By Septimus Senessie in Kono
Finance officer at the Koidu Government Hospital says the District Health Management Team (DHMT) in charge of the primary healthcare could not account for US$ 7,200 paid to them by UNIPSIL.
Thomas Bashiru Turay said management of the secondary healthcare was still unclear on how the rental fees by the UN office, which occupied the premises of the hospital between 2009 and 2013 were spent.
The one year fee for 2013 could not be accounted for, according to the findings of the parliamentary public accounts committee which visited the eastern district recently.
Mr Turay told Politico at the hospital compound that the fees were a result of a five-year agreement between UNIPSIL and the Ministry of Health and Sanitation. The UN agreed to pay an annual rent to the DHMT for occupying the portion of land at the primary healthcare department.
He added that the deal took effect in 2009 and ended in 2013, pointing out that in all of those years, UNIPSIL had kept to his promise of paying the said amount to the DHMT.
“The monies were misused by the past and present management of the DHMT without proper documentation to ensure transparency and accountability,” he told Politico.
Asked whether the District Medical Officer (DMO), Dr. Francis Jayah, ever explained to them how he spent the $7,200, he said the DMO only told them that he “used the money to repair one grounded ambulance and a generator they used to power the primary healthcare alone,” Turay said.
He said they could have used their own share of the money to purchase fuel and sustain the normal 4-hour power supply at the hospital because they had not received their first and second quarters of 2013 allocations by government.
But the DMO, Dr. Jayah, dismissed the allegations against him and described them as “misleading miscalculations and misconceptions”. He added that at the time he took over in 2012 the agreement he met concerning the said money was between DHMT and the Ministry of Health and Sanitation and not the hospital management.
He noted that “the agreement I met was what I worked by and I could not change it for any reason without the notice of UNIPSIL”. He added the “huge noise from certain quarters about the 60% or 40% sharing of the money was not written down but a mere gentleman’s agreement, which is not binding”.
He confirmed to Politico that he had used the money to repair a generator and a grounded vehicle, documents for which transactions, he said, could be produced to show how the money was used.
