By Deogratias Mmana:
The outgoing European Union (EU) Ambassador to Malawi Rune Skinnebach has said the fight against corruption has not improved in Malawi despite the support of the intentional community.
He has since left the ball in the hands of Malawians to change the trajectory.
Skinnebach, who has ended his four-year tenure, said development partners could only support initiatives that are there to fight the vice.
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He cited the empowerment of the Anti Corruption Bureau.
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The envoy said there was nobody in the country who was leading by example to fight corruption.
Skinnebach said this in an exclusive interview at his residence in Lilongwe.
“In Malawi, you cannot simply fight corruption. It is dramatic to see schools are not up to the level, hospitals are very rudimentary; we don’t have enough medicine and this is public money that is disappearing from the social sector and going to corruption. This is disaster for Malawi,” Skinnebach said.
The envoy said corruption in Malawi was at all levels, with nobody seen to crack it down.
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“My Malawian friends said it is normal if I am stopped by a policeman just to pay some Fanta money and I move on. So, corruption is at all levels. The Fanta money is at the bottom but at the high level we see that institutions, who are people, are not successfully acting on big corruption cases. So, there is nobody leading by excellence. There is nobody who can claim that they are doing what is necessary to fight corruption,” Skinnebach said.
“We [development partners] can only do what we do. We can only support the Anti Corruption Bureau. We can speak out when there are some big cases but it is up to you, Malawians, to change the situation, not us,” the ambassador said.
Skinnebach’s sentiments align with concerns raised by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in their recent statement of June, in which the commission decried endemic corruption and the erosion of good governance under the Tonse Alliance administration.
The commission further said Malawi’s standing in international corruption indices reflects a worrying reality as, in the latest Transparency International rankings, Malawi scored only 34 percent, placing the country among the most corruption-challenged nations globally.
On Wednesday, acting ACB director general Hillary Chilomba defended the bureau, saying the bureau continued busting corruption in accordance with the law.
Minister of Information and Digitalisation Moses Kunkuyu, who is also the government official spokesperson, has always defended the current administration from attacks that it is not fighting corruption.
Kunkuyu is on record having said that the Tonse administration has been supporting the ACB by, among other things, providing additional funding and recruiting lawyers to make it more efficient.
