By Laurina B Lormia
The Center for Transparency and Accountability in Liberia (CENTAL), Program Manager Gerald Yeakula has unveiled a new tool designed to track corruption cases across the country.
On Thursday October 10, 2024, CENTAL launched the Corruption Case Tracker (CCT), under its National Integrity Building and Anti-Corruption Program to document cases under investigation by the Liberia Anti-corruption Commission (LACC).
It is an online platform aimed to provide real-time access to government budgets, procurement contracts, and financial statements, allowing citizens to track public spending and identify irregularities.
It will also allow citizens to easily report suspected cases of corruption through a user-friendly interface, ensuring that their voices are heard and their concerns addressed.
Speaking on OK’s Conversation on Tuesday, November 5, Atty. Yeakula emphasized the CCT as a crucial step toward enhancing transparency and accountability within the country. He noted that, CENTAL realized that more needed to be done to identify specific types of corruption cases, enabling communities to receive clear, updated information. Rather than merely reporting allegations.
According to him, CENTAL has been actively involved in the anti-corruption space by collaborating with various stakeholders, including communities, donors, and the government. He pointed out that a common concern among citizens is the frequent discussion of corruption without concrete, data-driven metrics to support these claims.
He mentioned that, if people simply claim that the country is corrupt based on perception alone, without any data to back it up, it’s difficult to prove that there is an actual corruption.
“At CENTAL, we recognize the need to bridge this gap in data and literature on corruption in the country,” he said. “We will conduct our own State of Corruption report and undertake media monitoring to help fill that gap,” he explained.
He added that, the recent amendment to the Liberia Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC) Law now limits the LACC from immediately sharing information about specific corruption cases under investigation.
“The LACC can report when a corruption case is under investigation, but challenges remain in tracking the progress of cases through the justice system. For instance, cases reported as far back as 2018 are difficult to monitor for progression, making it challenging to ensure that more recent cases reported in 2024 are moving forward efficiently,” he narrated.
The corruption case tracker was established to gather reliable data on corruption cases and track their prosecution within the justice system. It will help us identify successful outcomes and, if challenges emerge, enables us to engage with key actors to address those issues.
He concluded that, if they discover that there are still many investigations pending at the LACC, they might ask whether there’s an issue within the commission causing delays in moving corruption cases forward to court.
Conversely, if they find numerous corruption cases already in court, they could question why there is such a high volume of these cases there.
