By Mama A. Touray
Buba Sanyang, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Local Government, Land, and Religious Affairs on Tuesday, in his testimony at the Local Government Commission of Inquiry, said Kanifing Municipal Council should not have taken a unilateral decision to suspend its Chief Executive Officer Sainabou Martin for one year.
PS Buba Sanyang said, “The council should not unilaterally take a decision when they are not being authorized to suspend the CEO with an indefinite suspension, an administrative leave should be given to the CEO hence the council feels like she cannot handle its financial issues due to the alleged incident.”
Mr. Sanyang added that the council filed a resolution to indefinitely suspend Sainabou and this is what they found to be wrong because it is not the mandate of the council but the responsibility of the local service commission to suspend CEO Martin and a resolution cannot be passed.
He expounded on it to the Commission that when the issue of fraud was reported to the Minister by the Mayor, the matter was looked into but at the same time the CEO and the team who were alleged to have done that malpractice also reported to the Minster other claims of fraud. But he was quick to add that by the minister looking at some of these issues he considered them to be great and he is to constitute a commission to look into it so that it can be an independent body.
“In the process, he said the Minister first need to constitute an inspection team to confirm and this inspection team was constituted when we constituted the inspection team I decided to include some internal auditors into the inspection team to come up with a report to look as a fulfillment of a condition to go ahead with the commission,” he testified.
PS Sanyang said the inspection report was provided and the Minister decided and confirmed to look at the recommendation and see how to implement them. He added that this was what brought about the establishment of the Ministerial Commission which was challenged in court and that brought about some of the powers of the commission being seen as not appropriate
