A complete team of the Board of Directors should be appointed at the Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC) and reforms urgently undertaken to make the merger of several institutions at the parastatal effective to avoid future management flaws, members of the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have said.

The parliamentarians were quizzing officials of the centre, yesterday, over management flaws that were uncovered by the Auditor-General’s report for the Financial Year 2013/14.

Management failures at RBC led to mistakes such as overstocking of medicines, poor reporting in financial statements of medicines in the RBC’s medical stores, purchase of substandard drugs, expiry of quality drugs, and the purchase of substandard mosquito nets.

The mistakes happened against a background of not having an effective Board of Directors with its chair, Dr Peter Drobac, living abroad and failing to regularly chair board meetings, while one other member of the board also lives abroad and another has stepped down and not been replaced.

According to Dr Usta Kayitesi, the vice chairperson of the RBC Board of Directors, two more members are needed to make the board serve to its capacity.

The additional two people who are needed to beef up a seven-member board also need to have skills in financial management, Kayitesi told The New Times shortly after appearing before PAC.

"It’s not easy to define the challenges at RBC but the crux of the matter is that we should have a fully-fledged institution,” she said.

Asked by MP Juvenal Nkusi, the PAC chair, to say whether RBC is currently governed, she said that it was governed "but not satisfactorily given its board’s situation.”

The Auditor-General’s report indicated that RBC had expired drugs in store, worth Rwf1.2 billion, imported 2.6 million substandard mosquito nets worth about Rwf9 billion, and bought substandard drugs and medical equipment worth more than Rwf1.8 billion.

Among other flaws uncovered by the AG include management’s failure to recover over Rwf80 million that was owed by former institutions which were merged to form RBC, as well as more than Rwf115 million that was transferred to hospitals and health centres with over Rwf million of it unreported in the accounting books.

AG warns against accountability flaws

At yesterday’s session, the Auditor-General, Obadiah Biraro, warned RBC officials against failure to account for the institution’s assets, explaining that it was against the principles of effective management.

"In strategic management, they say that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Right now you can’t measure the performance of this organisation; therefore you can’t manage it. You need the way forward to address this issue,” Biraro said.

In 2011, about 14 institutions, includingthose managing key programmes like the HIV/AIDS, malaria, and maternal and child care programmes, as well as the National Reference Laboratory, the Medical Production and Procurement Division, the Health Communication Centre, and the blood transfusion and mental health programmes, were merged to form Rwanda Biomedical Centre.

The acting Director-General of RBC, James Kamanzi, said part of the management challenges at the parastatal includes the fact that the merger process has taken long to be effective.

"When there is a merger of institutions, it takes time for the newly formed body to have clean financial reports,” he said.

He added that the poor performance of the RBC’s Board of Directors has not helped in the management of the institution since its management has had to contend with slow approval of certain activities, leading to slow implementation of some policies.

Much as Kamanzi pleaded with PAC to advocate for the appointment of all Board members, he also promised that improvements will be made in the financial management of the institution.

"We agree that there were management issues at the organisation but we would like to say that there are measures in place to address them; we have the obligation to address them,” he said.

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