Hon. Mainda Simataa Speaks Out!
LCC Scandal Expose: Why Computers were Stolen, and Management Threatens Auditors Who Uncovered K508,000 Tipper Truck Deal!
I sit on the Audit Committee of the Lusaka City Council, and it’s time for the public to know how rotten council is, and that 3 Auditors are about to be transferred by ‘suspects’, for doing a marvelous job. Also, I will not waste my time to report to ACC because I’ve tried them before.
But I strongly refuse to keep the public whom we’re accountable to, in the dark. They have the right to know, it’s their council – they fund it’s operations through various levies they pay, and it owes them quality service delivery in return!
The scandal at hand relates to K508,000 of the publics money about to be stolen, K200,000 has already been paid I’m told? But there’s bigger scandals, follow me to the end.
Back to the tipper trucks – so LCC Management is trying by all means to pass a questionable payment for the hire of tipper trucks which nobody knows if they really worked because audit was never engaged to do preliminary checks – a pre-audit check!
What has delayed this K508,000 from going into the pockets of a named contractor is that the Chief Internal Auditor Mr. Mwale and his two brave officers, Ireen and Malaika, (kudos to them) have refused to produce what is called a post-audit report – a document required by law to be attached, before a payment can be made.
And the Auditors are standing their grounds despite threats and malice against them. Bottom line is LCC management did not follow proceedure – the tipper contract (and we’ve been discouraging hiring) did not go to tender, and no pre-audit to verify if indeed the tipper trucks were deployed on the ground to do the works was done!
Now you understand why the computer hard-drives, not only from the Audit department, but I’ve learned, also from Finance and Housing, have been stolen on 3 consecutive occasions in the last 3 weeks, despite civic centre having CCTV and not less than 25 guards on night duty, yet no arrests have been made – it’s clearly an inside job!
To their credit, the gallant auditors have their investigations files data backed up online, and in hard copy in form of reports to councillors.
Anyway, I said I’d tell you more about other major scandals which shock me – here goes; there’s manipulation and undervaluing of 994,000 as the current figure which billboard companies (alliance media and others) owe us, when in fact not. The real figure is much much higher. So how was it reduced?
This is how they did it! Council management bought an accounting system (Rashmita) at a whooping K3 million cost, which they never used, then again bought Oracle, changed it again, and then bought Palmsoft which we’re using now, a very porous and useless system which was manipulated recently to reduce the amount billboard companies owe council, and recently allowed an officer from legal (who we fired, among others) to defraud council over K100,000 with a named filling station.
I want to end by saying that if anyone tries to fire, transfer or harrass the named auditors in any way, their names and pictures will appear here…for now I’m sharing pictures and names of the junior officers being used to threaten the auditors.
And oh, in case you wondering, councillors have no power to fire senior management – that responsibility lies with the local government service commission, and we gave them a list of those who must go. We did our part!
END OF PART 1.
