On Wednesday, 23rd November, the Former Acting CEO of NOCMA, Hellen Buluma made serious allegations against NOCMA Board, in particular, the Board Chairperson and the PS for Ministry of Energy.
However, a careful look the allegations reveals that the whole session which was only attended by 8 MPs from the opposition was a well scripted item whose main agenda was for Buluma and her accomplices to score personal and political mileages.
For instance, it is evident that Buluma twisted facts and fabricated lies to once again seek public sympathy and to tarnish the image of Zamba and the Government at large.
She is not a stranger in this drama, she played a similar script before. Indeed, in August last year, ACB arrested the Newton Kambala, former Minister of Energy, the Alliance for Democracy President, Enock Chihana and Chris Chaima Banda, former Chief Advisor to President Lazarus Chakwera for allegedly attempting to influence Buluma to award contracts to Orxy, Finergy and Trafigura.
But until today she has failed to provide evidence to the courts to back her accusations against the trio. This time she has miserably failed to implicate Zamba and the PS Energy on this issue.
Hellen has throughout used these underhand tactics to blackmail powerful and innocent people to keep her job and more specially to protect her incomes through maintaining the existing fuel suppliers (who came during the DPP regime) so that they continue to supply fuel to Malawi indefinitely.
In this way, she wants her network to continue defrauding the country by providing fuel at abnormally high prices and within stringent payment terms (hand to mouth), a tactic that Buluma and her counterparts have for long been using to drag Malawi into the current crisis so as to discredit the current government.
Throughouther work/political career, she has used her oil money to buy sympathy from members of several quarters including NGOs, Media, etc. Having analyzed the PAC session, our findings on this matter, reveal the following, that:
1) Buluma has always used political patronage and blackmailing to survive in the job, and the current fuel crisis has been largely engineered by her reluctance to include new suppliers, even though she knew very well that her suppliers were more expensive and offered stringent terms (short term payment) that were unrealistic to Malawi economy.
Her intentions were two-fold, firstly to engineer a crisis for political gains, and second for personal gains, i.e., ensuring that she maintains the existing suppliers where she is known to get some cuts.
Anyone who pumped sense in her and who showed the guts to stand their way was persecuted. The Zamba and Kambala accusations attest to this.
Buluma has tactfully prevented anyone from sticking their fingers in the NOCMA oil contracts jar. Simply put, Buluma fights anyone standing her way, anyone strong enough wanting Malawi to get cheaper and better affordable fuel products to avert the crisis becomes an enemy to Buluma and her political counterparts.
The fate of Zamba and Kambala et al., follows the same script. Her strategy is to align to the powerful to destroy those standing her way.
2) To illustrate, since July 2022, Government instructed, then the Acting CEO to advertise and open up the market by finding new suppliers. But strangely Buluma has throughout played games to eliminate any new suppliers by instead justifying extension of the existing suppliers.
Even though Zamba very much reminded Buluma to stick to the laws and all due processes including exploring single sourcing from various suppliers including an established African credibleand reliable oil supplier, 700 SA (who have a track record of supply to other African countries and Multinationals) to ensure that fuel crisis is averted quickly.
Strangely, Buluma always found excuses to avoid any competition in the oil market and justified the extension of contracts to her three preferred suppliers even though she fully knew well that they were more expensive and that their terms (e.g., upfront payments) were unrealistic for an economy like Malawi.
If the Acting CEO really loves the country as she claims, why was she dillydallying to act on an urgent matter.
One can therefore conclude that the fuel crisis was deliberately engineered by her inability to act quick to include suppliers with better offers.
• By the way, most of these suppliers that Buluma refused like GY and Sons were offering favourable credit lines (e.g. 3 months credit) and also that payments be made in kwachas.
However, due to her personal gains she refused at all cost to include these new suppliers opting to hide behind’ sticking to ‘procurement rules’.
In times of crisis, single sourcing is allowed and this route should have been pursued with no legal implications.
