Maravi

Dora needs help

Dora needs help
Written by Editor

Rupiah Banda has been associated with the public service for a long time. He has seen careers built and seen others destroyed. At his age, Rupiah is not supposed to have problems distinguishing between right and wrong. When he does what is wrong, no one should excuse him because it is deliberate.

What Rupiah is doing to Dora Siliya is unfortunate, senseless and unforgivable. Rupiah has single-handedly decided to allow Dora to destroy herself and in the process, cost this country billions of kwacha.

If Rupiah was not selfish he would be protecting Dora, not by condoning her misdeeds but by ensuring she is not put in the position where power gets to her head.

Dora has become self-destructive. She needs help. It is clear she does not understand what her duties are as a minister. She is moving from being a policy formulator in Cabinet to an implementer. Dora feels so powerful that she appears determined to take over the functions of all her subordinates.

Dora has suddenly become all wise and all knowing. This is very dangerous. We are convinced that if she has not committed criminal offences in the last few months, she is very close to committing them.

Just the other day, we published a story about her behaviour regarding the Zamtel saga. In that case, she felt confident enough to override and ignore the mandatory legal advice from the Attorney General of the country. In that single act, Dora demonstrated a foolhardy disregard for common sense. Her know-it-all attitude is an unfortunate manifestation of immaturity and inexperience. She is on top of the world, doing things she never thought or imagined possible. This is why she needs help.

If Dora was doing the things she is doing in her mother’s house, it would be wrong to comment publicly about that behaviour. But she is doing the wrong things as our Minister for Transport and Communications. We would be reckless and irresponsible if we did not ask Rupiah and her Cabinet colleagues to stop this orgy of self-destruction.

We are still trying to understand what is going on. What makes a person so brave as to ignore the law and think that they can get away with it? It would be easy to understand what is going on if we did not have sufficient examples in our courts of law. There are now enough examples of public officers being prosecuted for the same type of abuse of office that Dora seems to be engaged in.

It seems there is a problem at every parastatal that Dora is overseeing and she does not seem to have the wisdom, experience and temperament to deal with the problems. The revelation today about her behaviour on the National Airports radar procurement would be funny if it was not tragic. Dora has either been sucked into a criminal conspiracy or she is so naïve that she is a danger to herself and the nation.

How can a minister override all her technical experts and start to personally procure radar equipment? When did Dora become an expert in aviation equipment? The correspondence that we have reviewed shows that the Zambia National Tender Board working with Dora’s technocrats in the ministry took many months to review the radar procurement requirements, invite tenders and finally award the tender.

In comes Dora, and in a period of a month, she receives an offer from the Italian company that supplied radar equipment that has been obsolete for 20 years, to fix it for free as we are told. This offer comes on the 5th of December 2008. On the 5th of January 2009, Dora directs her permanent secretary to re-issue the tender to eliminate middlemen. But on the 26th of January 2009, Dora personally accepts an offer from the Italian company that supplied us with obsolete equipment 20 years ago to come and fix it for free.

Any person with average intelligence will tell you that they can smell a rat. This deal stinks.

SELEX, the company that is now offering to repair our radar equipment for free, told the government in February last year that the current radar equipment is obsolete and should be replaced by one of their systems which should have cost our government 13.7 million Euros.

On the back of this advice, the government instituted formal tender processes. The Zambia National Tender Board advised the Ministry of Transport to follow open tender. This was duly done and SELEX is one of the companies that bought tender documents from the tender board. It is strange that SELEX never put in a bid after buying the tender documents and only emerged after the tender had been awarded, with an offer for free services.

As one of the technocrats in the ministry observed, the free offer was fraught with hidden costs. What has changed? In February last year, SELEX told government that the radar system at the airport could not be repaired and should be replaced by a 13.7 million Euro (about K100 billion) system. But now they are offering to fix it for free. Why should a company walk away from making K100 billion? There is a fraud somewhere here.

It is worrying that Dora seems determined to frustrate the open tender process. She seems to have a problem with transparency. Dora started off saying that the process that awarded the tender was not transparent and did not inspire confidence.

Then she said she wanted to get rid of middlemen. When she is shown that the company awarded is not a middleman, she just went ahead and retained SELEX without following any processes at all. Here is a person who was saying she wanted a process that would inspire confidence, turning around and single handedly picking SELEX in a process that does anything but inspire confidence.

Dora needs training in basic ethics and government processes or else her misbehaviour will land her very far. Why is everything now being single-sourced? Kasumbalesa, RP Capital and now SELEX. Maybe Rupiah is correct, Dora is very intelligent. But that is not the point. The things she is doing are wrong. Dora needs help.

Labels: DORA SILIYA, PRIVATISATION

posted by MrK @ 8:01 AM