Education Minister Ram Chandra Kuswaha has been sacked and replaced by Sarbendra Nath Shukla after the former was accused of involvement in a corruption scandal. The new minister has vowed to fight corruption, reports Nepalnews:
After taking oath, Shukla told reporters that his first priority will be to make education ministry free of corruption and assure the donors that their money will not be misused.
It is unclear what kind of action will be take against the former minister accused of selling relief teachers’ vacancies. What is known is that Nepal’s “anti-corruption agencies lack clear jurisdiction”, according to a report by Global Integrity, an international corruption tracking organisation. The report says:
“By and large, the anti-graft body is protected from political interference in the current political and legal context. Traditionally, there was no system of hearing and confirmation process for this office. Under these circumstances, political influence over the appointment was bound to exist.
“There are so many instances that even the constitutional anti-graft body like CIAA and even the court decisions are influenced by powerful politicians in Nepal. The CIAA decisions have been declared invalid by the court so the CIAA has been losing case battles.”
In the meantime, the government has annulled nearly 12000 relief teacher appointments made by direct orders from the Education Ministry. It has also appointed a three-member team to investigate irregularities in the Ministry over teachers’ quotas.
While we are on the abuse of power, Nepal Electricity Authority has said VIPs, including former prime ministers Krishna Prasad Bhattarai and Sher Bahadur Deuba and former home minister KP Sharma Oli, have been using its vehicles without a formal approval from the NEA board. Republica writes:
Go back to previous pageSpeaking at a press meet organized at the NEA Tuesday, NEA Managing Director Dr Jivendra Jha said, “We find that the three vehicles have been provided to the VIPs on the basis of verbal orders from the government. There is no record of the NEA board taking any decision over this.”
Moreover, NEA is also meeting fuel costs of up to 240 liters per month for ex-PM Deuba. As per NEA rules, only the energy minister is entitled to such a facility. All the other NEA officials enjoy the privilege of up to 120 liters of fuel a month. Bhattarai and Oli, however, do not get any fuel from NEA.
Of course the new Minister’s priority is to “assure the donors”! Despite the Public Accounts Committee finding the previous Minister completely corrupt, and despite that Minister openly saying “what would a fish in water do, if not drink”, both the Government and his party (TMDP) did NOTHING until AFTER the donors cut off funds!
So the real story is not about this Minister being corrupt but about the Prime Minister and government being TOTALLY CORRUPT as a whole.
What else should one expect from a government of losers organized by the Indian ambassador to exclude the largest party in order to prevent democratization of the Nepal Army and carrying out the peace agreement.
What else would these fishy people do “if not drink”?
NEA is an organization which is in a massive loss gobbling up crores of tax money. It was a good move on the part of the employees to track the vehciles misused by various politicians in the country. The people should realized that a countryreeling under financial crisis and which is one of the most impoverished in the world has the luxury of providing a vehicle facility to the employees and the officers. Let us do some analysis on the economics of the facility of a vehicle. On a market value the price of a vehicle is 20,00000 lakhs. Life of the vehicle is, say, 10 years. Capital recovery per year is 200,000. The cost of operation of the vehicle is driver = 120,000, cost of fuel = 100,000, maintenance = 50000. The total cost per vehicle is 470,000 and the monthly cost is 40,000 Nepalese rupees. This amount comes out to more than the salary of the highest official of the Government. Is this fair for taxpayers for the Government to misuse such amount. The answer is flatly no, but who cares. If the lawmakers and the bureacrats start using the public transport system in Nepal, I am sure it will improve a lot. Besides that the government officials are enjoying the vehicles with a duty of 1 % which is again unfair and unjust since the general public haev to pay more than 150 percent duty on the vehicle purchase. When will such things will be realized. Our officials have been given the authority by the public to misuse wealth, power, and others.
Do you even know how an army works that you keep repeating the mantra of democratizing the Nepal Army.
This army has already suffered too much indignity at the hands of mass murderers. You keep parroting a silly slogan, and you have no idea that there is absolutely no better army in the world when it comes to following the letter and spirit of democracy. You fail to realize that this propaganda is now getting tiring.
Everybody agrees with you on corruption. That is why a lot of people are outraged about the whole charade of this boring, undignified politics. These people would sell their family for money.
Let me correct myself, everybody knew about this corruption. They all kept saying that these clowns would not change, and now you are using that disgust to change the subject and parrot your empty, silly, disgusting propaganda against the only institution that stands.
Nilabh these corrupt parties are in office, with a PM and cabinet members who lost in the elections because the largest party, which won the elections resigned rather than accept the COAS being permitted to continue resisting implementation of the peace agreement.
