Abdulai Conteh: Enacts Ernest Bai Koroma’s Vision in the NRA

In 2007, during the last few months of the Presidential Elections campaign, then APC Opposition Leader, Hon. Ernest Bai Koroma, attended the Abuja inauguration ceremony of the then newly-elected President Musa Yar’Ardua of Nigeria.  Among the dozens of African and global leaders who attended the ceremony, the hulking figure and charismatic presence of the then Hon. Koroma could not be missed by the feisty Lagos-based newspapers; one of the leading ones,  The Independent, interviewed him; and he said when he would becoming president he would “run Sierra Leone like a business”.   Now as President of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Koroma has strived to live up that promise in mandating his senior government officials, including cabinet ministers, to sign performance contracts  based on fixed targets.  One senior government official who is giving much credence to the President’s avowed aim of ‘running Sierra Leone like a business’ is the new Director of Finance in the National Revenue Authority (NRA), Abdulai Conteh (in photo).

Since he returned home after thirty years successful professional foray in the United States to take up office as the NRA’s finance director in early 2009, Abdulai Conteh has stimulated a quiet finance revolution in the NRA, one which the rest of the public sector would do well to emulate, if they are to justify their presidential appointments.  One of such innovation is rigorous monitoring of all procurement matters of the Authority.

In the past, it would be easy for contractors to pad their contracts, and share ill gotten gains with insiders they collude within the public sector. No one should try such sleight of hand with Abdulai Conteh. He can smell such shenanigans a mile away.  He has sent out his finance team all over the city and has put on file, and continually updates, costs on nearly all goods and services the NRA uses.  Thus, a padded contract would simply be disallowed.  Naturally, this has made Abdulai Conteh a lot of enemies within and without the system he now operates.

Another system put in place by Abdulai Conteh is that banking transactions are done in batches; and exchanges are done only after multiple hard copy and electronic checks would have been gone through.  The NRA monitoring teams and commercial banking officials can now more easily detect any discordance in banking transactions with the NRA.  This, about a month ago, made it possible for five apparent forgers of the Acting Commissioner-General’s signature, and the Director of Finance’s signature, to be detected at the Sierra Leone Commercial Bank (SLCB), as they tried to cash money from the NRA’s Account in the SLCB.  (The five alleged forgers and conspirators were this week charged on 35 counts at the Magistrate Court No 2 in Freetown; denied bail, and remanded to the maximum security Pademba Road Prison in Freetown).

Abdulai Conteh, as the chief finance officer in the government’s main revenue arm, has toured nearly every corner of the NRA’s operation around the country, putting financial checks and balances in place.  In the past, NRA collectors in both the Customs and Excise Department and Income Tax Department used to act as both collectors and finance officers – giving them plenty of opportunities for graft.  Abdulai Conteh has delinked the functions of collector and finance officer, plugging the holes for personal enrichment, and making it easier for internal and external auditors to audit the system.  When these systems put in place begin to mature in the next year or so, it is expected that revenues would rise in all the NRA, and, significantly, in NRA stations that have been dormant as regards revenues since the inception of the NRA in 2003.  Of course, this has made more enemies for Abdulai Conteh; but the soft-spoken unpretentious finance wizard is energized by the hope that in  leaving the richest and most powerful country on earth, the United States,  to return home to about the poorest country in the world, Sierra Leone,  and making meaningful contribution to nation building, he would be saving lives, through gingering up the economy by collecting  revenues which government would use for desperately-needed accelerated development.

The real revolution being stimulated in the NRA by Abdulai Conteh is not just merely in plugging revenue holes by preventing revenue leakages; it is in literally creating more wealth with the NRA’s finances.  By law, the NRA is entitled to 3% (three percent) of the revenue it collects – thus, if the NRA collects Le100 billion in a year, it gets Le3billion of that sum for its operational expenditure.  In the past, this money, which when translated into dollars would go into millions of dollars, is just kept in the bank, and finance officers would spend, spend, and spend it….until they get their next tranche from government. Not with Abdulai Conteh in charge. Given the reality that the NRA, though a public sector institution, is an autonomous corporate entity, Abdulai Conteh has used his US acquired financial savvy to be investing about a billion Leones of the NRA’s funds – and raking in nice dividend for the NRA.

Abdulai Conteh’s success so far in the NRA with the support he is apparently receiving from the Acting Commissioner-General, Haja Kallah-Kamara (also a returnee from the United Kingdom, where until late 2009 she had spent 24 years studying and working) is sending the right signals to the immense talents and professionally competent Sierra Leoneans in the Diaspora to return home, and help President Ernest Bai Koroma run Sierra Leone like a business, just as Abdulai Conteh is doing.

By Oswald Hanciles

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