Fia i Rwanda: Wednesday 17 feb – Visit to the parliament

Today was the day the Office of the Auditor General (OAG), Riksrevisionen in Swedish, presented their report to the parliament for the year of 2008. It had been delayed for a number of reasons but now it was finally finished. Sida has had a long and rather broad cooperation with this institution so we had an interest in the results presented. We have both been a big donor money wise and there has also been an institutional cooperation between the OAG and the Swedish counterpart Riksrevisionen. This cooperation was however terminated in 2008.

We went four people from the office for the presentation and it was quite interesting when we arrived. First of all we had trouble finding the plenary hall where the presentation would be held. We asked several people who worked there and were directed in the wrong direction twice. Nobody seemed to know where it was! Confusion as usual… Finally we asked the right person and found out that it was actually very near the entrance where we came in. Anyway we found out that they had changed the time to one hour later and had to wait. To pass the time we went to the canteen to have a cup of coffee. Something very common here is that the guards do their washing when they’re at work and even at the parliament someone had hung their wet laundry to dry outside on a fence. I found that amusing and quite cute!

When the plenary meeting finally commenced it was very interesting. Unfortunately for me, the meetings in the parliament are usually in kinyarwanda but we had an interpreter with us so we understood the bigger picture even if we didn’t get all the details. I’m ashamed to say that I fell asleep after about ten minutes. This is not that uncommon for me and I was so very tired after the move yesterday. I did however get a briefing of what was said afterwards. On a positive note the OAG’s report was very critical and thorough. Sadly though, they did find a lot of problems, corruption and embezzlement especially. Even though Rwanda has worked very hard on reducing corruption for several years now, according to the report, there was no decrease of embezzlement compared to the previous year. The report was very tough and ambitious and named all the public institutions that had money not accounted for and even stated the exact amounts that had been lost. This is a good sign in the sense that the OAG is doing their job, and are doing it well. It is however troubling that the problems are as big as they are. We would much rather have seen an improvement.