admin
The main purpose of an audit is to uncover shortcomings in an organisation, especially on the administrative, financial and storekeeping side, and then to suggest how these can be addressed at minimum cost but effectively.
Auditor General Mrs Mildred Chiri has done this for the Department of Civil Protection in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai in 2019 and she has found administrative shortcomings that need to be fixed, although these do need to be kept in perspective.
For a start she has not uncovered any criminal or corruption-related activity; rather she has found inadequate record keeping, poor storekeeping, a lack of formal contracts for some emergency transport, a lack of urgency in some administrative details and a degree of poor follow-up on some supplies and donations.
When the response is judged by purely operational activity, getting help to the thousands who needed help and needed it urgently, the department and other Government agencies come out a lot better since they did manage to do a lot of the required emergency work quite quickly, they did prevent starvation, they did prevent epidemics breaking out, and they did manage to get the bulk of the donations of food, clothing and basic household goods to those who needed them.
It is easy to imagine some of the responses that may be whispered in dark corners.
Where was Mrs Chiri when everyone was up to their necks in Chimanimani getting borrowed vehicles over washed-away roads to flattened villages?
Are emergency workers supposed to shove a bookkeeper in glasses and clutching a briefcase, laptop and solar charger on the back of every truck?
This would be unfair. Mrs Chiri wants to make the department and the civil protection units in provinces and districts better and more efficient, so they can do a better job and can reassure donors of disaster relief and taxpayers footing a large chunk of the bill that maximum value has been generated from gifts and supplies. Her solutions were fairly simple.
The department and its units need first of all to be better prepared in advance.
To expect the “can-do” types who run emergency services to work out and develop best-practice administrative and record-keeping systems on the go would be grossly unfair.
But if they raced into action with that briefcase containing pre-approved standard contract forms for instant filling in and signing when they needed to hire urgently equipment or vehicles, and if they had blank record-keeping books with the columns already marked and labelled to record the desired details, then many administrative shortcomings would be eliminated, without having to deploy a huge administrative tail.
There is a huge difference between implementing agreed, simple and effective pre-set administrative systems and trying to invent something “on the night”. And with those systems, those in charge would be able to see at a glance what they had available and use it better and quicker.
Those 34 tonnes of stores that were spoiled or allowed to expire because they were stored on wet floors are easy to explain.
Finding somewhere dry and sheltered in a district where almost every building with a roof and a dry floor in the aftermath of a major cyclone is difficult, and most of what is available is being used to temporarily shelter the displaced. But as Mrs Chiri noted there are simple ways of minimising damage to stores and simple record keeping systems that remind those in charge what is available and where it is kept.
She felt extra advance training for the civil protection staff, coupled with the advance preparation of suitable and simple systems, would make a serious difference if a similar sort of disaster was faced again and would allow a better and more effective response.
Trainers are available, along with examples of how to keep track of everything and keep stuff ready for use.
The military spend quite a bit of time and trouble training logistics specialists, their quartermasters.
Every unit deployed takes along its quartermaster who keeps track of everything and can tell the commanding officer, instantly, how much food, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and the like are available and where they are at every moment. They also know how to preserve stores and make sure they are ready for instant issue. And they do this without converting a fighting force into a regiment of bookkeepers.
And someone at headquarters in a deployed unit keeps the “to do” list, so nothing gets forgotten.
There are still some other areas the Auditor General wants fixed. One example Mrs Chiri brought up was the over-ordering of medical supplies. I
t is easy to understand why medical staff wanted to ensure that they would not run short if something serious turned up, especially when communications were a bit ropey. Their job was to save lives and prevent epidemics and they did that well.
But Mrs Chiri thought that, yet again, that there should be advance planning for record keeping, more thought given to where things should be stored, and no one forgetting that stuff was there and not being used, so could be returned to store before it expired.
Again a quartermaster problem and a quartermaster solution.
Other shortcomings identified in the response to Cyclone Idai have already been addressed. When tropical storms approached Zimbabwe last season, those lessons were applied.
There was far better early warning; emergency evacuation centres were already listed and available; essential stores and supplies were prepositioned; everyone from the Air Force and Zupco downwards was asked to put available transport on high alert.
The “can do” operational specialists had studied their own shortcomings and fixed these and now Mrs Chiri has found one extra gap, one that is again easy and simple to sort out in advance and that gap can now be filled as she went into some detail what needs to be done.
Online Reporter