Councillors empowered to track corrupt mayors

50 females Councillors drawn from Councils in the Southwest Region have been armed with skills and techniques to track the management of their different Council budgets to ensure that such budgets are properly executed.

The Councillors were trained during a two-day workshop which ended on Friday, January 23 in Limbe.

During the opening of the session, the Director of the Centre for the Assistance to Justice and Development, CAJAD, Tchepnang, said, “ We are not training you to go and challenge your Mayors.”

He said the Councillors were simply being given knowledge and skills that will empower them to be able to subtly point out the mistakes they find their Mayors or Council Executives making with regards to the execution of budget, or when they are trying to misappropriate money belonging to the people.

Susan Awasom, a Trainer at the Local Government Training Centre, CEFAM, lectured the participants on what a council budget is.

According to her, a council budget is not the Mayor’s budget. She emphasised that, once a budget which is a bundle of activities that a Council plans to carry out during a specific time frame has been voted, it becomes “the law” and cannot be changed by a mayor.

She said the Councillors should know that the Mayor has no right to change a finance head after the council’s budget has been voted without the authorisation of the SDO who is the supervisory authority. She said, if such a case arises, it is a violation of the law and Councillors have the right to hold such a Mayor to account for that.

She also outlined different kinds of budgets such as the line item budget, which is the common type used by most councils today. She however, stated that the programme or performance based budgeting will, in the next five years, become the norm, as it is encouraged by the international community.

Ace Journalist, Victor EpieNgome, who was also one of the facilitators of the workshop, schooled the Councillors on their rights and duties as far as the budget is concerned.

“The Councillor has the right to “reject any municipal decision which is not in the best interest of the community,” he said.

Therese Njamgue also talked on the need for transparency in the management of Councils funds. Transparency, she said, “is essential for stakeholders, since it creates an environment of trust and openness, which results in collaboration and partnership in addressing local challenges. Transparency provides the much-needed checks and balances against corruption and the misuse of public assets.”

The workshop was presided over by the 2nd Assistant SDO for Fako, Vincent Nafongo, who lauded the efforts of CAJAD for organising the workshop. He said it was imperative for Councillors to be armed with such skills because there were cases of contractors who have abandoned projects in certain municipalities because there was nobody to properly follow up on the execution of such contracts.

One of the facilitators at the workshop, Francis Anu, treated the participants to the different tools Councillors need to use to keep an extra eye on how their Mayors are using the people’s money.

According to Tchepnang, “The women have proven to be managers of small home budgets and given their track records in doing so, they stand a better chance of checking Mayors, an office that is predominantly occupied by men in the Southwest Region.”