Concealing Fiscal Costs: How Sierra Leone’s Single Treasury Account leads to Unauthorized Public Spending

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Originally published by Africanist Press www.africanistpress.com

By Chernoh Alpha M. Bah, Matthew Anderson & Mark Feldman

In the first two articles of our Sierra Leone investigation series, we highlighted the existing disparities in the national salary structure and how the payroll has widened since Maada Bio assumed power two years ago. We pointed out the explosive increase of almost 45% in the wage bill in the last two years from less than Le170 billion when Koroma left power to a whopping Le235.2 billion today. We observed that this astronomical increase is triggered largely by the overflowing appointment of leading SLPP party loyalists into high paying administrative positions in the civil and public service workforce.

We showed how salaries of partisan compensation jobs across all sectors of government account for the majority of the wage bill increase. We also highlighted another major public expenditure burden: the use of international official travels, especially those associated with presidential delegations, to financially reward SLPP party loyalists and new political appointees with huge per diems and travel opportunities. In future publications of this series, we will quantify the huge monetary deductions and revenue losses resulting from overhead expenditures and the ways they have added fiscal pressure on the country’s Consolidated Revenue Fund.

The president’s decision to implement a single treasury account and his order to centralize all government revenue mobilization and expenditure in the hands of his Finance Minister, Jacob Jusu Saffa created a non-transparent and unaccountable mechanism in the management of public finance and national revenue allocations.

In this article, however, we unearth another aspect of corruption in public finance management under the Bio regime, namely the use of off-budget expenditure without scrutiny. We show how off-budgetary expenditure and frivolous public spending have intensified following the president’s April 9, 2018 executive order on revenue mobilization. We observed that the president’s decision to implement a single treasury account and his order to centralize all government revenue mobilization and expenditure in the hands of his Finance Minister, Jacob Jusu Saffa created a non-transparent and unaccountable mechanism in the management of public finance and national revenue allocations. Our investigation discovers, in particular, that the creation of a centralized public finance mechanism, revolving around the presidency and the finance ministry, has enabled top finance officials in the Finance Ministry and those in the President’s Office to freely and frivolously disperse, dispense, and utilize national revenue and resources to fund non-budgetary and overhead activities often authorized by the presidency.

Over the course of the investigation, we found evidence of widespread use of unchecked spending and financial allocations to fund non-budgetary and overhead activities, especially those relating to the operations and activities of the First Lady. This situation, we discovered, is made possible by the president’s aforementioned executive order to establish a single treasury account, which removed the previously existing fiscal authority and oversight of government ministries, agencies, and departments. Documentary evidence acquired during our investigation clearly illustrate how this single treasury account has not only centralized government revenue collection and dispensation in the hands of the Finance Ministry, but has also facilitated surreptitious disbursements of state revenues and contracts to close relatives of the president and to non-state institutions including, especially, the Office of the First Lady.

For the two-day launching ceremony of the Hands Off Our Girls Campaign, we collected documents confirming the disbursement of a total sum of Le3,116,755,000 provided by the Ministry of Finance to the First Lady’s Office.

Documents examined by the Africanist Press reveal how the Finance Ministry provided regular funds to the Office of the First Lady, a non-statutory institution, on instructions from the Office of the President. For instance, we discovered that the activities of the First Lady’s “Hands Off Our Girls Campaign” received more than 50% of its operational and overhead budgetary expenditure between December 2018 and December 2019 from the Consolidated Revenue Fund. Our investigation tracked, for example, a total sum of about Le15 billion of direct government funding disbursed from the Ministry of Finance to the Office of the First Lady to meet operational and overhead costs of the First Lady’s Office. We examined, in particular, official correspondences between officials of the President’s Office, the Finance Ministry, and the First Lady’s Office regarding requests for funds and the speedy administrative authorizations and disbursements of such funds in ways that are uncharacteristic of the usual bureaucratic timelines associated with government financial processing. Civil servants we interviewed during our investigation confirm that while Finance Ministry records of these funding requests and disbursements do exist, there is a seeming lack of detailed records and accounting statements in the First Lady’s Office regarding the precise expenditure details on how these allocated state funds have been utilized.

Officials in the president’s office, in particular Bockarie Momoh Foh, wrote on behalf of the president’s secretary, to the Admin and Finance Officer of the First Lady confirming the allocation of the state funds to the First Lady’s Office.

