Graft fight in 30 years of multiparty dispensation

Governance and accountability institutions such as the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), the Financial Intelligence Authority, the Ombudsman, the Malawi Human Rights Commission, are some of the products of the multiparty dispensation. Among others, the institutions were established to safe guard public resources, fight graft, promote and safeguard people’s rights and freedoms. In four days’ time, these institutions will have been around for 30 years.  My hypothesis in this entry is that their work has and will not bear much fruit if some public institutions remain sacred cows, beyond reproach and no-go zones for scrutiny.

With all these governance and accountability institutions sniffing around, the big thieves in the multiparty dispensation have developed a new set of tactics of stealing. The strategy has been to bludgeon everyone into the sheepish thinking that no one should poke his nose into security institutions through audits as doing so would compromise the country’s security. As a result, the Malawi Police Service (MPS), the Malawi Defence Force (MDF), Malawi Prison Services, National Intelligence Service, etc., have become no-go zones for anything that smelt subjecting them to checks or scrutiny.

But the undoing of this arrangement on these entities is that instead of protecting them from the purported vultures, their protection has ironically been giving political leaders and heads of these institutions the devil-may-care-I-will-do-what-I-want-and-no-one-can-stop-me spirit. This is the single most important reason that has bred and nurtured theft with reckless abandon in these entities.

But nowhere in the world do top leaders steal alone. Even in the village set up rain does not fall on the chief’s garden alone. At the very minimum gardens around the chief’s farm get showers. So, when the errand boys see that the master is stealing, they follow suit. And because the bwana is compromised, he or she lacks the moral campus with which to arraign the subjects.

That is why I have said so many times that when between 2017 and 2021 Zuneth Sattar’s five firms got contracts worth $150 million mostly from MPS and MDF, etc., the big men were at all the material time uninformed about the developments. The Minister of Finance may not sign cheques but he or she being the President’s political head and eyes at Treasury will be fully aware of and nod to any huge payment the entity makes to a supplier. The minister will have failed in his duties if he or she does not appraise the tenant at Plot Number on any huge payment made.

In 2001, shocked by the huge amounts of resources from the public purse that were being lost through fraud, corruption and all manner of malfeasance, the then director of public prosecutions Fahad Assani estimated that as much as a third of resources of the national budget was ending up in people’s pockets. And no one was being held to account for this.

I am sure if Assani were to peep into the public coffers again today—22 years after he made that epochal statement—he would undoubtedly want to revise the figure for the amount of resources in the national budget that now go down the drain unaccounted for.

Probably, he would escalate it to anywhere in the range of 45 to 50 percent. In 2001, we didn’t have big thieves who could corrupt everyone that mattered in a ministry, department and agency (MDA) and walk away with our billions as today’s thieves are doing. This is a new breed of thieves. That is why the biggest case in terms of money involved from the early 2000s was the K1.7 billion Bakili Muluzi corruption case which the new DPP Masauko Chamkakala discontinued last week.

Today’s thieves steal in tens of billions of kwacha despite having all the governance and accountability institutions around. The thieves are the new breeds who have mastered the art of stealing from Account Number One. They know how to get anybody along the way to help them steal our money. They also know that no one will touch them.

If you think I am day-dreaming, just look at how ACB, the institution with the mandate of leading the fight against graft in the country has been thoroughly frustrated over the past three years. They say if you want to quickly kill a snake, hit the head first. See what has happened to the head of the graft-busting body. Instead of supporting her, the Executive has spearheaded and run a frantic war to stop her from doing her work. At one time we had a dozen armed policemen swooping on her in the wee hours of the day and locking her up in Namitete.

As long as some MDAs cannot be subjected to scrutiny, for whatever reason, we should stop hallucinating that the billions of taxpayer money poured in those institutions year in year out is safe.