I. The Evidence That Already Existed

The annual review of Tanzania's General Budget Support was, in those years, the most consequential governance event in the Tanzanian fiscal calendar. Tanzania was receiving approximately $800 million a year in direct budget support from its development partners. The annual review was where that relationship was tested: where donors assessed fiduciary risk, where the Government of Tanzania defended its systems, and where the implicit bargain between sovereignty and accountability was renegotiated.

The PEFA review I presented that October had spent months examining nine parastatals and government bodies. TANESCO — the national power utility — was among the most troubled. What the PPRA's own procurement audit of TANESCO had found regarding Richmond was not ambiguous, and the primary source record is worth setting out precisely. The PPRA audit covered the full 2006 fiscal year and was conducted at TANESCO headquarters over three weeks beginning April 10, 2007 — four months before the Annual Review and seven months before Sitta's Select Committee.

On tender PC 010/2006 — the emergency power supply contract — the Tender Board had convened on 28 and 29 March 2006, evaluated all eight bids, and disqualified every one of them as non-responsive. That was TANESCO's professional procurement machinery working correctly. Then, on 4 April, the Board Chairman received instructions from the Board of Directors, acting on directives from the Government, to recall all eight bidders and seek clarifications with a view to finding someone — anyone — who could be awarded the contract. The PPRA report notes that the Tender Board recorded its objection, advised that the process was improper, and was overruled. The TB minutes capture the moment of executive override with clinical precision: 'at 16:20 hours while the discussions were proceeding, a notice was brought to the Tender Board by the Company Secretary that the Board Chairman has directed to suspend the tender process with immediate effect until further notice.'¹

The PPRA auditors also documented a pattern that ran far beyond Richmond. TANESCO's own procurement staff told auditors that they knew the correct procedures but that their professional advice was routinely ignored. As the report states: 'The PMU personnel know the procedures to follow but they are not listened to when they provide their professional advice.' On the 100 MW generating plant advertisement, the Ministry of Energy and Minerals had directed TANESCO to advertise an International Competitive Bid with a ten-day window — against the legally mandated 45 days. PPRA had been asked for a waiver and explicitly refused, advising international shopping instead. The Government ignored this and proceeded. The TB minutes record that the advertisement had already been sent to newspapers before the TB meeting took place, with an explicit warning that 'severe consequences would fall upon respective officials' if the Ministry's directive was not followed.²

The room did not receive this quietly. The Special Secretary of the Ministry of Finance stood up to defend Richmond — in front of the assembled donor community, with DFID, CIDA, the European Commission and the Nordic embassies all present. I had to go through the findings point by point: the disqualification, the 16:20 suspension notice, the override, the contract signed after bid validity had lapsed, the absence of a performance bond. How the contract was signed in the middle of the night in the Ministry of Energy. It was not a comfortable moment for anyone in that room, but it was a necessary one. The Executive's reflex, even in that setting, even with $800 million in budget support on the table, was to defend what had been done. It is worth recording that we were fortunate in having a World Bank Country Director, John McIntire, who was a champion of accountability in his own right — his support for this work, and for the principle that accountability related diagnostics should be presented without equivocation, was not something every Country Director would have provided.

The PPRA report itself — the document that formed the evidentiary backbone of everything I presented — on the website on that day – was the official reference point. The government understood precisely what it contained. For some strange reason, it could not be that found that easily on the PPRA website after a few days. Richmond defaulted within months and was quietly replaced by Dowans Holdings SA — a different entity, another layer of opacity.

The formal evidence trail was not hidden. What was missing — in October 2007, and for some time afterward — was a political actor willing to use it.

A detailed summary of the PPRA's tender-level findings on the Richmond contract — including the 16:20 suspension notice, the unknown contract drafter, the stripped performance bond, and the financial exposure — is set out in Annex 2 to this article.

II. A Sector Built to Fail

To understand why Richmond was possible, you need to understand what TANESCO had already become before Richmond arrived. By the time the fraudulent tender was awarded in 2006, Tanzania's national power utility was not simply under pressure — it was in a condition of structured insolvency, locked into contractual arrangements that guaranteed its financial destruction regardless of how efficiently it was managed.

The central mechanism was the IPP cost structure. Tanzania had, over the preceding decade, signed Power Purchase Agreements with two Independent Power Producers — IPTL and Songas — whose capacity charges were fixed regardless of actual power delivered. By 2006, payments to those two entities alone consumed 96 cents of every dollar TANESCO collected in revenues. That is not a procurement irregularity. It is institutional capture — a national utility legally obligated to transfer the overwhelming majority of its income to two private counterparties, leaving four cents in the dollar for staff, maintenance, investment and everything else.³

The consequences were visible everywhere. Installed capacity was around 1,000 MW for a country of nearly 40 million people, with electricity coverage below 10% nationally and below 2% in rural areas. Around a third of all power generated was lost in transmission before it reached a consumer — losses far above any reasonable benchmark — because there was no money for the maintenance and investment the grid required. Per-unit generation costs had risen 60% in four years. Operating costs had more than doubled. And through all of it, the IPP payments ran on, guaranteed by sovereign commitment.

