Africa-Press – Eswatini. Non-governmental organisations stand accused of supporting terrorist activities in the country.
Senate President, Lindiwe Dlamini, has raised a concern about the role played by NGOs in supporting terrorism and questioned the validity of reports suggesting that they did the same in the country.
The president further questioned the role played by the Central Bank of Eswatini (CBE) by failing to monitor whether donor funds were used for the intended purpose.
Dlamini noted that the CBE periodically received grant funding disguised as if it were intended for NGOs mandated to deliver certain services but part of the funds were used to fund agencies against the State.
She enquired where the CBE kept track of the funds and whether they reported these funds once they were received and if they monitored if these were utilised for the intended purpose.
She also enquired what role was played by the ministry of finance in monitoring whether the funds were utilised for the intended purpose or whether they ignored such reports while the funds were utilised to promote democratic reforms in the country.
Dlamini read part of a statement on her mobile phone; “advancing human rights at national, regional and global levels. Civic society organisations that are on the frontline of promoting democratic practices will be supported in all areas of their operations with budget to be aligned to their support managed through our foreign service”.
She, however, declined to reveal where the statement was sourced.
“There is a lot of money that is financing terrorist activities if I am being blunt, yet there are institutions such as the Central Bank mandated to regulate and instil the law but seemingly do nothing,” Dlamini said.
She insisted that it was counterproductive to just ignore such concerns if there were indeed NGOs behind the terrorist activities in the country.
This was, however, dispelled by Minister of Finance, Neal Rijkenberg, who said investigations were conducted and the findings revealed that terrorist acts were funded through cash and not donor funds.
This was during the senators’ workshop on three bills being piloted by the ministry of finance held at Eswatini Revenue Service (ERS) headquarters yesterday.
The bills are the National Payment Systems, Income Tax Amendment and the Reinsurance.
Ensure
While deliberating on the National Payment Systems Bill, Dlamini noted that Section 31 of the bill provided a clause to ensure compliance with anti-money laundering and counter financing of terrorism legislation.
The section provides that a licenced payment service provider or payment system operator shall meet the requirements and comply with the abovementioned legislation as well as regulations and guidelines prescribed by the CBE as the custodian of the legislation.
Minister Rijkenberg acknowledged that there had been accusations that money came into the country as donor funding but was not used for the intended purpose.
“For example, some money comes through the European Union and was budgeted for civic education or public enlightenment on their rights.
That money is then transferred to CANGO, which is the main organising body for all the NGOs in the country. Following the accusations, there were investigations into that only to find that CANGO confirmed that the funds were indeed used for civic education,” he said.
Revealed
According to Rijkenberg, none of the donor funding was used to fund terrorist activities in the country.
He, however, revealed that they were finding a lot of cash coming into the country for physical funding with some of it used to fund what he termed nonsense, adding that unfortunately it came in as cash.
“A lot of the cash that comes in comes in as Rand notes,” he said.
The minister admitted that as government they needed to look into this but their investigations revealed that legitimate NGOs utilised the funds for civic education.
He said the situation was being monitored and the NGOs were now under scrutiny following the reports.
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