21 June 2011
Anyone thinking that the removal of former Auditor General John Morlu from the General Auditing Commission would remove the GAC from media limelight is mistaken. The country’s supreme audit institution continues to publish its audit reports and remains tough-taking; concurrently, pieces of dissent from auditees and sections of the media continue to float about.
Recent publications which lifted the GAC’s official payroll insinuating salary disparities and grievances of a few employees complaining unfair labor practices have met the response of not the GAC, as expected, but by the group calling itself, Citizens Against Corruption and Abuse of Power (CACAP).
For the group, the recent media reports against the GAC represent a continuation of a grand plan by corrupt officials of Government and their protégés to finally demolish the Commission having decapitated it with the removal of former Auditor General John Morlu.
In a press statement issued during the weekend, CACAP Secretary General Edward Saydee said: “Two months ago, they carried out a campaign of decapitation of the GAC and succeeded in the removal of John Morlu. Not satisfied, they are again furtively plotting insurrection in the GAC system, co-opting belly-driven employees of the Commission to gang up against the acting management, as we have seen in the last report of baseless claims and petition to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The Public Thieves are co-opting their media foot-soldiers to baselessly publish besmirching articles against the GAC: All game plans by these pillagers of our resources to deny us an opportunity to checkmate and scrutinize them in these electoral times and allow their plunders and thieveries to continue unabated.”
Saydee said in the press statement that in the recent upsurge of negative media publications on the GAC, his organization does not see unimpeachable facts and responsible journalism.
“We don’t see fraudulent transactions and fiscal deviations–things that we have seen in numerous audit reports of a plethora of government ministries and agencies that point to lack of fiscal system, waste of public resources and massive theft,” the group indicated, continuing, “What we have rather seen in the anti-GAC propaganda reportages is a grand conspiracy by the forces of corruption, as President Sirleaf once alerted, to ‘fight back with their ill-gotten wealth’.
The CACAP says what it is rather sensing now is a grand final conspiracy by economic vampires to completely dismember and demolish the GAC once and for all; something it says they commenced with the dethronement of John Morlu from the Commission.
“What we see in the recent anti-GAC reportages is a cunning attempt by fiscal monsters and public thieves to use the fallacious pieces of propaganda against the Commission as shield and cover to evade public scrutiny,” the group further said, adding, “By furtively and mischievously casting aspersion on the GAC and its reports, scoundrel and thieves in Government in collaboration with their media foot soldiers intent to make the impression that once the GAC and its reports are brought into question, they cannot and should not be answerable and accountable to such a Commission and reports.”
“This is lie,” said CACAP, stating that Liberians and their international partners “should not be amused and consumed by this diabolical and pathetic lie.”
CACAP vows that it will not stand aloof and watch the GAC fight alone because “we are sure that President Sirleaf, who declared war on corruption along with her officials, has lost the moral high ground to fight against the whirlwind of anti-GAC onslaughts because the Government has turned its back on thousands of findings and recommendations of the Commission’s audit reports and instead embarked on the decapitation of the Commission as we have seen in the removal of John Morlu the former head of the GAC who had brought sanity and prudence to Liberia’s public financial management regime.”
The group said if the people of Liberia make the mistake to acknowledge and give credence to the vile media propaganda against the GAC, the more national revenues and national resources will be put in harm with corrupt Government officials.
“Another danger in giving credence to the pro-thieves media propaganda against the GAC is that it will lift the burden of accountability over corrupt officials of Government, many of whom are vying for elected public offices,” CACAP says.
“In the coming legislative and presidential elections, we the common people of Liberia are given back our powers–the power and authority bequeathed to us by the Constitution of this country, to ‘alter and reform’ our Government as our ‘happiness and safety so require,’” the group further said. “In the last five years, we reposed such power and authority in a few citizens. Some misused that power. They abused the power. They perverted the power. Fortunately, this year, we have reclaimed the power. And it is time to ask each of them, ‘How well did you manage the power and authority we gave you?’”
CACAP maintained that one of the important ways the people of Liberia will compel those who managed our constitutionally inherent power and authority in the last five years is through audit reports produced by the GAC; reports which the group says empirically document the true stewardship of public officials.
“The GAC audit reports are our most clearly authentic reference book; they are our reliance and resource material in our attempt to checkmate and scrutinize those who presided over our resources in the last five years and who may be requesting us to re-bequeath our constitutionally inherent powers and authority to them,” CACAP states further.
“But most of these public officials, who knowingly and deliberately plundered and pillaged our state resources in the last five years, are fighting tooth and nail, like a trapped viper, to evade our empirical scrutiny of them; and the shameful and cowardly way they are doing this is to cast aspersion on the GAC and its reports. Since the public thieves know that Liberians have no other impeccable standard by which to hold them accountable, they are demolishing our last and only hope, the GAC.”
AllAfrica – All the Time
Taken from:
Liberia: Schemes To Demolish Audit Commission