We have waited, we have watched, we have tried to figure out why since the audit of government accounts for 2012 was made public, none of the sewer rats extolling the virtues of the King Rat and who see no wrong in his manipulation of Parliament and the Judiciary, have commented on the massive thieving going on in the affairs of state.

We can only come to the very painful conclusion that since they are all beneficiaries of the thieving machine, they dare not make a squeak in that direction lest they lose their part of the loot. Rather than tell their overlords that the thieving would in the end lead the country to the same state that the country would never want to tread again, the pay-as-you-go writers, refuse to acknowledge that the massive thieving now going on could lead to one and only one thing - the disintegration of community, region and state with dire consequences for all innocent Sierra Leoneans who continue to suffer in silence and are not a part of the state resources plundering machine oiled and kept running from the heart of State House itself.

You would think it is the God-given right of King Rat and his caboodle to steal, steal and steal. That they are not accountable to anyone not even their conscience, assuming there's any left in the pool of moral bankruptcy in which they swim exposing their ill-gotten wealth. The reckless spending of the peoples' resources and wealth highlighted in audit reports, like this AUDITOR GENERAL’S REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF OVERSEAS MISSIONS AND HIGH COMMISSIONS FOR THE PERIOD 1ST JANUARY 2003 TO 31ST DECEMBER 2010 and the failure to hold those responsible to account shows all too clearly that the smoke and mirrors State House occupant does not care about such reports and so it was with quite some interest when we heard that he was trying to make good on Sierra Leone's suspension from the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. Why the suspension?

Again the government and the various functionaries simply cannot figure out their basic arithmetic and this from a rat who once headed an insurance body that did simple and somehow complex sums that determined just how much the insured should pay on a monthly or yearly basis or whatever time reference in question. In the EITI all that is being asked for is transparency and some honesty in reporting what is paid into government coffers by the various industries - and this is not confined to mining alone as oil blocks sales and allied fields appear to be yielding more money into the coffers (read thieving paws of the rat of a President).

On the website of EITI there's an interesting report for Wednesday January 22 with the headline - "Big jump in revenues from Sierra Leone's extractives sector" with the sweetener that "revenues are up by almost four times but remain a small part of the economy".

Here's a part of that revealing report - "Although revenues from the oil, gas and mining sector in Sierra Leone in 2011 remained less than 1% of GDP, they are growing fast – from US $7.5 in 2010 to US $27m in 2011. Previous EITI reports had shown no increase in revenues between 2006 and 2010, so the increase in 2011 is significant with signature bonuses in the oil and gas sector being the major component. In 2011 oil and gas revenues outstripped mining revenues for the first time. Though still small, revenues from oil, gas and mining are forecast to grow to up to 17% of GDP by 2020. These figures were disclosed as part of Sierra Leone’s implementation of the EITI Standard.

Implementation of the EITI requires full disclosure of payments made by oil, gas and mining companies to the government. The report discloses that the four oil and gas companies in the country - Talisman, Lukoil, Anadarko, and European Hydrocarbon – accounted for over US $15m revenues, of which almost US $14m was paid in signature bonuses. Talisman alone generated over a third of total government revenue from the extractive sector. In addition, the 21 mining companies – dealing in gold, diamonds, bauxite, iron ore and rutile - provided a further US $12m. Sierra Leone was temporarily suspended by the EITI Board in February 2013 for failure to achieve EITI compliance following two validations, which is the quality control mechanism of the EITI. This report seeks to address the main corrective actions agreed by the Board before lifting the suspension. The report is now being assessed by the International Secretariat in order to make a recommendation on whether to proceed with a full Secretariat Review."

And then we read that the rat launched a report in Freetown on January 14 (SIERRA LEONE EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES TRANSPARENCY INITIATIVE (SLEITI) RECONCILIATION REPORT FOR THE YEAR 2011) which appears to be an attempt by the government to explain/reduce the gap between what was paid into government coffers by the extractive companies and what was reported by the government. As usual, the rat's speech is long on promises but always short of delivery - a trade mark of the smoke and mirrors exponent. Who can believe this from him -

"My government is committed to avoiding the negative consequences by ensuring that the natural resource wealth of this country is harnessed responsibly and for the benefit of all Sierra Leoneans"? How many Sierra Leoneans can he say are benefiting from the country's natural resources? If you ask him, without blinking an eyelid, he'll blurt out "everybody" meaning he and his thieving cabal.  

It is so simple an arithmetic. If the extractive companies have it on their books that they paid x amount of dollars to government, the government must show on its books that it received x such amount - nothing more nothing less. But where you have differences running into millions of dollars, then questions have to be asked and that was how our poor rich country got suspended - for those in authority just do no believe in the truth never mind the fact that they have not told the people what the money accruing from this sector is being used for. Surely not for the purchase of more war weapons, we hope and we still have to see how such funds are used in the interest of the people, especially those affected by the operations of the various exploitative extractive industries.

To get things going and get the records straight, the government employed a UK-based accounting firm audit company Moore Stephens to go through the books of the Sierra Leone Chapter of the EITI appropriately named Sierra Leone Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative and it is worth noting this bit in the recommendations contained in that report.