Transparency International Zambia (TI-Z) has noted the release of the Auditor General’s report for the year 2020 last week. The 2020 report, in conforming to the trend in recent years, has again highlighted very worrying revelations related to mismanagement of public resources. TI-Z is particularly concerned with the rise in financial mismanagement, which manifests itself in different forms such as wasteful expenditure, among others.
The 2020 report highlights that financial mismanagement has been on the rise during the last ten years that the Patriotic Front (PF) was in power, with 2020 accounting for almost 32% of all the mismanaged resources between 2011 and 2020. The 2020 report also makes the astonishing revelation that wasteful expenditure, which is expenditure from which government derives no benefits, increased from K3.7 million in 2019 to K1.4 billion in 2020. To put this into context, this amount of wasteful expenditure is more than the 2020 allocation to the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP), which was at K1.1 billion; is more than twice the 2020 allocation for Constituency Development Fund (CDF), which was K636 million; and could have facilitated the employment of about 50,000 teachers for 3 years.
This pre-election spike in wasteful expenditure was also observed prior to the 2016 general elections, when it increased from K1.58 million in 2014 to K39.9 million in 2015. This sudden rise in wasteful expenditure raises a number of questions as to why government under the PF regime habitually wasted more resources prior to elections.
TI-Z is currently undertaking a detailed analysis of the scale and trends in financial mismanagement during the last 10 years. We have thus far discovered that a gross total of K5.7 billion was mismanaged during the period 2011 to 2020 through various forms of financial mismanagement. The year 2020 accounted for 32% of all the mismanaged resources and was followed by 2012 and 2015 which accounted for 16% and 15%, respectively. In terms of the breakdown of financial issues, wasteful expenditure accounted for 26% of the total mismanaged resources during the period 2011 to 2020 and 77.6% of the mismanaged resources in 2020 itself. Unvouchered expenditure, which refers to Payment Vouchers not availed for audit because they are either missing or inadequately supported, accounted for 29% of the K5.7 billion.
TI-Z notes with concern that revelations of this nature are not new in the Auditor General’s reports, and we would like to commend Dr. Sichembe and his team for the consistency that the Office of the Auditor General has displayed over the years. But as we have stated in the past, the failure by relevant authorities to take action on these reports has largely rendered them academic over the years. We note and commend President Hakainde Hichilema’s commitment during his press conference last week, to the effect that under the UPND administration, reports from the Auditor General and other investigative agencies will no longer be academic documents but will be disseminated to relevant Law Enforcement Agencies for investigation and prosecution.
In our view as TI-Z, the report released last week by the Auditor General provides a great opportunity for the President’s commitment to be actualized. We believe that the citizens of Zambia are tired of reading about such financial mismanagement and seeing no action taken to hold those responsible to account in one way or another. The lack of action over the years has undermined the work of institutions such as the Office of the Auditor General, and it is high time this narrative was changed.
We therefore challenge the new dawn government of the UPND to use the 2020 Auditor General report as their litmus test for taking their commitment to fight corruption from the realm of verbal rhetoric to actionable interventions that will ultimately ensure that those responsible for mismanaging the resources of Zambia are made to account for their actions. Zambia has already paid a heavy price for corruption, particularly in the last five years, and while the UPND is not responsible for this, the reality is that they are now in power and therefore the ones on whose shoulders the burden to turn the situation around now rests.
It is also our expectation that should any PF officials be implicated in the Auditor General’s findings, the party will not cry foul, given that the anti-corruption strategy in their 2021 manifesto, which TI-Z analyzed prior to the polls, included plans to prosecute cases mentioned in the Auditor General’s reports.
Maurice K. Nyambe
TI-Z Executive Director
