By Ralph Simeon Sesay
Sierra Leone is still grappling as a country in strengthening transparency and accountability in public financial management. Through numerous World Bank support projects, the country has been able to establish legislations, departments and units with a view to strengthen public financial management. But are we been able, as a country, to get things right? The answer is no.
We are still in the midst of massive and rampant corruption, as state resources are diverted to personal use even when the laws are very explicit on the public use of state monies/resources.
Procurement activities continue to take the lion share of government budgetary support, despite the existence of the National Public Procurement Act of 2016, the Public Financial Management Act and many more. In fact, little has been done to ensure that value for money is attained in the procurement of goods and services.
Year in and out the Auditor General’s Report continues to indict Ministries, Departments and Agencies of bypassing the rules and procedures for awarding contracts for the supply of goods and services and technical works. Government continues to lose quantum of monies to private individuals and businesses.
It is a fact that Government is constrained to meet its development priorities and such monies have been continuously swindled through faulty procurement processes. Such monies could be necessarily used by government in meeting other development priorities.
The Auditor General’s Office has done a commendable work over the years to increase public accountability and transparency in the management of Government and Donor Funds. It is also crystal clear that the Public Account Committee of the Sierra Leone Parliament, which is charged with the responsibility of following up on Audit recommendations, has not been able to measure up to the task. We still continue to have a huge number of audit recommendations unresolved.
MDAs continue to spend government money with no supporting documents, while some MDAs and other Private Enterprises have continually refused to open their books for auditing.
The role of the ACC and Parliament, around all of this, continue to serve as another barrier to deal with defaulters. The PAC has been very much inefficient and grossly under resourced to execute their mandate over the years.
The current Commissions of Enquiry is ideally supported by way of evidence by numerous audits reports and the Auditor General, Madam Laura Taylor Pearce, is impressed that even though we still have challenges in the strengthening public accountability there is enormous progress on the side of MDAs, in the 2017 Audit Report, in maintaining public accountability and transparency in the use of government funds.
Many Sierra Leoneans are of the view that we should move for the strengthening of our institutions rather than spending fabulous monies on Commissions of Inquiries. Most of the problems around public financial management are systemic and we will only be able to solve them by continuously building on the capacity of institutions to deal with the challenges. It is very much certain that we can do it now than ever before due to the fact that there is a seemingly political will which is yet unwavering.
The Systems and Processing Unit of the ACC is doing a great deal of work around this and this should be the way forward. Sierra Leone has done several Commissions of inquiry since independence, but the challenges around managing public finances are still inherent in our body polity.