The General Auditing Bureau recently issued a report that should raise concern about lax conditions at several ministries and other government organizations.
The report says: The Ministry of Commerce and Industry was negligent in enforcing regulations governing the discharge of industrial waste.
This lukewarm attitude opens the way for industries to dump chemical waste and release harmful emissions without regulation, much less censure.
The bureau is also dissatisfied with the Ministry of Health, which allowed 18 kidney dialysis machines to lie idle even while there was a need for them by patients.
The bureau also found that the ministry was hiring maintenance contractors who were employing labor not under their sponsorship, which is a violation of the labor law.
The Red Crescent Society is in a sad state, according to the report. It lacks sufficient numbers of emergency personnel and has diverted field medical staff to work in administration, exacerbating the staff shortage.
The Ministry of Education was criticized for a similar practice of assigning women teachers to out-of-classroom duties even as there weren’t enough teachers to maintain a class size of no more than 30 pupils.
The report did not spare the Ministry of Agriculture for its lackadaisical attitude toward unlicensed poultry farms and the sale of expired veterinary medicines used in animal farming.
The Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs was targeted for being lax on bakeries and sweetmeat producers that employ illegal labor or laborers with invalid health certificates.
The report also said the ministry was lax in maintaining records of items that were confiscated.
Other findings were: Military hospitals did not have storekeepers in their warehouses; the lack of an organizing agency to oversee the payment of fees by parties involved in court cases; and a general lack of oversight or follow-up procedures in the regulation of the performance of government agencies.
Though there are, no doubt, a lot of violations not specified in the report, the aforementioned instances are enough to illustrate the enormity of the apathy and negligence of several government departments in discharging their duties, which, in many cases, directly affect the public’s health.
