Ports, airports and TOTAL money

Ports, airports and TOTAL money

Written by Observer   

  Hargeisa,(Qaran news)- For years opposition political parties and civil society activists accused senior government officials of using public funds as their own private treasure.  Every year, the executive and the legislature went through the motions of passing national budgets, usually after much acrimony, only for the executive to completely ignore the approved budget and go on its merry way spending or embezzling as they please with no real oversight.  The current Minister of Finance, Mohamed Hashi Elmi, has been singularly consumed with this malpractice.  Mr. Elmi even spent several months as a Minister of Commerce after Dahir Riyale Kahin was elected to the presidency in 2005, but lost his portfolio for insisting that all government revenue pass through the national treasury; something that did not please neither the President nor his Finance Minister.

Now Minister Elmi is at the wheel.  He wants to put things in order but is again finding road blocks in the form of other ministers wary of turning off the money spigot.  From reliable reports coming from the presidency he may be losing the battle again.

There are three areas of public revenue in play:  Port fees, airport fees and fuel tax collected by TOTAL, the French conglomerate that runs Somaliland's fuel depot in Berbera.  In the past, executive branch officers hemmed and hued and found every excuse to avoid appearing in front of the legislature.  Last week nothing-to-hide Mohamed Hashi Elmi met with and answered questions posed to him by a parliamentary subcommittee.  Reports from the subcommittee hearing, suggest that he gave details of the state of public finances and being a man who does not mince words, he reportedly called the new Minister of Ports and Marine Resources  "someone with an extra-Somaliland agenda".

A central theme of KULMIYE, the current ruling party, during many years in opposition, was the misuse of public funds by successive governments (Egal and Riyale).  KULMIYE promised to immediately bring Somaliland's financial house in order if elected to power, that all public funds will be properly collected, accounted for and spent in a manner consistent with best practices of budgetary rules.

The Observer has, however, learned that the ministers of Ports and Civil Aviation (two revenue generating agencies) have refused to turn fees collected by them to the national treasury.  According to these sources the two ministers won debates in cabinet after claiming that ports and airports are autonomous agencies.  Curiously, the debate on the status of the port was apparently settled when the Minister of Defense, who used to run the port of Mogadishu during the dying days of Siad Barre, argued in cabinet that the port of Mogadishu managed its own finances independently.  If it was so in Siad's regime, it must be the way to go.

Somaliland's ports or airports are not autonomous agencies.  They are run by government ministers and they should be under government budgetary rules.  They are not run by independent bodies that oversee their management, budgets, revenues and expenses.  All ministers and their ministries, including the agencies that come under them must conform to national budget rules.  If the government wants to turn the Berbera port and our airports into independent agencies, it can do so with the proper appointment of board of governors or directors.  Otherwise, there is no reason for a government minister to run his own treasury.  It is an invitation to corruption, unless of course that it is the intention and the old days of sacks of money being brought to the presidency in the dead of night are not over.

The Minister of Finance is reported to have told parliament that the two ministers insist that staff from their ministries collect port and airport fees.  Bringing an extra layer of functionaries is just a loophole to avoid best practices of accountability and transparency.

The Minister of Finance may have better luck with TOTAL.  TOTAL runs Somaliland's fuel depot.  Among its responsibilities is the collection of taxes on imported fuel.  In his hearing with the parliamentary subcommittee last week, Minister Elmi reported that that TOTAL  turned over to the Ministry of Finance approximately $131,000 in the past month.  The implication, intended or unintended, became that this was something new and a successful operation.  TOTAL is crying foul.  The Manager of TOTAL in Berbera says that TOTAL has been doing the same since 2004.  He has shown the Observer reams of canceled checks and receipts that TOTAL turns to customs officials in Berbera every 10 days, funds which are deposited in the Central Bank of Somaliland.  The manager argues that their responsibility ends there.  Once they turn the tax over, they cannot control how the government handles that money.  The Ministry of Finance can now manage this account properly.  Moreover, TOTAL's paper trail of past deposits could give government accounting officials the means to run down what exactly happened to all the funds received from TOTAL over the past 6 years.

Although opposition leaders have decried the agreement signed between TOTAL and Egals government, the late President Egal and his Foreign Minister at the time, were openly proud of bringing an international company to Somaliland. The agreement may be flawed, but knowledgeable visitors to the Berbera fuel depot attest to the fact the depot has been extensively improved by TOTAL and is run according to international standards. The same cannot be said of other agencies run by Somaliland authorities.  A major failure, which sadly hampers Somaliland's quest for international acceptance, remains the status of its proudly proclaimed "international airports", which are nothing but.  Nearly four years ago, the government started charging departing and arriving passengers $2 in extra fees for the improvement of the airport.  Apart from some landscaping, nothing of consequence has been done.  In the capital, the single runway is still too soft and short to accept heavy air craft and airline companies are forced to either go to Berbera or ferry passengers from Djibouti on old Soviet Union planes that should have been put to pasture decades ago.  What happened to all the fees collected by the Ministry of Civil Aviation?