The Office of the Ombudsman was established as an Act of Parliament to look into administrative malpractices bordering on human rights violations. It has always been under the radar for various reasons.
Lawyer Leon Jenkins-Johnson was appointed to the position by President Julius Maada Bio. In this interview with Mabinty Kamara, Mr Jenkins-Johnson spoke about the challenges he has faced since assuming office, the institutions that make his job difficult, and how he intends to overcome these challenges.
Politico: What has it been like in terms of cases reported to you and what’s the compliance rate to your recommendations?
Ombudsman: Our mandate is to investigate complaints of Maladministration in MDAs, Ministries Department and Agencies. That we have been doing. And we have been making recommendations. Sometimes we don’t get up to recommendation stage, we solve the issues before we get to the stage of recommendation. So far, for Freetown here, in 2019, we received and 333 complaints and we concluded 146 and we referred 73 to other institutions. We have about 114 still under investigations. Of that number, majority belong to both the Sierra Leone Police and the Ministry of Lands. And for the police, we are not getting the kind of cooperation we would have liked. We have so many complaints we have written to them about that they are simply not replying to, and if they don’t respond it will stall our investigations. We are still fighting those lines. We are waiting for a break through.
At the moment, I am awaiting for appointment to see the Inspector General of Police, so that we push him a little bit and get him to cooperate a little more with us. So that is where we are currently.
You said 73 of the cases were referred to other institutions. What are some of these institutions and why refer the cases to them?
Some cases that come to us are not strictly within our mandates. For example, we get more of labour issues. We referred those to the Ministry of Labour, Legal Aid Board, Sierra Leone Football Association. We don’t tell people that no, take your complaints elsewhere. So we receive the complaint and we refer it to the appropriate channels.
I was wondering if you have specific cases that you deal with when you said there are cases that they bring to you that are not within your mandates
Yes, we deal with administrative issues such as maladministration and injustice. More so, and particularly, it is to do with government institutions. That is the limitation.
So are Labour issues not part of administrative issues?
No. Well, labour issues are part, but the ones we refer are those that come from private institutions. For example, you have a security man working for a security company. If he brings that to the Ombudsman, we have to refer that to the Ministry of Labour.
You talked about the Police as one of the institutions that have been forestalling the investigation process. So we want you to cite some of the cases that have been reported to you from the Police.
What I said was that we have a number of cases pending with the police for which we have not got full responses from them. And so those form a bulk of the 114 cases that are pending. I tried not to talk about particular cases as best as possible, but put it this way in terms of the cases before us as I said. Recently, a number of senior police officers were sacked and we have that matter before us, but that one we are in the middle of the investigations, so I do not want to particularly say much about it.
Maybe they are refusing to respond to you because they don’t think you have the mandate to cover cases that have to do with them since they have their own internal bodies that should handle their affairs, like the CDIID.
No. The way it works, normally cases come to us after they would have concluded their own investigations. We are like external. So what we do is [that] we review their investigations, if you want to put it that way.
So when they would have finished their investigation process, when we are conducting our own investigations, as a matter of fact, they are supposed to give us the CDIID report of whatever case we are looking into.
So part of the difficulties we are having now is like, for example, when a police officer come and report, when we write to them, we expect them to immediately send everything relating to that particular police officer and then we can review or look at the processes they followed. But at the moment, what we are having now when we write, to even get that CDIID report, it’s taking us so long. The ones that they are interested in they will send, but for the majority they will just not say anything.
What about the Compliance rate
Well, to be honest with you, compliance is still a challenge. That is simply because people still do not understand fully what this office is all about. So we have to be constantly educating the public, constantly educating government institutions, that what we are doing is within our mandate and the law requires you to comply. It is not optional. We don’t send our recommendations and you choose not to listen. So what happens with compliance is when we conduct our investigations and we send it to a particular government institution, we give them a period of time for them to comply, usually it’s about a month for them to make changes or whatever recommendations. If they don’t comply, then we would send that recommendation to the ministry in charge of that institution and the ministry too will have a period of time for them to see that the recommendations are given effect. And after that point, if it is not given effect, we then escalate it and submit that recommendation to his Excellency the President.
Are there any penalties for not complying?
That is one thing we don’t really have. We cannot enforce our own decisions, put it that way. So, for example, if we make recommendations, say you must reinstate Mr. Thomas and pay him 15 million, if the institution does not do that, there is no way for us to go back and say you have to do it today, if you don’t do it you will go to jail. We don’t have those powers so our own will stops at recommendations. That is why we escalate it. So it will be now for the Minister who is in charge and so on to enforce the decision.
We also learnt that you were investigating issues between two employees of the Bank of Sierra Leone and the Bank. We want to know how far you have gone with the investigation of those cases.
We have reached a preliminary determination on the investigation, and we have asked the bank to reinstate the people with the alternative [to] pay them the benefit and their emoluments they will be entitled to up to the time they retire. And let me just say something to you. That is the record breaking investigations we have concluded in the office within the shortest possible time. From the date we saw the article in the paper, we saw that issue in the newspaper, and we took up that issue by ourselves. So we started it by ourselves and it was only after we started the investigations that we contacted the complainants. When they came here, I don’t think we spent more than three weeks maximum to reach a determination. So that is one of the success stories of this office.
So when are they to respond to the recommendations?
