducted from payments made to suppliers and service providers for which evidence of payments to the NRA was not submitted for audit inspection”. And “as at the time of verification (two months into the fourth quarter), there was no evidence of payment of [these] withholding taxes.” Well, so much so for the Office of a man who intends to be the 2028 flagbearer of the SLPP!
Apart from those issues highlighted above, that Audit Report is also littered with instances where euphemisms are used to indicate how recklessly reckless the SLPP government is on fiscal matters. In it, we are told that while the Bank of Sierra Leone’s “Gross International Reserves declined to US$468.35 million (equivalent to 3.0 months of imports) as at December 2023 from nearly US$600 million in January 2023”; our currency, The Leone, “depreciated by 16.8% between January and December 2023” coupled with the fact that, “The total outstanding public debt increased by 19% from NLe47.6 million in 2022, to NLe56.7 million in 2023, which was 46% of the GDP….”
It is tragically laughable that Bio, who promised in 2018 that if voted President he would block all the fiscal “leakages” in government spending, is still unable to figure out how to block those “leakages” six years on. It seems to me that the only thing the Bio-led administration is good at is spending state funds like a drunken sailor!
And it is now refreshing that President Bio and his SLPP are no longer talking about “inheriting a battered economy” from the All People’s Congress (APC). After six years, they have now realised that their economic policies have sent Sierra Leone’s economy to the mortuary.
And with Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) doing the autopsies for the past five years; majority of Sierra Leoneans now know that the SLPP is downright corrupt at best and incompetent at worst—or to be euphemistically euphemistic: recklessly reckless on fiscal matters! Not my assumption but ASSL’s!
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