As we go the route of accountability and transparency in our public offices, one disturbing sign that public servants aren’t yet aware of all their obligations to be accountable is that almost none of them ever comes out to try to public say something when they are accused of something possibly criminal.

Newspaper reports will for instance allege that a Rwandan civil servant embezzled such and such an amount of public money and the accused official will just take it and lie low.

Why is this so? Is it some form of laziness to be accused of something that could be a criminal offence and one won’t take the time to defend him or herself? Is it that they are refused the fora to defend themselves? Or is it that maybe they simply are guilty and so will lie low and hope everything will quietly go away and be forgotten?

Just last week we reported that Augustin Seminega of the Rwanda Public Procurement Authority, formerly the National Tender Board and the RPPA’s board chairman Damien Mugabo offered a briefcase company – BCE Contractors – a tender worth over Frw 4 billion for the repair of two dirt roads in rural Southern Province.

We reported that the company is run by suspect thieves and we wondered what it was that prompted these two gentlemen to offer a tender to a company whose boss, one Jean de Dieu Karangira, seems to spend more time in jail than in his home. We wondered what kind of powerful motivation made Seminega and Mugabo give BCE the tender despite strenuous protests from concerned parties such as the Ministry of Infrastructure and even the tender board’s own technicians that this wasn’t a reputable company and likely wouldn’t do any good work.

Indeed these fears came to pass when the BCE thieves simply pocketed the money, did a little shoddy work for window dressing and simple as that a lot of money went down the drain.

But you know what? Neither Seminega nor Mugabo has come out in public to say anything about what we wrote. They have not refuted the story. They have only kept quiet.

So what are we to make of this deafening silence? Are Mugabo and Seminega tacitly acknowledging that they were involved in a corrupt deal? Did they get a kickback to give BCE the deal?

They have said nothing to shed light on the affair, instead preferring the copout that the case is in court. So why should it be there in the first place? Would we be talking about a case in court if they hadn’t given well known thieves a public tender?   

Some of these public officials seem to have let power go to their heads.

In a phone conversation last Saturday with the Chief Editor of this newspaper Shyaka Kanuma, Augustin Seminega arrogantly  said, “harya biriya bintu wanditse warebaga ko bari bunfunge? Ariko mwagiye mureka kutuzanaho itera bwoba ngo kuko mufite ibitangaza makuru (did you expect that I would be jailed because of what you wrote? Why don’t you stop intimidating people because you have newspapers?)

The arrogance of these words is breathtaking. The fellow’s acts lead to the tax payer taking one on the chin for Frw 4 billion and all he can think is to ask whether a journalist who only is doing his job exposing such rot expects he (Seminega) will go to jail? In other words it’s like he is saying go ahead, write whatever you want and see what good that will do you!

We would also expect Prosecutor General Martin Ngoga to go public…with a denial, with a clarification, anything to show that he has nothing to hide after we reported that he facilitated an out of court settlement between suspect thieves in a case in which the government incurred a quick loss of over Frw 700 million.

In our story we wondered why Ngoga did not immediately arrest this thief Karangira when he was caught attempting to transfer to a personal account Frw 738 million that Mininfra had just signed to BCE for stalled work to resume on repair of the Mudasomwa-Gisovu and Butare-Kibeho-Muse roads.

We had our facts backed with documents and we told Ngoga so.

The man has gone quiet.

Is all this silence lack of respect for the public these gentlemen supposedly serve or what?