Auditor General and Colleagues Arrested in Zambia Corruption Probe

Zambian authorities announced the arrest of the auditor general and 17 colleagues at the Ministry of Finance on charges of corruption and theft of public funds after investigating the Ministry’s conduct.

A spokesperson for the Anti Corruption Commission, Timothy Moono, confirmed the arrests to Lusaka reporters on Friday 17 March. Mr. Moono added that the suspects had collectively accumulated $25 million, or 516 million kwacha, by fraudulent means.

Moono announced that the Commission “has subsequently restricted several bank accounts held by individuals suspected to be involved in this saga as part of ongoing investigations”.

The investigations began after an audit of the PF Lungu-led government’s financial management information system spanning from 2018 to 2021.

Cabinet Secretary Patrick Kangwa had announced in February, when the investigations were first reported, that “President Hakainde Hichilema has directed that the ongoing investigations must be conducted without any interference.”

The arrests come as a milestone in the UPND Government’s ongoing campaign against systemic historic corruption. After its appointment, the Government founded an official Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), and have held regular training summits for various staff tasked with fighting corruption as part of Zambia’s drive to build corss-agency capacity to enforce anti-corruption directives. Since the ACC announced that corrupt practices could be reported anonymously without repercussions to the reporting individual, a number of investigations have been launched that have led to arrests.

Sampa Kalunga, Transparency International’s Zambia representative, described the Zambian anti-corruption program as “disjointed, archaic and does not show results”. This latest investigation suggests otherwise, demonstrates that Zambia is beginning to address the corruption that has plagued its bureaucratic systems in the past, and shows that the ACC is beginning to bear fruit.