Minister urges South Sudan officials to stop nepotism, fictive jobs
By Isaac Vuni
August 28, 2007 (JUBA) — Southern Sudan minister of Finance has appealed southern Sudan government officials to stop nepotism recruitment in their ministries or to create fictive jobs to loot public funds.
Speaking at the opening session of states Consultative Planning and Budgeting workshop today in Juba, GoSS minister of Finance and Economic planning, Kuol Athian Mawein, said “There are many Southern Sudanese government officials and politicians’ today practicing nepotism by bringing in their respective offices their relatives and friends in order to loots public funds and resources,.”
He said corruption involves both the gives and the receivers of such bribe and hence it creates disunity, tribalism and prevention of development in southern Sudan. Therefore, he urged those who are either elected or appointed to hold government offices to better disassociate themselves from misuse of their official powers for their private benefit rather to recruit and treat all people of southern Sudan according to their qualifications and merit.
The GoSS finance minister said proper uses of resources would improve good governance and image of the government of southern Sudan. However, if the ministry of finance is weak, then the government also will be weakened and will not be able to control corruption across the government institutions.
He cautions the participants that if corruption, is not combated in southern Sudan, it will drives away investors and will eventually hinders economic development to the downtrodden people of southern Sudan.
However, Mawein assured the participants that GoSS ministry of finance and Economic planning has the duty to put in place a strong systems of planning, budgeting and accountability at GoSS and states levels of governments and to also ensure that money of the government of southern Sudan is used to deliver services to the people of southern Sudan instead of being wasted on siphoned corruption.
Mawein said South Sudan ministry of finance is far from meeting its stated objectives in the budgeted items partly because there is not proper or timely sending of financial statements on Goss expenditure that seems to be operating out of budget lines including the ten states of southern Sudan which have even no budgets to spend apart from giving them monthly block grants.
Poor management of resources may result to resources being used for wrong purposes which will lead to incorrect development patterns where some areas may end up being developed more than others simply because resources are not properly allocated according to the needs of an area. Therefore, southern Sudan Resources have to be fairly distributed and in line with government policies including budgeted items.
Minister Mawein stated that mismanagement of resources weakens people’s faith in the government as those in authority would tent to bribing people to in order to win their support for the very ruler to stay in power for longer and such will lay a bad foundation for a democratic system in southern Sudan if not eradicated soonest.
He reminded the participants that a budget is a formal expression of the goals each ministry or state is expected to achieve in the short run with public finance. Adding that budget establishes a harmony between the short-run and the long-run objectives of the government. It also lays out government expectations to all those who are entrusted with management of public institutions.
On the other hand, the concerned officials are to communicate to the public what short of services citizens should expect to receive from public funds besides providing a benchmark against which to measure performance of institutions and units that will enable corrective action to be taken where necessary after the budget has been approved by southern Sudan legislative assembly lawmakers.
“I would like to assured you that our budget discipline is very weak partly because you the spending agencies do not submit accountabilities on money given to them by GoSS ministry of finance treasury. We send you block grants because we do not know your real budgets but you do not account to us for the money you spend”, remarks Mawein.
I there fore appeal to you the states ministers and GoSS director generals to send in your financial statement in time on all money released to your respective institutions by southern Sudan treasury headquarters.
The three days workshop, first of it kind in history of southern Sudan has brought together more than 300 people including undersecretaries, state ministers, state director generals, development partners among others and they will seriously reviews Budget sector working groups of Education, Health, Natural Resources and Rural Development, Infrastructure, Rule of Law, Public Administration, Economic Functions, Social and Humanitarian affairs, including tackling issues of Public Service Overview of Budgeting and Accountability, Auditor General and Anti-Corruption Commission reports, UNDP support to states programmes and the Current Challenges being faced by Goss including recommendations for the Way Forward.
(ST)
David Mayen Deng
Minister urges South Sudan officials to stop nepotism, fictive jobs
I do not know really what role is our Legislature and the Ministry of Finance are playing on all the financial looting that South Sudan has been experiencing since the establishment of GOSS. First of all, such words like “appeal to” sound to me like a polite request, when GOSS and its useless legislature needs to be more commanding in attitude. South Sudan’s governmental apparatuses have been made into places where all kinds of people have found refuge. When you hear of such titles like “Under Secretary”, ”Commissioner of …”, “State Director Generals”, drawing from the experiences of other sensible nations, you get the feeling that such a conference mentioned above was composed of sensible people who know what they are doing. But, because South Sudan has become the property of former combatants who on one hand bravely fought a just revolution; hence missed adequate education, you would be surprised to see that the so called “Under Secretaries” and “Commissioners” did not have the requisite educational foundation for controlling those sensitive bureaucracies given to them. The only qualification an “Under Secretary” or “Commissioners” would need for handling millions of dollars worth of , supposedly, socially vital projects is a senior SPLA rank; nothing else. Yes, nothing else counts.
Unfortunately, when revolutions were fought in almost all nations of the international community of over 200 nation-states, the sole reasons for revolutionary leaders’ risking their lives would be a conviction that they provide an alternative for a dysfunctional status quo. Once they captured power, they hit the ground running because they already had the alternative plan for replacing those of the ousted establishments. Fruits of bloodshed and hardships are immediately felt by their countrymen/women for whom wars were fought in the first place. However, our revolutionaries have become exceptions. There is a sense of ownership of South Sudan felt in all aspects of life- from the security sector to the civil service. Otherwise, who can explain the reasons why only few non-SPLA officials hold senior positions in South Sudan? Could it be lack of qualified manpower in South Sudan? …Far from that. Compared with the standards of our so called “Under Secretaries” and “Director Generals” who may fail to right their own name, live alone accurately calculate their allocation of funds by the ministry of Finance, the South has qualified citizens. GOSS employed under-qualified undersecretaries and wonders why there is corruption? Does GOSS think that every body could fly a plain without training? Or could there be on job training for pilots? Of course they will crash, but sadly not alone. In South Sudan, we have a culture of accepting responsibilities even when we are quite sure that we are not well equipped to deliver. But could those be the faults of our shivering “Undersecretaries”? I believe not, because our government does not even know how to provide jobs for people like them as alternatives.
