The PAC has done its job

Mmegi Editor | Tuesday October 29, 2013 13:20

In his analysis, Modubule laments the lack of measures in place to deal with civil servants who fail to comply with government financial regulations, a failure that he notes often results in government projects being completed way after their initial completion dates, resulting in huge costs to the taxpayer.

Inspite of the same officers appearing before the PAC almost every year, there is no sign or willingness to improve from their side.  The thrust of Modubule's analysis is that this state of affairs continues at our collective peril as a nation.  It is time something is done about officers who fail to comply with the financial rules and regulations if indeed we are committed to becoming a corruption-free country.

As Modubule says in his analysis, the Executive must put in place foolproof control measures and punitive instruments, if the Cabinet is not to be part of the game plan to rob the nation.  There should be in place mechanisms to be applied when an officer offends for the first time, the second time and the third time, measures so tough that even recidivists will squirm and recoil from temptation. 

We have these kinds of measures elsewhere in our lives for habitual criminal offenders and workplace offenders.  The Trade Disputes Act lays down clearly the procedure to be followed when dealing with an employee who fails to comply with the terms of his or her employment, and so it boggles the mind why a similar procedure is not adopted dealing with delinquent and notorious civil servants.

We have read PAC reports for many years and have attended the committee's proceedings since the no-nonsense chairman made them open to the public two years ago.  Thus we have volumes of evidence that indeed some officers are deadwood that should be gotten ridden of while others are plain stubborn. 

These are the same officers who later mislead their superiors in political leadership, resulting in bad policies, poor budgets and laws that miss the mark.  It is the consequence of such scenarios that ministries often make huge requests in supplementary budgets, some of them running into hundreds of millions of pula.  But the culprits are hardly ever reprimanded.

It is time we moved with the times and freed ourselves from the corrupt civil servants who made a science of fleecing state coffers and misleading their superiors in order to continue in their wily ways.  Very clearly, they belong elsewhere because they have not have the interests of the country at heart.  The PAC has done its job by providing sustainable evidence for a successful prosecution of the culprits.

 

                                                           Today's thought

'A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.'

 

                                                           - Thomas Paine