Somaliland: Deputy PAC Chairman Says Committee Corrected Sections of Erroneous Report

MP Abdulkadir Jama Hammud, Deputy Chair of the House of Representatives’ Public Accounts Committee (PAC), who is, presently, the Acting Chairman following the unceremonious expulsion of MP  Nassir Ali Shire as Chair, said his Committee had every right to correct erroneous parts of the report it presented to the House earlier.

“The Committee must own up to a mistake and correct it if and when new evidence or corroborating documents are produced,” he said, responding to a question put to him by a Somaliland satellite TV correspondent.

The Acting Chairman revealed that organizations mentioned in the report cleared themselves by producing notarized, correctly drawn documents that absolved them of any wrong-doing beyond any reasonable doubt.

Speaking of how he saw the demotion of the erstwhile PAC Chairman from the post, he said: “Organizations and individuals publicly mentioned had submitted necessary documents to the House of Representatives Chair and ourselves. We found them correct and adequately convincing. The Chairman shouldn’t have challenged the Speaker when he apologized on behalf of all of us in the House.”

MP Hammud admitted that PAC members were all to blame for the wrong report as they only followed leads on tabulated data and that they did not approach concerned entities to verify or abrogate omissions and gaps espied.

“Humans err, and we have to rectify errors when we discover them,” he said.

In another development, the Auditor General of Somaliland, Ahmed Yussuf Dirir, disclosed that there was no cause for PAC to underline minor sections of a budget report that was approved, signed and sealed by the Auditor General’s office – the last stop before being submitted to the House.

The AG also stated that PAC neither consulted his office, submitted a report nor followed proper channels to point out an anomaly as, since it was not an executive of the government, it had no right to act as one – a witch-hunter.