South Sudan receives an annual income of over 2 billions a year. Please do your researches to find out how many of Sub-Saharan African countries receive such money. Our Southern Neighbor, Uganda, does not have minerals from which its government could generate revenues, but just because of sound macro and micro economic policies of President Museveni the country has experienced a conspicuous social and physical transformation since the beginning of his rule. On our side, our revolutionary leaders get large sums of money that they did not sweat for, it just comes from our blessed soil, and they can not show where the money goes! Thousands of born and unborn children still die of simple treatable fevers despite of our billions. Our roods were filled with soil which later, naturally, turned into mud and became even worse than they had been before “reconstruction”. Our government gives USAID, WFP, TUTASHINDA RECONSTRUCTIONs, AMAZON Ltd, etc suspicious contracts worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, and instead of supervising the work of those dubious deals, our dear “revolutionaries” decide to wait and see results. You can not blame them when they would hardly be able to comprehend the contents of those contracts – go to the ministries in Juba and verify for yourself if you may have any suspicions about my motives. It is chaos at a level unprecedented in the region. Juba is the new destination for the treasure hunters of the world. Not that all the billions that have so far disappeared were all stolen by our job-insecure senior officials of the GOSS (who definitely got the most), a good portion of that money disappeared into the pockets of foreign “entrepreneurs” because of the incompetence of our bureaucrats. The money that has so far disappeared from the South could have built thousands of schools and paid for thousands of expatriate teachers for ten years; built boreholes for our returnees form insulting lives in refugee camps, and many more, and many more countrymen. And what do our “revolutionaries” of the GOSS say? “We are still new!”, ”We only have two years!”, “The educated do not want to come back”, etc, etc. The excuses we hear are even more insulting than their incompetence. No revolutionary in the world has ever clung on the pretext of “we are still new” that we often hear from our fellow citizens of the GOSS, especially at the senior level. All other revelations in other parts of the world – noticing that we are not exceptionally brave or more patriots than other nations who fought similar wars of liberation- have used the expertise of non-combatants to run civil services. They all identified with the masses when it came to nation building. They actually brought the masses on board and worked together for the betterment of the collective existence of their nations. Ours did not do that, to the disillusionment of all South Sudanese. Our soldiers now prefer air conditioned offices under such titles like “commissioner” and “Undersecretary”, to being in the fields organizing men for a potential return to war if the CPA was not honored. They, as we can all easily notice, prefer working in ministries than with the SPLA, even though they could have similar air conditioned offices in barracks.
Finally, I truly believe that the SPLA needs to be bureaucratized in order to be professionalized- and those very “Undersecretaries” could still handle huge sums of money, but with lesser technicalities involved in allocations. Let real bureaucrats (who have gotten their training on that field) be drawn from the masses, and professional soldiers handle the SPLA. If that was done from the beginning we could have avoided the loss of billions of dollars, but crying on spilled milk is the last think any nation would want to do. GOSS could still do the right thing if it wants- and the result would be to see long queues of South Sudanese lining up for interviews in order to qualify for occupy those jobs for which no interviews were ever held.Or did any one see Southerners lining up for jobs in any ministry before? Look at that Mr.Minister before condemning Nepotisim in GOSS. Why should those who can make change appeal to subordinates who refuse to change? Could our minister of finance (who accidentally happened to be from the same place where the old one was from- not Zande, Nuer, Kakua or Shiluk for example) not write to regional bodies to the effect that funds would not be released before getting details on how previous funds were used? Or anything on that line? We really wonder who is in charge here? It is the same in all ministries as well- and we still wonder why things are not right.
David Mayen, the Center for International Human Rights Advocacy, The University of Denver – [email protected]
Bob Tata
I honour the Minister’s cause and I believe our country needs hundreds him!!
I am really delighted by the reaction of the GoSS’s finance Minster who is genuinely worried by the corruption and nepotism that are being adopted by the vast majority of GoSS’s officials; a disastrous phenomenon that doesn’t surprise me at all as it is one of the things that should be expected from the administration led by Mr Kiir and Riek de Machar!
I believe that there are many good people in Southern Sudan who are willing to deliver professional services, but who can not get through as they are being blocked by the greedy and corrupt Anya nya leaders who are now leading their corrupt government even without minimum or reasonable qualifications.
So, for Mr Minster, I think you have to be careful about your safety from those beasts as they may harm you before we come for your rescue!
Finally, Mr Minster, you will be remembered as one of the rarest South Sudanese offecials who have ever criticised the government that he still serving; regardless of the consequences!! I really honour you and those who are fighting corruption in south Sudan, and I want to encourage you to stay in your cause until you are joined by those who are like you and who are well prepared to deliver god services to citizens of Southern Sudan in Gods will.
Our country needs such people who do not put their personal interests before that of the general public and those who do not want to take advantages of our innocent people! Stay a way from their corruption and God will reward you.
Thanks to all those who do not always put themselves first!
By Bol Thourmuck, a Biotechnologist who lives and works in the UK