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Sierra Leone’s parliament passed an anti-corruption law on Wednesday that provides for a special office with wide-ranging powers of investigation, Reuters reported.
Citing the government’s official gazette Reuters said the office, the Anti-Corruption Bureau, would investigate “instances of alleged or suspected corruption referred to it by any person or authority, or which may have come to its attention”.
While welcoming the law as an important tool in President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s crusade against corruption, the chairman of the Inter-religious Council of Sierra Leone, the Reverend Alimamy Koroma, told IRIN on Thursday the government should go further.
“We want in-built monitoring devices in any operation that is carried out and in government departments,” he said.
The bureau will be headed by a commissioner and a deputy, both to be appointed by the president, subject to parliamentary approval. President Kabbah has on numerous occasions pledged to uproot corruption, which was one of the reasons Foday Sankoh gave for starting his rebellion in 1991.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions