Buea State Counsel, S.W Procureur General and Patrick Njukeng corrupt?

“We price our reputation for integrity and confidence by committing to high standards and accountability,” so reads a clause that appears as Mission statement of Global Health Systems Solutions, GHSS, an NGO based in Limbe, Cameroon. GHSS may have a reputation, but it certainly has very little to do with integrity as the Journal found out.

It has in the most part, to do with fraud, bribery, corruption, embezzlement, unlawful arrest and detention to cover-up its tracks – and you name the rest. It certainly has nothing to do with ‘high standards and accountability as it wants the public to believe.

GHSS Limbe isn’t a small NGO. Going by the size and scope of its operations as seen in its website www.ghsscmr.org, it’s a gigantic NGO, running operations in the Congo, Ghana and Cameroon in the field of disease prevention. It is under the tutelage of one Patrick Njukeng Achiangia, who also happens to be a fulltime gov’t official working with the University of Dschang in the West Region.

One of GHSS’s major sponsors for years has been the Center for Disease Control, CDC, a United States gov’t agency based in Atlanta, Georgia. It is in the character of the CDC to do annual audits of NGOs they support to ensure that their grants are judiciously used for the purpose they are granted.

In December 2013, the Journal gathered that the CDC sent out one of its field audit officials by the name of Randolph William to perform an audit on GHSS operations. Randolph William travelled from the USA to Cameroon and carried out the audit. Everything appeared to have gone just well until one miscalculation by Patrick Njukeng, after the audit, led to the opening of the Pandora of corruption that the Journal exposes here.

Randolph William returned to Atlanta perhaps with a clean bill of health about GHSS operations. However, the clean bill of health appears to have stemmed from the fact that the books were doctored to reflect judicious use of its financial grants.

But right after the audit, one of the staff of GHSS, the senior accountant of the NGO by the name of Laurence Acha Mbah, had to go to jail for refusing to affix his signature to fudged transactions presented at that audit.

The Journal gathered that late in December 2013, after the CDC audit, Laurence Mbah discovered going through details in the records of the organization that figures submitted to the auditors by his department had been doctored under the instructions of CEO Patrick Njukeng to the effect that 57,116,534 F.CFA,was fraudulently inserted in the submission as part of expenses by the NGO.

Included in this amount was a $28,000 fraudulent consultancy contract allegedly delivered by one Matthias Atelefac, based in the state of Maryland. However, Matthias happened to be related to Patrick Njukeng – both having hailed from same village and according to our sources, there was never any service rendered in that amount to GHSS.

“I took patience to study the financial report that was submitted by the Accountant to the CDC Grants Management Specialist. That was when I saw symptoms of deception in that financial report.” Mbah told the Journal.

He said when he queried the accountant about this; she told him that she acted under instructions from the Executive Director, that is, Patrick Njukeng.

Mbah, a graduate of the Catholic University of Lille-France, where he studied on scholarship and obtained a Master’s degree in Business Administration and International Corporate Management, said he wrote to Patrick Njukeng, the director, threatening to terminate his three-year employment contract with the organization if the malpractice was not reported to CDC Atlanta.

“The Executive Director in a swift reply to me, threatened me to dare resign; that if I resign he would have to drag me to court for breach of employment contract.” Mbah told the Journal. He said under stress emanating from the situation, he decided to take leave in February 2014.

When he resumed work on March 3, he said he was denied access to his office and from there; things took a dramatic turn for the worst.

On March 11, they granted him access to his office. But that same day he was picked up by the police from his office without any summon and taken all the way to Buea where the Procureur General of the South West Region was under special instructions to have him under indefinite custody.

After waiting for several hours behind bars, Mbah was informed of the reason for his arrest through a written uncorroborated complaint submitted to the police by his boss, Patrick Njukeng.

In the complaint, Njukeng alleged that as Chief Accountant of the NGO, Mbah misappropriated 9million F.CFA from the organization between the months of March and September 2013. He remained in police custody for six days.

On March 17, he was transferred from Police custody to the Buea Central Prison to await trial.

After some two weeks in Buea Central Prison, that is, on March 28, a police investigator drove him to the organization’s office in Limbe where “I met some guys who introduced themselves to me as external auditors and further briefed me that they had been ordered by the State Counsel of Buea to conduct an external audit in my absence, for use in prosecuting me.

