By Mabinty M. Kamara
A civil society coalition, the National Consortium on Public Accountability (NCOPA), has condemned recent reports by two leading civil society organizations exposing corruption in public institutions.
The surveys conducted by the Institute of Governance Reform (IGR) and the Center for Accountability and Rule of law (CARL) shun light on graft in parliament. The reports which were published in September this year, consistently show that parliamentarians were among the most corrupt public servants in the country. They further revealed a drop in public confidence in the law making institution.
The figures from particularly the CARL report revealed that Police, Parliament and the cabinet ministers were the three most corrupt institutions, with 83% of respondent saying that they believe that to a “large extent” the force is the most corrupt state institution, followed by 60% of respondents who said that the Parliamentarians were the most corrupt, whiles government ministers were ranked third with 52% of people saying they were the most corrupt.
NCOPA said this week that Sierra Leone has over the years been flooded with reports that were not competent and credible and therefore called on statistics Sierra Leone to claim its space of producing credible survey reports.
“At country level, Sierra Leone has suffered a lot by the proliferation of survey reports which are mostly not coordinated, without sound survey methodology and not subjected to validation by statistics Sierra Leone,” Dr. Vandy Konneh, Executive Director of Disability Rights Movement, one of the member CSOs in the consortium, said in a statement to press people on Wednesday, 13th October.
Robert Kondema Kargbo, Chairman of NCOPA and head of Health Network Sierra Leone, told Politico that the believe that the two reports were done out of malice and that they were aimed at tainting the image and commitment of the parliamentarians and the government at large in the fight against corruption.
He said they found a lot of inconsistency and error in the report for which they thought it fit to “set the records straight.”
“We have done a comprehensive study on the reports, looking at different analysis that were brought up, which we thought was a concern especially when they stated that State House and Parliament were the most corrupt institutions in the country,” Kargbo said.
He went on: “We are not here to bash at them or to drag it because we are all civil societies. But the report itself is counterproductive, which is why we decided to convene this meeting today to engage civil society and the media to have a comprehensive review of the report. We appreciate their efforts in compiling the reports, but we believe that it was not properly coordinated. We believe that they didn’t do the right thing. There was no proper coordination of the report and that it was done in a haste. And I can tell you categorically clear that they did it out of malice. IGR and CARL did the report on malice basis.”
Kargbo noted that one cannot say that parliament or State House are corrupt when they have no direct dealing with money as in trade. He also noted that the answers provided by the respondents revealed that they did not fully understand the mandate of parliamentarians, hence such people lacked the authority to rate the institution.
He noted that they have made efforts to reach out to the two institutions in question but without success.
Kargbo said they are calling on the two institutions to recall their reports and apologize to the institutions mentioned in them within three weeks.
Both CARL and IGR had defended the methodology of their surveys.
Jeremy Ben Simbo, Project Coordinator for the Public Financial Management Consortium (PFMC) at CARL, through which the report was produced, in an earlier interview with Politico defended the methodology of the study, noting that the data produced were independently gathered, analyzed and verified by experts and heads of institutions.
The PFMC comprises leading and respectable CSOs and NGOs, notably Christian Aid Sierra Leone, Restless Development, and the Budget Advocacy Network. The study was funded by the UK’s International Development agency - DFID.
IGR’s survey was conducted on behalf of the pan-African research agency – Afrobarometer.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
