News Story

FREETOWN: NEW PEOPLE INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: Investigative reporters tracking down money and paper trails in order to prove President Ernest Bai Koroma's commitment to "zero tolerance" and "transparency" have unveiled a grand thieving scheme devised by no less a person than the Secretary to the President in the President's own Office, Mr. James Sanpha Koroma. Investigations by The New People indicate that the Secretary to the President is requesting for "self accounting". In other words, "nobody checks how Sanpha Koroma spends money allocated to his office, nobody audits his books, and nobody supervises that spending."

The scheme is very simple. With the approval of the National Budget by parliament, Ministry of Finance & Economic Development (MoFED) will now deposit all of the Le2.4 billion (as per the FY 2008 Budget) into an account managed solely by the Secretary to President (SP), Sanpha Koroma. This deposit is without any due diligence on compliance by the offices of Accountant General and Budget Bureau. What this means is that the Office of the Accountant General and the Budget Bureau will effectively have no control over Le2.4 billion of the country's budget.

The New People has further discovered that Sanpha Koroma's rationale for the request is there are undue delays in accessing funds from MoFED. The New People looked into whether these so-called "undue delays" were mission critical - that is, do the delays make the running of the office of the secretary to the president impossible or difficult. Inside sources say "No."

Subsequent investigations within the MoFED revealed that documents received from the Office of the President are processed at lightning speed. In most cases, paperwork from other crucial ministries is even shelved so that the paperwork from the office of the president is processed. James Sanpha Koroma's reason for requesting "self-accounting" are therefore dubious and suspicious especially as Mr. Sanpha Koroma should know more about the budgetary procedure and processes in this country.

In fact, The New People investigative team further discovered from MoFED sources that the only two major Government departments that are self accounting are the Police and Military. This is understandable considering the size of these institutions and volume and nature of transactions processed by those two departments. More importantly, these institutions (the army and the police) have functional internal audit units which oversee budgetary allocations and use. What this means is that within the Police and the Army, there are systems and controls in place to safe guard public money. The New People fruther crosschecked and confirmed this information with army and police sources.

There is public money, public interest, and the integrity of procedure and processes at stake in this matter. A major concern to The New People is that if James Sanpha Koroma is allowed to control his own budget (which is public money) without accounting to the public and to anyone, other arms of government such as the legislature and judiciary would decide to go "self accounting" or "non accounting." This violates the essence of President Ernest Bai Koroma's policy of openness in government, transparency, and zero tolerance for corruption.

Given that the international community and other donor agencies are mindful of transparency and accountability across government, James Sanpha Koroma's request may not have come at a more inauspicious time. J. S. Koroma's "self accounting" request is fraught with great potential for misuse and abuse. His record on ethical conduct does not give cause for confidence that his "self-accounting" scheme is not one of his subtle "kapu kapu" or "put-ya-ar-chap-am" schemes. This, we all know, can only make a bad situation worse.

So we ask the simple question (which The New People has also e-mailed to his personal e-mail Jskoroma@aol.com), what is the motive here? Why is self-accounting in the public interest? How does "self-accounting" promote transparency and zero tolerance for corruption in Sierra Leone even as Anti-Corruption Commissioner, Abdul Tejan Cole, recently hinted that his biggest challenge is to minimise the possibilty or corruption occuring.Mr. Abdul Tejan-Cole, do you have a public statement on this issue? What is the Secretary to the President's motivation here? Is it that as former Financial Secretary (FS), Governor of the Bank of Sierra Leone, and CEO of a private interest, amongst others he cannot stand having the current Financial Secretary, Accountant General and the MoFED scrutinise spending in his department? What does he have to hide? Or it all this part of the bigger role that the Secretary to the President has arrogated upon himself in his sundry pronouncements that in his substantive position of prime minister, he cannot or should not deal with the Minister of Finance? What arrant nonsense!

Mr President PLEASE don't allow this, we beg of you. If your pronouncements mean anything, set the right examples from your own office.