By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Last week a coalition of civil society organizations launched a report that focused on corruption in the traffic division of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP).
It revealed that government lost Le80 billion last year in the form of bribery to individual police offers from potential fines for traffic offences.
In addition, some Le700 billion, representing 32% of potential revenue from license fees to fines for traffic regulations violations, went down the drain, the report revealed.
Needless to say these figures are shocking!
The fight against corruption in Sierra Leone has always been a major challenge for the country. Successive governments have pronounced policies, taken steps, all geared towards strengthening the anti-graft fight. But revelations from studies like this only show that the war is far from being won.
As a nation, Sierra Leone has gone far in fighting corruption. The establishment of an anti-graft body was a major step towards that. The Anti-Corruption Act of 2000 established the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) as an independent body to investigate government corruption.
After the civil war the country was on its knees and establishing such a body was crucial to the new path it was about to take.
In its early days, the ACC was accused of taking slow steps to convict “the most corrupt” in the system. In 2007, the British government grew frustrated with this stagnation and withdrew its support from the commission. By then the ACC was so weak that there was little faith on it especially at the level of the international donor community.
Most analysts believed the major reason behind the commission’s weakness was that its powers were very limited.
Their big break came; in 2008 the commission was given direct arrest and prosecutorial powers. Most citizens expected that the corruption fight would be a lot easier compared to what it was in the previous decade. However, it was not as easy as it looked on paper because they can only prosecute and convictions and acquittals are done by the judiciary.
ACC officials have raised concerns about this. They say this way the judiciary frustrates their effort to fight corruption. There have even been calls, including from former ACC Commissioner Joseph Fitzgerald Kamara who is now Justice Minister, for the creation of a special anti-corruption court as a way out of this quagmire.
The Commission has also recommended for special training for judges on how to handle corruption trials.
“The role of the judiciary must be examined,” said Alhassan Kargbo, Public Relations Officer of the ACC, at the launch of a report last year which exposed deficiencies in governance in the country.
President’s commitment
The act of corruption is so endemic that it is now a source of living for many families in Sierra Leone and fighting it will be a direct threat to the survival of these families.
President Ernest Bai Koroma has pronounced his commitment to fight corruption in many forums, even though many people have questions regarding how firm that commitment is.
A look at the deficit of successive Auditor General’s report provides ready reasons for such skepticism.
The latest report by the Institute for Governance Reform (IGR) which focused on the police crucially showed that leakages in government ministries, departments and agencies in the last decade alone has cost the government as much as Le 1.4 Trillion (US$260m).
Such figures reinforce the doubts about the political will to curb corruption in the country. With regards to political will, a number of governance experts have warned that it does not stop with the presidency. Political will to fight corruption has to trickle down to every government department and agency; everyone has to take responsibility.
“Corruption has become a matter of life and death,” said Ibrahim Tommy, Executive Director of the Center for Accountability and the Rule of Law (CARL), which propagates for good governance and transparency. CARL is one of over half a dozen civil society organizations which collaborated with IGR in the latest report on corruption in the police.
As of 2015 Sierra Leone was more corrupt-free than 56 countries in the world, according to the TI global corruption index. This is a bright picture but the country must not be flattered, because the road is far from the ending. And reports from TI, Afro Barometer, and even the ACC and the Auditor General’s annual report are fervent reminders.
In the 2013 TI report, 84% of Sierra Leoneans admitted to paying bribes.
And last year the Afro Barometer research findings showed that only 17% of Sierra Leoneans will be unwilling to pay bribes if they were faced with the situation. The numbers are consistent.
Within reach
In Sierra Leone’s fight against corruption a number of institutions are constantly on the spot light and every time they are there it is for the wrong reasons.The SLP has been a prominent member of the class of such institutions. This is worrisome given the role of the police in protecting lives and properties.
Just last week the traffic division of SLP announced that 195 people died in road accidents across the country in 2015. Some of these accidents must have been caused by vehicles that were unworthy of being on the road because of poor mechanical condition. It is the responsibility of the SLP to take them off the road, but for some reason they still ply the roads.
The situation is even worse in the provinces, little wonder why 138 of the 195 fatalities came from the provinces.
Response and defenses’ are expected after the revelation of such reports and institutions often use their response to deliberately shield themselves from the indictments, rather than seeking to address the identified loopholes that lead to corruption.
Continuous back and forth of the credibility of these reports deliberately take attention away from the real issues that should be addressed. Owning the report and conceding to the findings is a way of addressing problems of corruption in institutions like the SLP.
For example, IGR’s last report which focused on Statistics Sierra Leone, its operation and preparation for the census, was bitterly contested with the issues of methodology being at the center of focus. Few months down the line, the census has come and gone and a huge number people are claiming that they were not counted. Had that report being treated with the seriousness it deserves a number of problems Statistics faced could have been prevented.
Eradicating corruption in Sierra Leone as it was with Ebola until few days ago might be impossible. But minimizing it is surely within our reach.
(C) Politico 28/01/16
