The Mayor of Kigali was put to task to explain accusations in an audit report of huge posting errors by the city to the tune of Rwf800 million.

While the last Auditor-General’s Report for 2012-2013 has recommended to many public entities expeditious improvement on matters related to misposting, the City of Kigali was yet to come clean on book-keeping and misposting.

According to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of parliament, budget agencies often had various mispostings in their financial statements but the Ministry of Finance allowed them to adjust and correct the mispostings in their financial statements before the signing of audit reports.

“You have no excuses whatsoever on these financial errors,” said Juvenal Nkusi, the chairperson of the PAC. “What happened? Do you need more support or it’s about unqualified personnel.”

Due to misposting, the city management was accused of having scored very low on budget execution, which was marred by unclaimed huge amounts of arrears and debts.

According to Theodomir Niyonsenga, a PAC member, the city was equally blamed for having lost up to Rwf30 million over litigations that were mainly about expropriation and delayed projects.

“What do you have to say about unnecessary charges that you paid over lost court cases?” Mr Niyonsenga asked. “The expropriation should be planned earlier to avoid such issues.”

According to the report, expropriations involved residents who were to relocate from Muhima to provide space for in-city road extensions, over which expropriates took the city to court due to harsh evictions.

The city is to extend main roads up to 54 kilometres but the project has been on hold due to lack of funds. The city was consequently forced to remove it from its performance contracts to avoid implementation failures.

In addition to mispostings, the AG report blames the city for incompetence in book-keeping that led to over-recording of revenues or unsupported debts files amounting to Rwf243 million.

“The city council observed only 53 per cent of the recommendations by the Auditor-General last year,” reads the 2012-13 report.
In response to the queries, Fidel Ndayisaba, the Kigali City mayor, admitted the mistakes but linked them mainly to joint programmes and hardships in expropriations.

“Our staff performance rate did not exceed 70 per cent but the good thing is that there were no cases of embezzlement and employees involved in the cases were reprimanded,” he said.

Mr Ndayisaba said mispostings mainly evolved out of a project that was jointly run by the city and the Belgian Co-operation Agency that caused confusion in the auditing process.