By Hoccas Siwel
There is a backward culture in oppressive societies where, when the few or one dedicated civil servant or administrator of high integrity who’s obligated to the state and not State House steps up and does his or her job so well that it exposes the errors, lies, inconsistencies, and obvious or implied criminal nature of their fellow civil servants, they are reviled by the latter who always act in line with the dictates of the whims and caprices of their chief or the uneducated and illiterate mob.
Together with other ‘educated fools,’ whose cleverness have so corrupted them, they look for ways to corrupt the faithful and diligent, to entrap him or her using the same laws they so boldly and shamefully violate.
Sierra Leone is not unlike such a place.
When a corrupt government backed by watchdog agencies and colluding ‘development partners’ and ‘multilateral agencies’ who prop them up for their own benefit decides to go after a standout colleague whose very presence among them is a threat to their nefarious and pugnacious acts and or intentions, then it is up to the uninitiated to step up and restore things to their proper footing.
This is the case of the Auditor General of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Lara Taylor Pearce who the ‘Paopa’ government is trying to get out of its way in a very unceremonious and insulting manner that will also taint us being the government of the people, as it has been wrongly reported that calls for the very capable and effective Auditor General to resign is gaining “unstoppable momentum across the country”. Who, and from across which country? The only people who would call for Lara to step down are those men and women of the same congress of thieving public servants (who ‘we’ voted for and in effect speak for ‘us’ from across the country) and their cheerleaders in the media. But where were their voices when the Chief Minister and others, even the Anti Corruption Commission (ACC), who is turning out to be the unofficial spokesman or PRO for Parliament and by extension an appendage of the Office of the President, were acting in clear violation of the laws of this country? Are they above the law?
What caliber of individual do you go to see in a country with a lauded past in education and administration that has digressed into one known for violence and corruption? Think of how corruption influences workers over a sustained period of time. Now think of how it has even affected those who claim to speak for God at some of these churches and mosques. Now extend that to public servants in a country where it is common knowledge that you go into public work to get rich and not to enrich the society of which you are part of.
Educated men and women who grew up in such cultures almost always use their education the wrong way and to their own advantage, hence to the detriment of society. So it does not come as a surprise to see the Minister of Finance who, say, working on information from an Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) informant, moved the Attorney General who doubles as the Minister of Justice to offer his legal opinion on the ASSL head not paying monies into the Consolidated Fund to justify her removal. This is a clear case of educated men finding loopholes to explain and justify their activities that are not in the interest of the people but made to look so. My, my, how they misuse procedural law for the wrong reason and purpose, and against the wrong person!
For a country as corrupt as Sierra Leone where political parties take turn to exploit the people, where the only continuity in governance is the continuity of corrupt practices, the Attorney General’s first acts of duty would be to search all financial and other provisions/laws to unearth “inconsistencies and contradictions.” When the 2014 law is still there, the assumption is that the 2017 one annuls or repeals it. But was the 2014 law repealed? Was Lara wrong for not depositing the money into the Consolidated Fund from which she would be requesting money to do her job? So did she do a sack-able thing by relying on the 2014 provision?
The Finance Minister of ‘Bread and Butter’ public relations spin fame, who has payroll and other issues to contend with, definitely did his homework about obvious inconsistencies and contradictions of Section 3(1) and 3(2) of the Fiscal Management and Control Act 2017 and Section 27(2) of the Audit Service Act 2014, for which he, in a move that should so embarrass the Attorney General to step down from his position, accordingly asked the AG to give his legal opinion. How did the finance man turn out to be the lecturer of the legal man? What high logic as displayed by the Minister of Finance, and how the Attorney General acquiesced to his obvious lack of fore and oversight.
Once again, one would assume that for a country with a culture of corruption the Attorney General before assuming office would have gone over every and all laws relating to finance that people could easily exploit to their advantage based on their outright contradictory and inconsistent nature, where such legalx opinion as given by the Attorney General are not given because they weren’t required in obvious defence of financial and other malfeasances. See how they continue to trick the unsuspecting, trusting, and naïve public!
They want the Auditor General out because she is the pivot to stopping corruption in public service. The real direction from the law should come from the president guided by the procedures that define his or her role as interpreted and explained by the High or Supreme Court and Attorney General.
So when Lara was doing her job according to their specifications, she was the doyen of the ‘Paopa New Direction in the Same Old Direction’ government. The drama that ensued from the 2014-18 Auditor General’s Report on the past government that resulted to no wins in court for the ACC and culminated in the threat of civil conflict over the calls by the ACC for former President Ernest Bai Koroma to appear in Freetown for questioning, was good for the Bio-led government. They were being portrayed as here to plug the leakages that they are so familiar with.
But when clever Lara, who uses her extensive education in the service of the people of Sierra Leone, decided to turn her fine tooth comb in the direction of the present government and did a 2019 audit of it that exposed so much and even confirmed the CARL perception survey that Parliament and the Office of the President as the second and third most corrupt institutions in the country (and further exposes us to the tendencies of sacred cows in government), she has now done a great wrong to be fired for.
But why? They don’t want the 2020 audit report done by Lara, as the 2020 Auditor General’s Report is expected to be one laden with the kinds of fireworks western media would love on corrupt leaders. Then, all the chickens from the COVID-19 grant and other monies would have come to roost. The only way the 2020 Auditor General’s Report would be any less revealing than the 2019 would be for gross underreporting and other complicities aimed at concealing the true and real extent of theft of public monies. So now the entire machinery of the state is out to get Lara so much so that they even went fishing for half-baked reasons to get her out of the way via a legal opinion.
When President Kabba took over from the coup leaders, he said the state’s coffers were empty when those men left. During the 2018 presidential debate, Samura Kamara claimed that under Bio $30 million disappeared in as many months. The regret of not amassing the billions of Sani Abacha, Yayah Jammeh, Charles Taylor, and their like, because he didn’t have the mandate from the international community, Bio and co. left power and sailed into the sunset. Several decades later, they returned with Paopa backed by men and women with their own agenda to take what they didn’t take back then.
The first move that should have shown the public that the current regime does not have the country’s interest at heart was how it outmaneuvered the APC and others in getting the majority in Parliament. And how APC strategists didn’t see that move to usurp 10 MPs from Parliament to end up with a majority to do the bidding of the president and his gang of planners is a cause of grave concern, and a lesson on how not to strategise.
With the ACC, Parliament, the Police (who are there to prevent us from protesting but would stand aside for party thugs to go on a rampage), and the Attorney General on board, the only people standing in the way of a complete sweep of all the branches of government are the Auditor General and High Court, who found Paolo Conteh not guilty of treason. Sad to admit that this effort being made by the Finance Minister and Attorney General points to one thing: This Paopa regime came to steal from the public, which we should have seen coming from since Bio and co. sailed into the waiting sunset.
If the Auditor General should resign, we the people should also demand that the President, his Vice (who went into Guinea without executive permission to visit the opposition much to the chagrin of Alpha Conde who closed his border with Sierra Leone), his Chief Minister, and other sacred cows step down as well in line with international best practice.
If Lara goes, this regime is telling us that she is right, and that they have untoward intentions regarding theft of public money. If Lara goes then the real and true anticorruption watchdog would have left the scene for the wolves to have unrestrained access to the sheep and their food, while the ACC would be there to defend their actions. If Lara goes, we the people and the international community should totally lose confidence in this regime, if we have not collectively done so already.
This call for Lara to resign is akin to the biblical writing on the wall for the ‘Paopa Regime of the Same Old Corrupt Direction.’