ACB has failed this nation

The inquest into how and why taxpayers’ money continues to enrich a connected few will not have gone long and wide enough unless the role of those entrusted with the job of checking and stopping this social injustice is examined.
The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) was established in 1996 to specifically check, stop or punish those involved in corruption of any kind in both public and private bodies.
But of particular interest in the Corrupt Practices Act is Section 32 on possession of unexplained property which basically empowers the body to investigate any public officer where there are reasonable grounds to believe that such an individual maintains a standard of living above his or her present or past emoluments or other known sources of income or has property disproportionate to his present or past known sources of income.
The section further says that should an investigation find that such a style of living is not commensurate with the public officer’s known sources of income, he or she should be prosecuted and punished unless he or she gives a convincing explanation.
It is now almost 20 years since ACB was established and even by the most minimum of standards, experience will show that the body has spectacularly failed and slept on duty throughout.
This is why.
Our country has had three regimes since MCP was told to buzz off to political purgatory during the first multiparty election in 1994.
Sadly, all these three regimes are associated with abuse of tax-payers’ money by a cabal of sick minds.
UDF started off with K187 million which was lost in the Ministry of Education through dubious tendering to construction companies associated with politicians and cronies to build schools under the free primary education, many of which were not built at all although payments were made.
DPP took their turn in 2004 and an audit was stopped midway in 2011 when it initially unearthed a K90 billion loss as a result of thieves playing games with Ifmis and their leader, Bingu wa Mutharika, went to his grave after amassing K61 billion from a country where living standards have sunk to pathetic levels.
For PP, a conservative figure of K20 billion is being touted to have gone into the pockets of some individuals both in private and public sectors through an orgy of financial appropriation to each other during the short time the party has been in power.
The ACB has responded by going into an overdrive rounding up suspected thieves and they will all have their date in court but the questions decent, hard-working and taxpaying Malawians are asking are these: Where has ACB been hibernating all these years? Why did they not stop the stealing and save the tax that decent hardworking Malawians pay through their noses?
ACB must accept that it has failed hard up Malawians. Few well-connected people in this country are getting rich and building castles and villas in Lilongwe and probably other cities and towns, at the expense of drugs in hospitals, good roads and a general rise in living standards for all of us.
Those who study the history of revolutions will say clearly that they all begin when innocent hard working people feel the system is screwing them up while a few connected to the top and their families are benefitting massively.
This social injustice must stop before things get out of hand and ACB is at the centre of it all. So far, it has failed. n