I was reading “It’s Our Turn to
Eat” the story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower, John Githongo, who had been
appointed Kenya’s anti-corruption czar signaling the new government’s (Mwai
Kibaki’s) determination to put an end to sleaze. The author Michela Wrong explores
the corruption endemic in African society and how one brave man made a lonely
decision with huge ramifications. It is how an entire country can be munched in
the clammy claws of corruption. She focuses on corruption in Kenya, and talks
incisively about two such cases which rocked
Kenya during both the Moi and Kibaki eras. The Goldenberg and the Anglo Leasing
Scams.
I quote a particular section in
the book because of the near exact replication of what has happened in
Seychelles.
“While Goldenberg, involved
financial strategems so complex even economists had difficulty grasping them
all, Anglo Leasing was so simple a child could master the technique. It was a classic procurement scam,
needing only two parties, although for it to work one of the those parties had
to be at the top of government, powerful enough to silence doubting minions and
ignore institutional checks and balance (we have heard the governor of the Central
Bank’s statement to the National Assembly and we also know who the top government
person(s) were/was). Another vital
component was the military and security nature of the contracts. In every
other sector, contracts had to be put to open tender, forcing even the greediest
supplier to stay within the realms of the reasonable. Advertisements were placed in newspaper
and trade journals competitive bids
collected, technical competence established, and the companies who came forward
knew they might be subjected to due diligence before the relevant ministry made
its decision. Any irregularities risked being picked up by opposition-dominated
parliamentary committees and scoop hungry journalists. The only area escaping such scrutiny was the security and intelligence
sectors, where single-sourcing, opaque negotiations and loosely worded
contracts could all be justified on grounds of “national security”
Security
concerns served as the perfect cover
for some extraordinarily sharp practice. The Kenyan Auditor-General (like his
Seychelles counter-part) discovered, that no due diligence had been carried,
and no implementation schedules agreed. And once again noted that ‘the non availability in most cases of
detailed contract specification, invoices and delivery notes made it difficult
to verify what was delivered, and the failure to keep an up-to-date register of
assets left their whereabouts unclear. In others the Kenyan government clearly
never stood to receive anything at all, given the nature of the companies it
was doing business with. “At least seven of the supplier/credit providers do
not exist in the countries in which they were purportedly registered and may
therefore not be bona fide registered business firms.’ (In The case of Anglo
Leasing, its address was a non existent street in Liverpool, England).
“Confusion
over the firms’ identities was an important ingredient in the scam.” In the Anglo Leasing “scam” (the
whistle blower) would be “confronted by a surreal situation of a government
which appeared to have no clear idea with whom it was signing its
multi-million-dollar deals. The anonymity of the contractors helped conceal
both the mechanism and eventual beneficiaries of this laziest of scams.”
Were the people of Seychelles
the victims of a “procurements scam’ of the type perfected in Kenya? And just
as in Kenya it was thanks to a whistle blower that the whole scam was exposed
it now up to the National Assembly to enact a “Whistle Blowers’ Protection Act,
as well as an Access to Information Act.
It is surprising that the World
Bank and the IMF have never seen it fit to question such huge capital flight
from a country seeking its financial assistance with 40% of the population living below the level of poverty.
The questions I would like to
ask: When will the World Bank and the IMF call in the forensic auditors/
accountants to investigate the procurements of national security and
intelligence services provided to Seychelles by certain Irish personnel through
certain named, and unnamed, or as yet undiscovered companies? As A Seychelloise I have a right to know how,
and why, such huge sums of money was being paid out for procurement of so
called security and intelligence services
where single-sourcing, opaque negotiations and loosely worded contracts was used
“as justification” on alleged grounds of “national security”?
The second question is whether,
Mr. James Michel when he was president in whom the executive authority of the
Republic vested, delegated the
“function” of signing contracts which bind the Republic to
Lise Bastienne or others, as “subordinate officers? [Article 66 (3)]
Alexia G. Amesbury
