The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee had come down heavily for the office of the Directorate of Public Prosecutions accusing the office for frustrating the fight against corruption.

DPP Director Richard Butera

The DPP’s office has always been blamed for failure to prosecute people that are corrupt yet Parliament’s oversight committees like PAC always come with up reports which implicate some people for corruption and which the office of DPP can use to win cases of corruption against them in court but it is said that the DPP’s office never bothers to follow up some of these cases.

While speaking at Parliament the Chairperson of the committee, Nandala Mafabi has said that the committee did investigations on the Global Fund Scandal and it also recently carried out an investigation into the mismanagement of funds by some officials that were meant for the organization of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting but  few people have been prosecuted for being involved in such mismanagement of funds by government officials.

Mafabi says if Parliament carries out investigations on corruption scandals and the DPP frustrates the efforts of Parliament, then the office of the DPP will be doing the disservice to this country.

The Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Amos Ngolobi however says that it is not true that the DPP frustrates Parliaments efforts in the fight against corruption because sometimes it is circumstances beyond the control of the DPP’s office that make them fail to prosecute some of those corruption cases.

Ngolobi says for instance the institution is highly underfunded and this curtails their effectiveness in managing cases and is partly the reason why his office has not handled some of these cases on corruption.

He says besides his office has to gather enough evidence before it can prosecute anyone in court since it does not solely depend on the reports of parliament on corruption to prosecute suspects.

The fight against corruption has been criticized on the ground that it only manages to net the people that misappropriate little cash whereas those that are at the helm of mismanaging huge amounts of cash are left to go scot free thus the adage of the net that catches small fish but lets the big fish go through.

By Tiberindwa Zakaria, Ultimate Medaia