By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Proceedings at Committee Room One in Parliament took a shocking turn on Thursday after Ibrahim Tawa Conteh announced his resignation as the Chairman of the Transparency and Accountability Committee.
The Member of Parliament from the ruling Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) told Politico shortly after his resignation that he will not allow himself to be used by the leadership of parliament whiles he is conducting probe in to dealings of government officials.
His committee and the Information and Communications committee were jointly investigating the unbundling of SALCAB and the role of the Ministry of Information and Communication in all of it.
Mohamed Rahman Swarray, Minister of Information and Communications and his senior directors were present at the meeting.
Discussions about SALCAB and its unbundling have taken center stage in recent weeks after reports emerged of an alleged plan by the government to sell the cable network. The government denied this.
“When it was about the investigation into Kingho and the Ministry of Mines, nobody called me or we didn’t stand the house down several times. Today, we had the Ministry of Information and Communication about the unbundling of SALCAB. The ministry provides justifications to cabinet for the unbundling of SALCAB, but those justifications were examined and I have received several calls from the leadership and top people in Parliament as to how I should go about the probe,” Conteh said.
“I cannot be a stooge. I cannot mortgage my integrity and I will not go there and say what someone else has told me,” he added.
The over-three hour long hearing had to be adjourned several times due to momentary outburst of heated exchanges between some of the MPs and the minister.
Leader of Government Business in Parliament, Mathew Nyuma, said Conteh was free to resign because “resignation is a modern way of democracy.”
Nyuma denied Conteh’s claim that the leadership interfered with his work. He said he only had to intervene when one of the MPs said the Minister was “arrogant.”
“We cannot allow an MP to insult a minister, telling him he is arrogant. And it was live on TV, so we called them and tried to calm the situation down,” Nyuma said.
“I told him he was the chairman and they are free to do their work but he needs to take responsibility for the comment. So when they returned he even ordered for the comment to be struck from the records” he added.
Nyuma said the party will not reprimand Conteh for his decision.
Politico understands that at least two other members in the Transparency and Accountability Committee announced their resignation; Lahai Marrah and Catherine Zainab Conteh, both are from the main opposition All Peoples Congress.
Nyuma said the resignations of the APC MPs were tied to politics.
“Off course you will understand the political context of all of this,” he said.
Some have accused Conteh of giving up at the first real hurdle, but he said, “Parliament had the opportunity to change the perception of people by doing their work fearlessly in line with the duty they have sworn to do.”
His resignation comes in the wake of a report commissioned by the Center for Accountability and Rule of Law which ranked Parliamentarians as the most corrupt public officials after the Police. The House of Parliament has since sprung to the defense of MPs by disputing the findings.
With the resignation of Conteh, the work of the committee could be thrown in to jeopardy. The committee is supposed to start a probe into the Bank of Sierra Leone to understand how Le500 billion funds that was meant to help businesses was disbursed to banks.
There is also the continuation of a probe into the National Minerals Agency and how they handled the Kingho license situation, a probe that has already exposed some shocking decision making by the NMA.
Copyright © 2020 Politico Online
