Mepa audit officer should not resign (1)

There was a time in the recent history of this country when the setting up of "people's courts" to replace the real ones would occasionally acquire some favour with certain members of the government of the day. For the most part these occasions used to arise when the courts would reach a decision on some case or other which did not please the government of the day.

Thankfully, those days are buried deep in the past, hopefully never to return. This is not to say, though, that adverse decisions by autonomous authorities are always taken with much more grace by some members of government than used to happen in the past.

Recently, the Prime Minister chastised Mepa's audit officer for allegedly jumping to conclusions on Mepa's practice of arranging private encounters between some privileged applicants and some members of the DCC, a decision-making body, while the application was in a sense still sub judice. It appears that no records are kept as to what, if anything, would have been discussed or agreed in these meetings.

At the same time the Prime Minister did not criticise any aspect of this occult practice.

Nor did he find anything untoward in the fact that Mepa actually set up an office "precisely for this purpose," as the court put it, that is, for the purpose of perpetrating this occult practice to the advantage of a select few, who must have been very few indeed given that this practice, being as it is occult, was never advertised on Mepa's website, which is rather strange when considering that Mepa, and not only Mepa, retain it to be perfectly legal.

And now, this same authority that established an office precisely to arrange meetings in camera between some members of the DCC and some applicants, while their application was before the same DCC for a decision, has attacked the audit officer because he investigated a case while it was before the Appeals Board. It has also taken umbrage because the audit officer dared to publish his findings. In Mepa's own words, "the Audit Officer should have never carried out an investigated [sic] and more so published his report given that this case is in front [sic] of the Appeals Board".

Surely, if the audit officer had kept his findings under wraps, Mepa would not have been so miffed. Alternatively, the audit officer could have delayed his investigations just long enough to be able to write whatever he liked in his report and publish it. In both cases he would have avoided rocking the boat too much since nothing he could have written in a confidential or untimely report would have had any effect on the planning process.

The problem with both scenarios is that had the audit officer behaved so, he would have abdicated his duties, those same duties which he is finding so difficult to discharge that he is reported to be considering handing in his resignation. He is also reported to have said: "If the authorities don't want an auditing process, then why don't they scrap it..."

I don't think the office of the Mepa auditor is there because the authorities want it or don't want it. It is there because it is one of the building blocks of a society that desires to organise itself on democratic principles with all the requisite checks and balances.

If I, a common citizen, have the right to express my opinion in public, why should not the Prime Minister and Mepa enjoy the same right? And why should the exercise of that right induce the audit officer to consider resigning? I really do not think it is the most appropriate reaction to criticism, unfair as it may oftentimes be, even if that criticism comes from the same authority through which the audit officer serves society and from the same minister who has executive responsibility for that service to society, both of whom should therefore know better.

Instead, I suggest that persisting in doing one's duty without fear or favour is the most appropriate way forward for Mepa's audit officer under these circumstances.