By Binta Jaiteh
The Board and Management of National Electricity water company (NAWEC) has promised to submit its activity report and financial statement of the year ended 31st December 2018 by 12th February, 2021 and 31st December 2019 by 29th March, 2021 respectively to the National Assembly public enterprise committee
Ousman Muhammad Cham , chairperson of the board of directors informed the committee that the company has taken stance in providing effective and efficient service to the people, adding that NAWEC is fully aware of its multiple accountability requirements to both executive , legislature and to their customers.
“NAWEC is much aware of its mandate to provide services and our critical contribution to the economic development of our country,” he said.
He noted that Nawec has undertaken great strikes to bring right kind of competence to NAWEC, to improve its efficiency and effectiveness to solve the service provision to the Gambian people.
“We promised the committee that the backlog of the reports was to be cleared before 2021 but unfortunately covid-19 break through and has derailed our preparation process, despite that we had no choice but to submit our 2020 financial statement while activity report was pending. Today we converged here to provide the activity report for 2018 and 2019 , apologizing for not able to deliver as promised but we are all aware of the challenges we face during the lockdown,” he added.
He said they have a responsibility to the committee to present the reports annually ( audited financial statement and activity report) we submitted our audited financial statements for 2017 and annual report was outstanding due to some technical issues we had and later resolved.
Honorable Halifa Sallah, chair of the committee said they can’t prolong otherwise their work will be inefficient, saying: “we have seen that the corporations have been trying to tidy up their accounts and that is not the objective. This is to give fair and true state of corporation so that challenges could be identified and recommendations made to move them to great viability.”
“We listen very carefully to views expressed by the enterprises and we have gauged their performance against the provisions establishing their way of operations,” he said.
However after efficient consultation among the members that the committee has finally considered that the NAWEC board and management reappear before PEC and submit its 2018 reports by 12th February, 2021, and the report for the year ended 31st December, 2019 no later than 29th March 2021.