ANTI-CORRUPTION BODY CALLS FOR REVIEW OF E-SISTAFE

Mozambique’s Central Office for the Fight against Corruption (GCCC) has called for an urgent review of the electronic state financial management system (e-SISTAFE), on the grounds that, in the hands of dishonest officials, it leads to the theft of large sums from the public treasury, according to a report in Tuesday’s issue of the Maputo daily “Noticias”.Speaking on Monday at the opening session of a capacity building seminar for state inspectors, GCCC director Ana Maria Gemo denounced the repeated abuse of e-SISTAFE by officials who fraudulently withdraw state money to fill their own pockets. Such frauds can continue for long periods until eventually they come to the notice of judicial bodies and criminal proceedings are initiated.“We have to ask: what is failing in the inspection of our public administration?”, said Gemo. “Can these situations not be detected earlier? What is the degree of effectiveness of the existing internal control mechanisms?”“With what regularity do inspections take place?”, she added. “What investments have been made in the inspectorate in order to make it robust”.

These criticisms must come as a blow to the Ministry of Economy and Finance which has always argued that e-SISTAFE is much more reliable, and less prone to corruption than the earlier manual methods of dealing with wages and other state payments.Despite the intention of producing a mechanism that would reduce corruption and theft, the GCCC believed that some officials were now manipulating e-SISTAFE in order to continue plundering the state. The GCCC has already alerted the Ministry to its fears.Gemo stressed that all efforts to transform the public sector into an effective instrument to improve living conditions must take the fight against corruption as their starting point, since corruption destabilizes institutions and destroys citizens’ trust in the State.“The social and economic cost of corruption is enormous”, she said. “It affects in an unjust and disproportionate manner the most vulnerable segments of the population”.In punishing the culprits, Gemo added, there should be no distinction between “grand” and “petty” corruption since both “should be fought against with the same vigour, intransigence and intolerance”.“If the State has given an undertaking to its people and to the world to fight against corruption, then all State bodies, of any kind, must find pragmatic ways of making this undertaking viable”, she declared.“The cure of this cancer requires strong treatment in order to destroy the virus”, said Gemo. “The treatment must be effective, otherwise the cancer may beat us”.