They have up to the 30th [July] to rely to us. So if the bank does not comply by tomorrow [30th July], which is the two weeks period, we will now send it to the Minister of Finance to complain that we have given recommendations to Bank of Sierra Leone and they have not complied. That will be the next stage. The Minister also would have a month for him to see that that decision is effected, and if that is not done, then we will send it to His Excellency the President, which is what is in the Act. So [this] is how the Ombudsman’s Act provides for us to work.
Since compliance has been a challenge, as stated by you, don’t you think that will discourage other aggrieved employees from bringing their complaints to your office?
I don’t think we have a bad compliance rate, if you measure what we have concluded and what we have. We only just have some few stubborn sticky institutions, but the majority of the institutions comply.
When you say concluded, you may have concluded as you have done now with the Bank of Sierra Leone issue, but then people may not comply with your recommendations. What will happen if eventually they fail to adhere to your recommendations after exhausting all avenues?
Frist of all, don’t forget here, I have to operate within the mandate of the law. Much as I would like to do other things, but the first thing I would like to do is stick within what the Act says, and this is what the Act tells me I can do. So I want to make sure that when you bring your complaint here, we discharge our duties and we tell you what our feelings are. So if you know that the Ombudsman has told Bank of Sierra Leone, for example, to comply and they are not complying, you also have the option of going to court, and that would be a very useful document for you to take to the court. If you want to make a case in court, it will be very strong if you are able to show the court that even the Ombudsman had looked into this and this is his recommendations they failed to follow. And so that will help you a great deal.
But in this Bank of Sierra Leone case, I don’t know if that is the normal procedure that cases can even go to the court before they are brought to you?
Well, normally if the case is in court or has been dealt with by the court, we cannot handle it again. So if you go to the court first before you want to come to the Ombudsman and the court makes a decision, you cannot come afterwards to the Ombudsman and say please can you look at this case. But you can go to court after the Ombudsman makes a recommendation and you feel the recommendation is not being complied with.
Does that not undermine your power?
Well, I have to only use the powers that I have. I cannot use more than I have. I would have loved to, but I can tell you one thing, we are looking at the Act to see how we can amend it. But you see, the Ombudsman’s work all over the world is like this. What we really need is, we need institutions to be professional, honest and decent. So we should not have this question of when the Ombudsman sends his recommendations you start dragging your feet. That is one thing we have been saying, because if you want a good workforce, good government institution, good democracy, then when recommendations come you comply.
The Ombudsman’s office is created out of the constitution of Sierra Leone. It’s not just any office. It is at a level of just as you see High Court, the Supreme Court were created; it’s the same way the Ombudsman office was created. So really and truly, when any government institution receives a recommendation, [they] should not be asking whether or not we are going to comply or not to comply. That is why we send it to the ministry. So effectively, what I would expect to happen is when the Ombudsman sends a recommendation and the Minister sees that you have flouted the recommendations, you should be sacked. So that is the way it should go. It is the ministries that should make it clear to the institutions, that when once you receive recommendations from the Ombudsman, please make sure you comply. I would not want to see a complaint on my desk saying that you did not comply with the recommendations from the Ombudsman’s office. I think that will help a whole lot.
Apart from compliance from institutions, what other challenges do you have as an institution in terms of executing your mandate?
Well, we have the general challenge with funding, which most institutions have. But recently we were able to attract funding from OSIWA. OSIWA gave us US$40,000 for a project that we forwarded to them to empower the office and to build our stance in administrative justice. And I am pleased to tell you that just about one or two weeks ago, myself and members of our project implementation team travelled to our offices in Bo, Kenema, Port Loko and Makeni and we were able to take computers for them, printers and internet facilities, all of which OSIWA bought for us.
So we had those challenges before. Luckily, as I said, OSIWA has helped us a little bit with those. But further than that is the challenge that I believe this ombudsman office will always have, that is still telling the people what our mandate is, because for so many people that it is a foreign word. When you say the Ombudsman’s office, people say what is the Ombudsman’s office for? So as we go along, we constantly have to be explaining. Even the letters we write, we first of all have to set out explaining what the Ombudsman does before we get to the issue. That is usually a challenge.
Having over three hundred cases means that people are actually aware about the existence of the office and your mandates is clearly spelt out. So don’t you think it’s a deliberate act by people to ignore your recommendations?
Yes. I agree. I tell you there are a lot of institutions who feel you can just ignore the Ombudsman. We tend to get that a lot. But we don’t despair and it’s difficult for us because even for me, sometimes when I keep pressing, people think you are out there to do damage or you are being mischievous. We get that sometimes, like you start pressing on issues, people start finding explanations for it when they don’t want to stick to the recommendations.
You talked about offices in the regions. I was wondering if people in the provinces will have to come with complaints to Freetown.
Yes. We have offices in the regions.
And then you talked about a review of the 1997 Act that guides your operation. How soon should we expect that?
We are thinking about review. This Act is old, but it is still useful. It is good. The Act is old but all of the issues that we need to be doing, and when you looked at Ombudsman Acts in other country, I have looked at several other Ombudsman Acts in different countries, it is not too different from ours. The only difference that I can tell you is very few can take you to court. Some in one or two jurisdictions, like you were asking for example when we make our recommendations if you don’t comply we can take you to court if you refuse to comply, but beyond that, all the little things that we need to have they are in the Act. But we are certainly going to put it under review. We are working with the Law Officers Department on that.
So how soon before that happens?
Well, we have a new Attorney General. I’m not going to give a definitive time. So Politico will not come and hold me to my neck to that. Maybe we will not go ahead with it because we need probably to bring people in to look at it and everything is money, but it’s part of our aspirations here. Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
