LILONGWE-(MaraviPost)-Millions of US dollars went missing from the budget, the official tasked to fight corruption was in hospital with three bullets in his head and the president admitted that even she didn’t know where all the money had gone.
It sounded like the plot of a drama, but for Joyce Banda, president of Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest countries, discovering the fate of millions of donor dollars was of crucial importance to an economy worth just over $3.7bn a year.
Malawi lost millions to corruption
“It is a national tragedy,” Ms Banda said in an interview in Lilongwe, the capital, about the “cash-gate” corruption scandal that erupted in September and had already led to two senior ministers losing their jobs.
“The looting of government money has been going on for the last 15 years and this is a president that has decided that it has to stop,” she told the Financial Times. However, critics contended that some money disappeared on her watch and she was slow to act.
Western donors, who provided about 40 per cent of the country’s budget, stopped payments worth US$150 million, ratcheting up pressure on Banda to tackle graft.
In November 2014, a junior civil servant was sentenced to prison on in the financial scandal dubbed “Cashgate” that saw millions of dollars looted from the impoverished Malawi government.
A magistrate in Lilongwe, sentenced Victor Sithole to nine years imprisonment with hard labor, court records said. Sithole, 28, was an accounts assistant in the Malawian government in 2013 when he was found with about US$66,000 cash in American, South African and Malawian currency.
An investigation led by then president Joyce Banda revealed that he was one of dozens of civil servants who had siphoned about 24 billion kwacha or U$60 million in government funds.
Malawi was home to more than 16 million people at that time, more than half of whom lived below the poverty line according to the World Bank.
When the scandal was publicized, foreign donors announced that they would freeze aid worth millions of dollars until those responsible were prosecuted.
