News (?) from Africa: Ebola aid money gone missing

What's wrong with Africa? Why is it that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa are, almost without exception, worse off now than they were in the bad old days when the white colonists ran things? Agent 3, who is by way of being an OAH (Old Africa Hand) says the answer is simple. Africans don't know how to run a railroad, or anything else. And they steal. Incompetence and corruption, he says, are the twin scourges of the Dark Continent, and will ever be so.

Case in point: Sierra Leone, one of the west African countries worst affected by the Ebola plague. Almost 23,000 people have been infected since the outbreak in neighbouring Guinea in December 2013. 9000 have died. The good-hearted (and guilt-ridden) governments of Europe and North America pledged some £2.9 billion in aid, of which about 40% actually reached the affected countries.

Why have some of the donors held back on actually signing the cheques? Perhaps the answer has something to do with what happens to the aid money when it gets to Africa. An audit of Sierra Leone's Ebola funds have not been properly accounted for. According to an official report published today, 25 billion leones (= £3.7 million of US$5.7 million) was paid from various emergency accounts with no proper receipts or other supporting documentation.

Sierra Leone's national audit service said the country's health ministry had showed "complete disregard" for the law in its disbursement of emergency funds. The 25 billion leones not properly accounted for amounted to no less than a third of the 84 billion paid out by the health ministry between the beginning of the outbreak in Sierra Leone in May 2014, and the end of October.

Of the 25 billion leones -- the name means "lions", by the way -- 14 billion was completely unaccounted for and 11 billion only partially accounted for, according to the report. What the auditors called "lapses" in the financial management of the funds resulted in a loss of quality in the treatment of the disease.

The audit team said the health ministry failed to produce documentation for contract agreements for the purchase of 50 vehicles and ambulances. They also pointed out large gaps in the serial numbers listed for frontline health workers as "possible misappropriation" of hazard payments.

Frontline workers like those in the picture are eligible for extra hazard pay to compensate for the risk of infection. But the auditors' review of such payments at the Connaught Hospital revealed that soldiers and police officers were included on the list of eligible health workers, in spite of the fact that hazard funds had already been transferred to both forces separately. In other words, it looks like the workers got paid twice. Either that or the paymasters pocketed the extra.

The audit service has submitted the report to parliament for action, but are not holding their collective breath. As the OAHs say, MAWA -- "Mother Africa Wins Again".