The Pastures of Corruption..!

By Al-Tahir Satti

They once asked a man the name of his horse. The horse had no name, so the man paused, thought deeply, then went to the stable and gouged out one of its eyes. He returned proudly and answered: “Its name is One-Eyed.”

This, almost exactly, is the state of the Prime Minister’s office when it issues what it called a “decision” to subject public sector companies—those in which the government holds shares—to the supervision of the Ministry of Finance, both financially and administratively, and to establish a new unit within the ministry to be responsible for such oversight.

There is no meaning or real benefit to either the decision or the new unit—unless the intent is mere self-praise and appearance.

In truth, this country has long had laws, regulations, and mechanisms designed to bring public sector companies under government oversight. But unfortunately, those laws and regulations are frozen and paralyzed. Instead of issuing flashy decisions like “I decided”—as if to say “I exist”—the better course would have been to activate and enforce these existing mechanisms. Proving one’s presence is fine, but it should be through real action, not symbolic directives and empty decrees.

In any case, there is already a legal clause requiring that any company in which the public owns at least 20% of the shares must have its accounts audited by the National Audit Chamber.

So, the better path is to enforce the law and bring these companies under proper audit and accountability. That means reviving the Audit Chamber, which effectively died on December 19, 2019. Yes, the authority and relevance of the Audit Chamber have faded; its reports disappeared from public view from the time of the “catastrophe” (2019) until today. Even the so-called “Path Correction” process did not include restoring the role of the Audit Chamber. If any reports exist, they are hidden away in military drawers or in the hands of political activists from that period.

In contrast, during the so-called “former regime,” October of every year was when the Audit Chamber’s reports were publicly presented—through Parliament and the media.

So, the Audit Chamber must be revived to audit government-owned or government-participating companies. After reviewing them, the state should move to eliminate these holdings altogether. Most of what is called “government companies” are hotbeds of corruption, not sources of revenue for the national treasury. They’re nothing but private fiefdoms where a few roam freely without oversight or accountability.

Since the time of al-Bashir, successive decisions were made to dismantle them, but they were never implemented. Every year, al-Bashir issued one or more decisions to liquidate these dens of corruption—and nothing ever happened.

During Hamdok’s era, Mohammed Al-Ghali, head of the committee tasked with reviewing and auditing government companies, announced that the government intended to dissolve 105 out of 431 companies because they weren’t contributing profits to the national treasury. He explicitly said: “80% of government companies do not support the public budget.” Yet, this threat was never followed through.

This is the state of companies affiliated with civilian government institutions: their capital sources are unknown, as are their profits. When Hamdok and his forty activists failed to understand or dismantle these companies, rather than admit defeat, they deflected public attention to the military-owned companies.

Yes, they kept the public focused on military companies while the civilian companies—under their very feet—remained financially opaque and mysterious in function. Their interest in military companies had nothing to do with reform or economic development, as they claimed. Rather, it was to destroy them, just as they had done with Meeco Poultry and hundreds of other companies, factories, and projects they seized—to loot, extort, and ruin.

Meeco Poultry, for example, produced 65% of Khartoum’s poultry consumption before it was confiscated by the shadowy committee member Babiker Faisal, who handed it over to the opportunist Salah Manaa, who then appointed his brother-in-law Sami Bella as director. By the time they fled after October 25, the company’s production had dropped to below 10%.