Defence minister Rear Admiral Peter Hafeni Vilho has exposed in parliament what can be considered to be a bad relationship between him and Auditor General Junias Kandjeke.
The minister has accused Kandjeke of seeking to spy on the military by requesting to get information on the fighting capabilities of fighter jets to be included in an audit.
Vilho said he refused to avail this citing that it was confidential.
“What does this request amount to? Is this really an audit report? Yes, what does a performance audit have to do with capabilities of fighter jets? Why would you want to release that information in public? In my response dated 4th October 2019 I refused to provide additional information as requested because of my training and understanding that this amounted to daylight espionage.
And this is my response to them, from the defence and security perspective the details of the information that are contained in the report are what is deemed sufficient for public consumption and the rest being confidential. The information you are seeking unfortunately falls in the confidential category and therefore cannot be availed.
The minister also told parliament that the auditor general has been failing to meet up with him in 2019 and later got his attention when he refused to avail the needed information by coping the Prime Minister in a letter.
He said when the AG finally responded to him, he only provided important detail on his power as defence minister to request for an exemption from the president for certain items not to be made public.
Vilho said, “He eventually wrote me a long later dated 11 October. Since I asked him in February, the first time he responded to me was on the 11th of October 2019 the content of which in the main, was meant to intimidate than to inform”.
Vilho said the AG, in his response letter, quoted for him articles of the constitution to demonstrate “how powerful he was”.
“In our response to the AG dated the 31st of October 2019, we indicated to him that the minister will indeed proceed to request the president for an exemption as advised. However, while the process of exemption is ongoing, the information requested will be withheld and access to operational bases as opposed to logistics and support bases is withdrawn,” said the defence minister.
The minister said on the 20th of November 2019, he eventually wrote to the president requesting for an exemption to the auditing of the performance information and access to operational bases.
“In conclusion, in summary, until 2017, the auditor general would perform only one type of audit, that is a financial audit which they performed without obstruction. In 2018, at the behest of the office of the Prime Minister, another audit was introduced, that is the compliance with the performance information audit which they equally performed without hindrance.
However, all we requested the AG is not to release the other part of the information in the public domain. But like I said before, they ignored us anyway and published the information. Now come the next financial year, 2019, when they requested us for the information on the performance audit, we only furnished them with information we considered non-confidential. When they insisted on having the confidential part of the information, we refused and barred them from visiting operational bases.”
To applause from the benches, the said, “we would rather have an adverse opinion than release that information”.
Defence minister exposes bad relationship with Auditor General in parliament
