Sierra Leone: Common Responses to National Audit Report (2022)

The country audit report is out again for the year 2022. The same lack of complacency by state institutions and state actors continues with business-as-usual characters. The country’s Parliament and the anti-corruption commission continue their same working habits in the fight against corruption.

The Office of the Auditor General was established shortly after the nation gained its independence in 1961 with the mission to audit all government activities and operations and to submit timely reports to Parliament.

The department has since considerably increased in size, and additional legislation has been enacted to allow it to fulfil its mandate.

Over the years, corruption in Sierra Leone has eroded the trust we have in the public sector to act in our best interests. It wastes taxes and rates meant for important community projects. This results in poor quality services or infrastructure, or projects never getting off the ground, as examples in your community across the country.

Good governance is considered key to achieving sustainable development and human well-being. Empirical studies show that good governance, in contrast to democratisation, has strong positive effects on measures of social trust, life satisfaction, peace, and political legitimacy.

Studies also show that good governance improves life evaluations, either directly because people are happier living in a context of good governance or indirectly because good governance enables people to achieve higher levels of something else that is directly important to their well-being.

This is in particular related to the control of corruption, which has been demonstrated to affect well-being both directly and indirectly. The absence of corruption has often been shown to increase the efficiency of public and private enterprises and thus create favourable conditions for economic growth.

There is also evidence that higher levels of general and specific trust increase the happiness of people, even beyond higher incomes. is based on the principle that every person or group is responsible for their actions, especially when their acts affect the public interest.

It refers to the answerability or responsibility for one’s actions, so that systems exist for decision-makers in government, the private sector, and civil society organisations to answer to the public as well as to institutional stakeholders.

Accountability is partly a matter of institutional design, implying that formal checks and balances can and should be built into any constitutional architecture.

A serious accountability campaign also requires political energy in the sense that “people, interest groups, civil society, the courts, the press, and opposition parties must insist that those who govern follow legitimate mandates and explain their actions” and that “those demanding accountability must be confident that they can do so safely and that officials will respond honestly.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in advance, folks.

Abdul .M. Fatoma (AMF2023*), Chief Executive of Campaign for Human Rights and Development International (CHRDI)