Maravi

Abuse of office removal will only serve criminals - Nkole

Abuse of office removal will only serve criminals - Nkole
By Kombe Chimpinde
Sun 21 Nov. 2010, 04:01 CAT

Maxwell Nkole has observed that the removal of the abuse of office offence is the government’s calculated move to shield culprits.

In an interview, Nkole - who is former Task Force on Corruption chairman - said the removal of the abuse of office offence from the ACC Act was retrogressive because the police had no capacity to enforce it.

“This is why the past governments applied specialised skills in investigating and prosecuting such type of crimes by introducing a desperate law under ACC,” Nkole said.

Nkole, a researcher at Cardiff University, said that abuse of office was a very sophisticated, tedious and hidden crime that required specialised laws under specialised agencies other than the police to trace. He dismissed the government’s claims that there were other laws that could curb the vice, stressing that section 37 was the best deterrent to abuse of office.

“It was on this law that the Task Force recovered a number of properties that were stolen from Zambians. People knew investigators would come sniffing whenever they suspected anything about a public official,” Nkole said.

He said it was frustrating that the Task Force that spearheaded the fight against corruption had been perceived as an academic exercise by the current regime.

“The whole dissolution of the Task Force, the removal of the abuse of office doesn’t make sense. To me it’s just a calculated move for government to ensure that certain individuals who are suspect to office abuse go scot-free,” said.

“I think they were a lot of recoveries we made and those we were in the process of finding. There was a directive from the late Mwanawasa for money from indisposed properties to be used for building district hospitals. Now we don’t know if those policies have been adhered to. If Task Force was still in place, I feel the country would have recovered stolen funds.”

Labels: ACC, MAXWELL NKOLE

posted by MrK @ 1:42 AM