Sudanese group calls for taking actions to combat corruption
August 15, 2015 (KHARTOUM) – The Sudanese Transparency Organization (STO) has urged the government to translate its political will into actions to enhance transparency and combat corruption.
STO chairman, Al-Tayeb Mukhtar, described in a statement on Saturday the presidential directives regarding referral of violators of the electronic funds collection system to summary trials, the submission of the Anti-Corruption Commission draft law, and allowing the media to show up corruption cases as “serious steps in the right direction”.
“However, this political will needs to be put into practice by making the necessary mechanisms, legislations and procedures such as promoting independence of the judiciary, separating the prosecutions offices from the executive body, drafting the code for protecting informants in corruption cases and approving the Anti-Corruption Commission law,” he said.
Mukhtar warned that the political will would remain in a standstill in the absence of the abovementioned requirements.
“Corruption has reached a dangerous level in some Arab countries and its monthly average has exceeded $3 billion in one of those countries in the past eight years only”, he added.
Last July, the head of the committee tasked with drafting the anti-corruption law, Babiker Gashi, said that corruption poses serious danger to the national security, pointing that nobody should escape punishment including public official who enjoy impunity.
It is worth mentioning that Friday sermons at several mosques in Khartoum this week have addressed the need to combat corruption. The Imam (prayer leader) at Khartoum grand mosque, Kamal Rizig, described impunities as “disgrace”.
Speaking at his swearing-in ceremony last June, Sudan’s president Omer al-Bashir pledged to fights corruption and nepotism by establishing a higher anti-corruption agency with broad powers under his own supervision.
Sudanese lawmakers continued to warn that the state and the economy is under threat from a surge in levels of corruption that is coupled with growing poverty among the population.
Early in 2012, Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir ordered the establishment of an anti-corruption commission to “monitor and follow what is being published in the media about corruption and to coordinate with the presidency of the Republic and other competent authorities in the ministry of justice and the national assembly in order to complete information on what is being raised about corruption at the state level”.
But after more than a year of seemingly zero activity, Bashir sacked the commission head and did not appoint a replacement, dealing a major blow to demands by the public for more robust investigations of corruption.
The global Corruption Perceptions Index for 2014 published by TI ranks Sudan at 173 out of 174 among the countries surveyed.
(ST)