The ACC’s interactive meeting with the media 

By Daily Revelation Editor

We wish to commend the leadership at the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) for availing themselves before the media yesterday and taking the hard questions.

We noticed that there were concerted attempts by the leadership at the commission to respond to the many questions that were posed yesterday, some of them really hard questions.

Even if the responses were not to the full satisfaction of what the public expected in terms of the answers, particularly over the same old announcement of investigations against current serving ministers and other senior government officials, at least there was an openess to respond to questions. For instance, the commission informed that one case against Solicitor General Marshal Muchende had been closed for lack of evidence, while confirming at the same time that investigations in the other were ongoing. ACC head of investigations Raymond Chiboola announced the same in respect of permanent secretaries in the Ministry of Information and Media and Central Province, Thabo Kawana and Milner Mwanakampwe, respectively.

The commission promised that such interactive engagements with the media would continue. It is certainly our wish that they will live up to that promise as such open engagements by a key institution such as them are what this nation needs. Institutions of governance should certainly be more accessible to the people for whom they were established in the first place.

However, while praising the commission for the initiative and attempts to respond even to the hardest of questions, there was still a lingering feeling that there is still a lot of inertia in terms of them pursuing alleged corruption involving serving senior government officials. The furthest ACC and other investigative agencies go is usually just confirming or announcing the ongoing investigations, which usually never materialise beyond that stage.

The ACC for instance announced over a year ago that they were investigating several ministers and other senior government officials. The nation would surely have expected them to announce the further progress they had made on those investigations. Alas, apart from ACC board chairman Evans Hamaundu indicating that they had closed one of the cases they were investigating Muchende on, with investigations ongoing in the other, there was very little in terms of the progress on the same probe plus the many others they said they were carrying out. And one year since the announcement about investigating ministers, there was still not a mention of any of the ministers that were under probe one year down the line. It surely can’t be that there has been no progress on any of the cases the commission has been investigating. And one may even wonder if these are forever investigations that won’t yield anything tangible beyond the word.

Asked on what progress the commission had made in probes against ministers, and if they could at least give the number of those they were investigating since they could not announce the names, Hamaundu simply repeated the same old song of saying that the commission was still investigating some cabinet ministers and Muchende.

“We have received a number of complaints and investigations are being done. We can’t mention names now because it will be taken out of context but we will release the names when we reach a certain stage,” said Hamaundu.

The nation surely expects progress reports from the commission at the next interactive meeting.