Traditional Authorities Act needs urgent overhaul

BAB KHARAS WRITES:

There are so many loopholes and shortcomings in this Act because the lawmakers didn’t know about and didn’t expect challenges nowadays. 

It started like a love relationship. Those challenges will only be overcome through amendment of the Act.

Otherwise, it will end up being a “blame game of forth and back” of accusations and counter-accusations without uniting the respective traditional communities. 

Equally, there are constant excuses of the “law is silent” on this and that. Coming to the establishment of Community Trust Funds, nowhere in that law is there a provision made for internal auditing. In fact, internal auditing of whose funds? 

First and foremost, the composition of those Community Trust Funds is wrong and illegal, because in many instances it is the very same Traditional Leaders alone who are the Board of Trustees. Meaning that the referee is the same player, so what do you expect?

There’s absolutely no room for public scrutiny of their own resources and funds. They must be involved in terms of the very same Act, but they are deliberately excluded to make room for misappropriation and squandering of public funds. Furthermore, I would disagree with Hon. Minister Sankwasa on following the prescribed processes and due procedures to be followed to designate a chief or headman.

I’m well aware of the same cases where the designations were submitted through the respective Governors’ offices, especially in the south and at the end both them and former Ministers were reportedly misled. 

The Minister shouldn’t appoint Chiefs for the traditional communities, but give them a specified time frame to designate, appoint or elect a successor. Some community members have allies, allegiance, relatives and comrades within the Ministry with whom they are committing those heinous crimes.

That is disheartening and perturbing in nature, because the disunity, traditional conflicts and leadership crises among the respective traditional communities become an in-house crime being orchestrated by civil servants. Amend the law in such a way that the respective traditional communities can remove the Traditional leaders; otherwise, it will give the line minister endless headaches.

At the same time, the Government is allowing embezzlement of public funds and resources to continue unhindered, whilst the communities are crying outside. The moment the financial books of all the Traditional Authorities are audited by the Auditor-General’s office, you will see how many traditional leaders will be arrested by ACC. 

However, there’s a continued political camaraderie and deception among politicians and some politically untouchable traditional leaders, simply because of party affiliation. They will get away scot-free with murder.  So, in essence, let’s get back to the amendment of the Act to resolve all this mess of “unfinished chieftain successions, no audited financial reports, no feedback meetings and above all squandering of funds meant for socio-economic development and social upliftment”.

Addendum to the Article: Why should the Government keep traditional leaders on its payroll, who are not performing at all? What’s more corruption than, if you are paying allowances to non-performing traditional councillors…!

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