Members of the public following the case of the suspended Auditor-General Lara Taylor-Pearce and her deputy Tamba Momoh have said if the Sierra Leone People’s Party regime was really serious about fighting corruption, then the suspended duo together with other public agencies aimed at combating graft and blocking financial leakages from the public domain should have been the darlings of the SLPP government.
The concerned citizens and some members of the Civil Society Organizations said the works of institutions like the Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL), under the then leader of the suspended Auditor-General, Lara Taylor-Pearce and her deputy Tamba Momoh, the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and their substantive heads should have been the SLPP government’s poster boys and girls when it comes to fulfilling its promises that it would make corruption public enemy number one and finally put the nail in the coffin of the bane of our governance narrative.
But since the suspension of the duo and the circumstances surrounding their suspension, the concerned citizens have said the regime started losing credibility.
“Lara and Tamba’s work exposed so many corrupt actions by vote controllers across all the Ministries, Departments and Agencies to such an extent that you wonder if the regime was here to make corruption worse than what it already was at the time. And they should have used Lara’s work to make them more accountable in this democratic dispensation. If the Bio regime was serious about fighting corruption, the Auditor-General’s reports should have been the light at the end of the tunnel to give us hope that the president and his ACC chief would have brought charges against members of his regime he had hired to do the people’s work. Sadly we have been disappointed by how things turned out between the SLPP government and this anticorruption heroine and her deputy,” said a member belonging to the Civil Society coalition.
The activist whose advocacy is centred on exposing corruption in public office said not too long ago President Bio then in the opposition used Lara’s work to chastise the ruling APC government about its corrupt tendencies. But as soon as the astute auditor general started focusing her work on the SLPP government, she became Bio’s number one nemesis.
“You have to understand that the president had captured all other public institutions. The only one that was truly independent was the Audit Service Sierra Leone. After failing to bring the agency under executive capture, the only thing left to do was to get something on Lara and Tamba the executive can use to get rid of them and replace them with people Abdul Aziz who is now serving as the Acting Auditor-General, who is willing to do as he pleases. This is what has happened to Lara and Tamba,” the CSO representative alleged.
She said the work of the ASSL has proven that the Bio regime is the most corrupt in the history of the nation. And for a regime that came to power promising to get rid of public corruption, this was not the image they were expecting to reach the people and international development partners.
“Now that they have suspended Lara and Tamba, and that the tribunal has handed over its report to President Bio after a long time coming, the whole nation and our international development backers want access to the tribunal’s report. It must be unheard of for the president to allow this report to collect dust in the Office of the President while we the concerned public and even Lara and Tamba are screaming for justice. The only credible thing for the president to do is to release the tribunal’s findings and especially their recommendations on the fate of Lara and Tamba. This is not something that should be taken lightly since President Bio came to power promising the get rid of the kinds of things the Auditor-General’s reports from 2018 to 2022 have exposed about Bio’s office and all the other offices in the MDAs,” she added.
It must be recalled and according to reports Lara and Tamba were suspended nearly three years ago in November 2021 after they investigated corruption, including double dipping at the president’s office and corruption allegedly in the president’s wife’s office. The duo were suspended because they had gone in search of evidence to support claims made by the president’s office including getting receipts from hotels in South Africa, Lebanon and The Gambia without the president’s explicit approval.
“What Lara and Tamba did shouldn’t have led to their sacking. What they had exposed should have been used by the president to sack many people from his office and those of his wife’s; also those from the MDAs. The ACC, the FIU and the PAC in parliament should have been busy exposing and recommending such people for prosecution to vindicate the regime. But since the regime decided to go after Lara and Tamba, we have lost face to the international community. Our fight against corruption must be a laughing stock to those that support our government financially. If we are to save face the report into how and why Lara and her deputy were fired must be made public,” the CSO activist said in closing.