They proceeded to read their already prepared audit report to me and after reading it; they cross-questioned me, but I refused to offer a single word to them.” Mbah said.

He said after this incident, he began to smell a rat in the whole investigation. The said external auditor whose name we only got as Awundjia hails from the same tribe – if not from the same village in Lebialem where Patrick Njukeng hails from.

But that’s not all, all the officials – powerful men in the region surrounding the case all come from Lebialem.

The Procureur General of the Court of Appeal in the region, one Justice Fonkwe Joseph Fogang and the Senior State Counsel for both Fako and Buea Court of First Instance, Lebong Morfaw both come from the same village with Patrick Njukeng.

Mbah told the Journal that an insider within the judicial police in Buea had actually informed him that the Procureur General, and the State Counsel had special interest in his case file, that they were treating it as their individual case files, to protect the interest of their brother, the Executive Director.

He said the informant told him that that was the reason why the Executive Director instead of lodging his complaint to the Limbe State Counsel who had jurisdiction over the matter, rather preferred the Buea State Counsel who has no competence of jurisdiction to hear the matter, but for the fact that he was dealing with his clan's man.

After his attorneys exhausted all legal options to secure him bail, they resorted to a secret investigation on the background relationship between Patrick Njukeng and both the Procureur General and the State Counsel.

Their findings revealed that securing Mbah bail became too difficult because of the tribal conspiracy between the Executive Director, the Procureur General and the State Counsel of Buea.

This tribal clique against this one man got too strong to the extent that all court interlocutory rulings that granted him bail were always appealed by the State Counsel in conjunction with the Procureur General, so that he continued to remain behind bars.

Mbah said his understanding of the reason they wanted him to remain behind bars indefinitely was that if they led him out, since they already severely persecuted him by subjecting him to torture for three months, he won’t hesitate to write to funding partners about the financial malpractices of their brother (the Executive Director – Patrick Njukeng, who is the sole owner of Global Health Systems Solutions).

On May 15, a different Judge, Justice Chi Valentine Bumah, in a fresh ruling, ordered that Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) conduct an independent external audit on the financial accounts of the entire organization in the presence of Mbah - that he would not rely on the audit report of an external audit that was conducted in Mbah’s absence, and that the audit report must be submitted to the court on or before July 23rd, that is two days from today.

When the ruling was made, Patrick Njukeng immediately wrote a petition against the Judge for ruling that an independent external audit be done on the entire organization.

The Senior State Counsel, in conjunction with the Procureur General, also reinforced Njukeng’s petition by making an appeal and criticizing the Judge for granting Mbah bail. The appeal was upheld and Mbah remained in jail.

It was not until June 3rd, that the President of the Buea High Court, Magistrate-Justice Charles Menyoli, got information about Mbah’s three-month illegal detention that he jumped into the matter and cried foul.

After hearing a motion on the illegal detention ‘’Habeas Corpus’’, filed by his attorneys, Justice Charles made use of his superiority as president of the High Court to give another interlocutory ruling, which finally humbled the State Counsel to release Mbah from illegal detention.

The Journal learned that even though the higher court released Mbah, his counsels encountered yet severe resistance and opposition from both the State Counsel and Procureur General, who jointly persisted their denial to sign Mbah’s Release Order to the extent it had to be sent back to the President of the High Court to sign by himself.

Some few days after he was freed, the Senior State Counsel, apparently not done yet, in conjunction with the Procureur General, once more appealed the ruling of the President of the High Court.

The appeal implied that, though Mbah is released, he is supposed to be re-arrested and detained until the appeal is heard on a later date, unknown until now.

As we report, Mbah is now in hiding in the country, amid fear of re-arrest and detention in the hands of these tribesmen.

The external auditors from Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC) are still to announce the schedule for their audit because Patrick Njukeng allegedly doesn’t want to cooperate with the group.

The Journal sent an email to Njukeng giving him an opportunity to tell his side of the story but didn’t hear from him for close to two weeks. At press time, we again tried contacting him by phone, the phone rank severally but no one picked it up.

We also reached out to Mathias Atelefac in Maryland through social media, but he never replied us.

We spoke to CDC Atlanta representative, and they acknowledged that they’re aware of the irregularities going on in GHSS, but declined to comment further, stating that they are still conducting their own investigations and would get back to us once it is concluded.