LESSONS FROM CASH-GATE-

* This article also appeared in The Sunday Times.

There is no doubt that the shooting of  Mphwiyo has generated a lot of interest, fear and anxiety amongst Malawians. If truth be told, what happened and is still happening in this case is something that most of us only thought was only made for the cinema or some Hardly chase thriller. Usually when we hear of shootings, it is about robbery or some trigger happy police officer was strictly following the shoot to kill order but not the Paul Mphwiyo type of shooting.

It thus comes as no surprise that a lot of Malawians and donors are following the issues with keen interest. It is totally understandable that the news continues to dominate Newspaper front pages even after weeks since it happened.  As the news unfolds, there has been numerous theories and counter theories on what exactly led to the shooting.

 One thing though has been consistent: someone, within the government system was involved in some fishy business. And this was not a once off thing, but something that has been happening over a period of time. It is with this in mind that news about  ACB and the fiscal police starting investigations on the civil service struck me.

While Some people have lauded the  institutions for  the investigations, it is my view that these institutions do not deserve any credit for this. Rather, serious questions ought to be asked as regards their efficiency.  Ladies and gentlemen, here are institutions whose primary responsibility is preventing corruption and other financial crimes yet all they do is to wait for the crime to happen and start chasing shadows. Worse still in most cases such cases are lost because by the time they come in the culprit may already have destroyed the key evidence.

Just for information sake, this is not the first time huge amounts have been siphoned off the tax payers purse. Few years ago,  some  people were arrested for being found with over 400 Million Kwacha in their bank accounts. Although arrests were made, the nation is yet to hear the conclusion to that particular case.

 Yet the mere fact that this happened should  to have alerted the ACB, the fiscal police, the auditor general’s office and indeed the accountant general in whose department the said crime was committed, to tighten up the loose ends, open serious and credible investigations on the civil service and not wait for a the Mphwiyo case to start whining.

Surely the mandate of ACB and fiscal police must go beyond prosecuting but also includes preventing corruption and other financial crimes. In any case apart from the deterrence, what else do we benefit for jailing someone who in any case has already stolen our money and drank on all of it? Does it not sound like a forestry officer who stands on the road confiscating charcoal bags in the name of checking deforestation when the tree he was supposed to protect has already been cut. In which case, confiscating the charcoal would in any case not bring the tree back to life.

Frankly, I find most of the institutions that we have set up to check abuse very reactive and thus failing to live up to their mandate. I am sure that had the ACB, the fiscal police, the National audit office taken keen interest in the earlier case I have alluded to above, the Mphwiyo case might not have happened.

Launching numerous investigations now, to me sounds like some waste of more money on top of that which was already stolen. My point being that the fiscal police and the ACB could have done much better by simply being proactive and not wait for some complaint or some shooting to start probing the civil service. Institutions like them need to have the mandate to probe corruption or financial irregularities even where nothing is being suspected. Waiting for the donors or the government to push them to carry out investigations is opening up themselves to undue interference from those directing them to do the same.

In the same spirit, the government needs to strengthen institutions  like ACB, the National Audit Office and FIU. The FIU for example since it has a privilege to access our account information from the banks, need to be given the mandate to investigate and recommend for prosecution suspected cases of financial crimes. It would also of immense benefit to Malawians if these institutions would act in the same way as auditors do. Auditors do not audit an organization just because there is something wrong suspected but they would also audit just to check on levels of compliance to standards within a system.

It may sound expensive and a waste of money yet in my opinion this is the only way through which financial crimes and corruption can be checked. Probing the civil service just because there is a case at hand  is not good enough. When will the ACB and the fiscal police look into the accounts of most of these civil society organizations, when will they check the NGOs. Will they also wait for some high profile financial mismanagement issue to be exposed. Institutions mandated to check abuse must learn to be proactive if we are to make any headway in the fight against corruption and abuse of public funds.

It may be argued that it would be wrong, to check companies or institutions just for the sake of it. Well, in my view, it is also wrong not to  take interest in the operations of various public companies and institutions until when corruption has taken place. Thus, while it is good to launch the numerous probes into the civil service now, a more proactive approach to issues would help us a lot. A stitch in time saves nine so they say!