These funds include monies disbursed for the two-day launching ceremony of the “Hands Off Our Girls Campaign”, diverse funds for the erection of hundreds of the campaign’s billboards, funds geared towards meeting costs related to the national tour of the First Lady, and payments for public awareness. For the launching ceremony of the “Hands Off Our Girls Campaign”, we collected documents confirming the disbursement of a total sum of Le3,116,755,000 provided by the Ministry of Finance just for the two-day launching ceremony. Evidence in our possession shows that the said funds were requested by officials of the president’s office, in particular correspondences between Bockarie Momoh Foh, writing on behalf of the president’s secretary, to the Admin and Finance Officer of the First Lady confirming the allocation of the funds. These repeated requests and disbursements to the First Lady’s Office do not include regular monthly payments to meet operational and other overhead costs, including staff salaries, of the First Lady’s Office. The Office’s staff salaries range between Le50,120,000 and Le54,000,000.

We tabulated the total amounts of government funding – including the more than Le3.1 billion spent on the two-day launching event – and discovered that at least Le5,827,080.000 of government funds were disbursed to the First Lady during the first two months following the campaign’s launch. The total amount of money allocated to the First Lady for the two-day launching ceremony of the “Hands Off Our Girls Campaign” alone, for instance, is four times more than the combined annual salaries of all 40 of the Senior Procurement Officers in the Public Procurement Department assigned across all ministries, agencies, and departments. With monthly salaries between Le1,420,076 and 1,624,763, the total combined salaries of all 40 Senior Procurement Officers in the national workforce is Le56,803,146 monthly.

The total amount of money allocated to the First Lady for the two-day launching ceremony of the Hands Off Our Girls Campaign alone is four times more than the combined annual salaries of all 40 of the Senior Procurement Officers in the Public Procurement Department assigned across all government ministries, agencies, and departments.

Our investigation also uncovered that this massive overhead and operational costs of the Office of the First Lady has not only added a fiscal burden on state revenue, but it has negatively impacted the operational relevance and budgetary allocation to the Gender Ministry and other departments and agencies. Civil Servants complain that activities of the First Lady’s Office are crowding out the relevant line ministries, whose sectoral funding appears to be diverted to fund the campaigns of the First Lady. These civil servant concerns related to the overshadowing of the Gender Ministry, along with the frivolous nature of spending and budgetary allocations for the “Hands Off Our Girls Campaign”, in particular, highlight the questionable motivations and execution of what, on the surface, appears to be an admirable campaign to promote gender equality.

Apart from these overheads and non-budgetary spending towards the First Lady’s Office, we also discovered that the new centralized fiscal authority accorded to the finance minister equally enables the awarding of untendered government contracts to close friends and relatives of the president. Within three months of the president’s order to centralize government revenue mobilization, for example, a timber export monopoly license was awarded to Leadway Trading Company, making the company the sole agent for all timber exports from Sierra Leone without any tender or bidding. Our investigation reveals that Leadway Trading Company is in fact managed principally by Babadi Kamara, a business associate of the president. Finance officials we interviewed during our investigation expressed disbelief that Leadway Trading and Babadi Kamara were made sole agents for all timber exports from Sierra Leone without a competitive bidding process. Our investigation discovered that Babadi Kamara helped to raise campaign funds for the election of Maada Bio in 2018. Quite interestingly, Leadway’s contract assignment was initially only granted temporarily for the shipment of existing timber deposits at the Freetown Port and other depots across the country (an estimated 13,000 containers). Yet, the company’s export contract was again renewed by State House in February 2020, eighteen months after it was first granted, without a competitive bidding or tender process. A recent government press statement acknowledged the payment of US$37,140,000 from Leadway Trading but provided no details on how much each exported container was sold, neither has there been a disclosure on Leadway’s total profit from the shipments over the eighteen months.

Leadway Trading and Babadi Kamara were made sole agents for all timber exports from Sierra Leone without a competitive bidding process.

Thus, contrary to Bio’s pledge to curb financial indiscipline and limit waste in government spending, we note that frivolous public spending and off-budgetary and overhead expenditures have increased over the last two years, with huge amounts being spent on domestic and international travels of the presidency and on funding support for the Office of the First Lady. We also find previous and recent media statements by the First Lady denying receipt of state funding to be undeniably false. We conclude that the establishment, through executive order, of a largely unchecked public spending account in the hands of the Finance Minister has enabled the opaque disbursement of public funds without the necessary oversight from other government institutions nor the public. The result has been a troubling rise in nepotism and non-scrutinized access to state funding by the First Lady and some business friends of the president. In subsequent articles of this series, we will continue our examination of the diverse ways the centralization of government revenue mobilization and spending masks non-scrutinized spending and financial waste.

We have published above a sample of correspondences and documents to illustrate the evidence upon which this analysis is based.