HH
H.E President Hakainde Hichilema

HH MUST FIRE THE AUDITOR GENERAL. HE IS COMPROMISED

The Candidates’ Comment

In his individual capacity, Hakainde Hichilema wants to fight corruption in this country. The biggest hindrance to this goal is that Hakainde is working in an environment where he is surrounded by compromised institutions as well as corrupt individuals in both government and the party.

We know of a very prominent senior member of the UPND Alliance who has remained unemployed. He has not been given any role in the new dawn administration after Hakainde was given information involving the crookedness of this individual. Again, we know of another person who is an aid of Hakainde with regards to party functions, who has not been appointed into anything despite that all his friends having been given jobs in the new administration. This is because Hakainde knows how crooked, how corrupt these individuals are. When the UPND won election, this Alliance Partner member went to various investigative wings requesting for files of cases of PF members whom he went to ask for money in exchange for protection from prosecution.

You can fault Hakainde for anything you want but he hates corruption.

However, regardless of how Hakainde hates corruption, there is every reason to believe that his fight will yield nothing. If by any chance it yields something, the fight against corruption will only be achieved where members of the former ruling party are involved.

Where there is corruption involving UPND members, there shall be no fight. This is not because Hakainde wants it that way but because systems in this country are designed in such a way that those with links to the ruling party are protected.

If Hakainde wants to leave a better legacy of fighting corruption – better than Mwanawasa’s record of persecution against political rivals – there is need to sanitise institutions that play a critical role in exposing and fighting corruption.

We all know that the Anti-Corruption is corrupt and has no moral right to fight any corruption worth talking about. This is so because elements at ACC are also guilty of the same vices which they seek to eradicate.

However, another corrupt institution is the office of the Auditor General. Recently, the AG report details some of the wrongs committed by the PF administration and specifically, at the Ministry of Health and DMMU. But when you look at the period under review, you will realize that there were serious scandals at the Ministry of Agriculture involving PF thieves and their business partners.

We are today having a conversation about a $50 million fertilizer supply contract by Alpha Commodities because of the corruption involving the Ministry of Agriculture. Suppliers of fertilizer including Neria Investment, Nyimba Investment, Export Trading Group (ETG) and Rockcliffe Trading were all paid fully by government to supply fertilizer for the 2020/2021farming season but they did not meet their individual contractual obligations. Towards the 2021 August elections, these companies in collaboration with the PF were busy telling lies in the media that they had supplied all the commodities as per contractual agreements. As of December 2021, government had lost $144 million owing to the crookedness of these fertilizer supplying companies.

But this is information that the Auditor General has not captured in its report. Why? This is not a genuine oversight by the Auditor General but, it was intentional.

We say so because, even the scandal involving HoneyBee has shown how the AG report only captured issues surrounding this company yet, there were two other companies Pharmanova and Artemis which were embroiled into serious scandals.

At the time, Pharmanova got a contract worth $3,554,100 while Artemis got a contract worth $14,139,450 and these two did not supply anything to Ministry of Health. Why did the Auditor General leave these two out in their subsequent report?

Because it is a corrupt institution that is for hire. If you are businessman or a government official and you do not like one of your competitors, you can simply go to the Auditor General and pay them to put up a damaging report against the person you hate. The Auditor General will do just that, so that, the person you hate is dragged in the mud and judged as corrupt in the eyes of the public. While this is so, criminals who should be in jail are never recorded anywhere. It will be prudent for Hakainde to do away with characters at the helm of this institution and find other credible people with morals. The current crop at Auditor General is corrupt.

Hakainde is free to get our advice or to ignore it. It is up to him. He can choose to behave like Edgar Lungu, who allowed such nonsense in public institutions.

Source: The Candidates

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