There are more people employed by the Army and other security services in Nepal than all the other government officials combined, excluding teachers. That in itself is one of the most corrupt aspects of Nepal’s disfunctional state, leaving aside the notorious corruption of the senior officers themselves and the notorious allocation of security personal as domestic servants for corrupt VIPs. No development is possible until a normal army has been reduced to a proper and subordinate role instead of gobbling up most of the budget with no accountability.
Repeating that “there is absolutely no better army in the world when it comes to following the letter and spirit of democracy” displays the mental atrophy that goes together with corruption. It is as useless as MKN’s speeches.
Politicization of the three bodies of government is costing us too much. While the legislature cannot pass a stricter laws, the judiciary cannot implement the existing because of the executive body. I know I sound blatantly obvious but it’s so effing frustrating to think about the mess that even stating obvious things make me feel like I am dropping some sort of jewels of wisdoms.
Thank you Kamred Arthur. You seem to have all the answers to Nepal’s problems. How about becomng PM of Nepal. You couldn’t do any worse than Kamred Prachanda. Plese remember that the APF was created on the pretext of fighting the Maoists! That is really one comtribution to job creation of the Maoists that we Nepalis should be truly and eternally grateful.
As for the NEA the problem is quite simple. There is no “civilian supremacy” over NEA.
More people were employed in the army simply to protect the citizens of this country from the Maoist murder campaigns. They were scoring success on that front when these treacherous politicians struck a deal with the Maoist to overthrow a chance of re-installing genuine democracy. They were afraid that if elections were held after Maoists were defeated or, at least sidelined, it would have proved that the fault of this whole charade lay with them and they would not have the opportunity to scapegoat the king for it.
There is absolutely no evidence that there is institutionalized corruption in the army, albeit there are incidences that give the impression. This is connected to the UN mission, but that nature of debate is to expected in a democratic set up. A bunch fools with blood on their hands made this state dysfunctional. And if you can’t know it proves that you are nothing more than a communist – an evil an vile creature hell bent on destroying all life to suit their own personal fantasy.
Even in my rage I am capable of accepting some limitation, any reasonable person would. By ignoring the truth you are showing what a narrow minded Maoist/communist propaganda master you are.
Repeating that this army is corrupt and it needs to be democratized is nothing more than your vile endorsement of the murderers propaganda. You merely shout because you have no substance, lay off this country.
You want a conversation on the basis of what the Maoist say. The people who started a war that was not needed, democrats who undermined their won legitimate government. Silly, leftist journalists who spread lies and nothing but lies at the time of war and remain totally unaccountable and unrepentant of their hopeless crime of working as a mouthpiece of criminals.
Against this backdrop, you come with an outrage, a totally silly outrage, accusing my country’s army – the only institution that has managed to maintain its discipline against the unscrupulous, low life murderers of being undemocratic. That is when it stood aside against overwhelming moral superiority of its own overall action.
I say overall because I hang my head in shame on some acts of human rights abuse. I am terribly sorry for myself that this happened. The only upside is that there is a framework within which some action has been taken, but the fact this report has not been made public which is a shame.
The real corruption is in the Maoist peoples murder army. They have collecting money to fund their own leaders lifestyle, that is self evident.
The amount spent on the peace process is not made public for fear that it would expose the extent to which these murderers have emptied the coffers. No credible information is provided on the number of combatants, most of whom are stolen and kidnapped children.
No action has been taken on people who are accused of GROSS human rights violation, murders outside of the combat zone, loot, thievery, source of funding for the entire campaign of crime, for the lavish spending during the election and funding of the intimidation campaign in villages. None, there is a total information vacuum of the side of the Maoist.
While the incidents in which the army is implicated and the name of the officers and men are known, there is no such public information available on Maoist murderers.
The damage to property and vital infrastructure has not been compensated for, no apology made in that regard.
The list is endless and it is available and all of that information leads to just one conclusion. I will let you choose yours, that will show if you have any integrity.
Finally, I only said that once, which really brings me to think – truth really must hurt communists a lot, right.
On the other hand, you keep repeating absolutely the same idea no matter where you are and how long it has been for you commenting on the NT forum. Surely explains why you only insult people who say anything different, whether that is Satya Nepali or Anonymous, or I.
Unfortunately the reply by Abe Boris was placed in the wrong thread. If you click on the name Abe Boris from the comments on the left or the link below you can see a reply to Nilabh.
http://www.nepalitimes.com/blogs/thebrief/2010/02/25/misuse-and-abuse/#comment-912
Re NEA, its interesting that NEA staff from different parties united to expose that racket with the VIP vehicles. Such unity of people from different parties was also noticed in the Newa response to the anti-federalism bandh earlier. Perhaps “consensus” will start to bubble up from below on at least some matters?
Of course I meant to say the comments on the right, not the left. Nepali politics is so confusing