The governance architecture matched the financial one. At the time of our 2008 PEFA review of TANESCO, there was no functioning Board of Directors. The Terms of Reference for the Board had been drafted by the Managing Director — the very person the Board existed to oversee.⁴ The Ministry of Energy, the Board, and Management had no clear separation of authority. The owner — the Government of Tanzania — had not established a stable long-term strategy for the utility it owned. No one was in charge in any meaningful sense, which meant that no one was accountable in any meaningful sense either.

Into this environment, Richmond arrived. The brazen manner in which this particular contract was approved was an anomaly. In the past procurement rules were stretched, and when occasional ministerial override of technical assessments happened – it was normalised. However in 2007, the absence of a functioning governance structure meant there was no institutional actor with both the authority and the incentive to say no. TANESCO Tender Board did its best. The Tender Board did say no — three times. The Ministry simply removed the process from their hands.

III. The World Sitta and Mwakyembe Walked Into

The Tanzania they inhabited was one where Parliament's primary function, in practice, was ratification. The Executive governed; the legislature provided procedural cover. This was not unique to Tanzania — it was the dominant operating model across Sub-Saharan Africa, and frankly, it was the model that many in the international community had quietly learned to work around. Annual reviews could document procurement failures. PPRA could publish findings. Donors could raise concerns in carefully worded aide-memoires. None of it compelled executive accountability.

This is not to say that Tanzania lacked individuals of integrity within its accountability institutions. It had several, and they deserve to be named here. Ludovick Utouh, the Controller and Auditor General, built the Tanzania National Audit Office into one of the finest supreme audit institutions on the continent — rigorous, independent, and technically credible in a way that few African audit offices have achieved. Dr Shrima, the quietly formidable head of the PPRA, gave that office its institutional spine: it was his organisation's work that produced the August 2007 audit report on TANESCO, and it was his office that withstood the pressure to soften its findings before publication. John Cheyo, the sole MP for the United Democratic Party and Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, was among the most effective parliamentary accountability actors of his generation — small in numbers, as he put it, but with fantastic influence.

These three men, working across their respective institutions in the same period, created the evidentiary and oversight infrastructure that Sitta and Mwakyembe would subsequently use. The inquiry did not emerge from nothing. It emerged from an ecosystem that people like Utouh, Shrima and Cheyo had spent years constructing.

The donor community's sustained engagement with Tanzania across this period has its own complicated logic, and one observation from those years captures it better than any formal analysis. A colleague once remarked, not entirely without affection, that if Tanzania did not have the Msasani Yacht Club, Zanzibar, the Serengeti, Ngorongoro and the International School of Tanzania, there was no way it could have remained the donor darling of budget support in Africa. It was said with a smile, but it pointed at something real. The government counterparts were genuinely pleasant, welcoming and well-meaning people. The scams, however, came year after year — Richmond, the Bank of Tanzania External Arrears Account, IPTL, and more — and while they dented donor enthusiasm, they did not stop the money flowing. The lifestyle amenities of Dar es Salaam had nothing to do with the formal justifications for budget support, of course. But they shaped the social environment in which difficult conversations were perpetually softened, and in which the gap between documented evidence and institutional action persisted for years without resolution.

The most telling illustration of how completely the formal accountability architecture had been captured came from the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau — the PCCB — Tanzania's own dedicated anti-corruption authority, headed by Dr Edward Hoseah. The PCCB had investigated the Richmond contract and concluded that the procurement process was transparent and competitive, with no evidence of bribery or corruption. This was a direct and irreconcilable contradiction of the PPRA's own findings, which had documented in precise detail how the Ministry of Energy had overridden the Tender Board, recalled bid documents from TANESCO, negotiated through a Government team, and signed a contract at night at the Ministry with no performance bond and an unknown drafter. The two reports described the same transaction. One said clean. The other said corrupt. Every formal accountability channel had now been exhausted without result: the procurement regulator had documented the violations, the anti-corruption bureau had declared everything lawful, and the Government had continued as before. Mwakyembe's committee later characterised the PCCB's investigation as a whitewash⁵ and proposed immediate changes in the Bureau's management.⁶ Parliament resolved that disciplinary action be taken against the PCCB Director General and the staff involved. There is no public record of those actions ever being implemented.⁷

The deeper structural problem — the IPP cost structure, the IPTL and Songas arrangements, the governance vacuum — was known to the donor community, documented in successive PEFA reviews, flagged in World Bank assessments. It had been known for years. It had not been addressed because addressing it required confronting a web of contractual obligations, ministerial interests, and political relationships that no external actor had the standing or the leverage to unpick. It required someone inside the system, with constitutional authority, to act.

When Sitta authorised the Select Committee in November 2007, he was making precisely that claim — that Parliament had both the authority and the obligation to act where the Executive had not merely failed but actively obstructed. Richmond was the entry point; the structural pathology of the sector was the larger target. The PPRA had produced the evidence. The PEFA process had assembled it. The donor community had received it. The anti-corruption bureau had buried it. What was missing was a political actor willing to force a reckoning regardless.

IV. What I Saw in Mwakyembe

Harrison Mwakyembe was chosen to chair the Committee because Sitta understood what the inquiry required. This was not a task for a generalist politician willing to wave a banner and declare victory after a few uncomfortable hearings. It demanded forensic patience — the kind of methodical, sustained pressure that could penetrate layers of orchestrated obstruction without ever giving the other side a procedural escape route.

I had occasion to observe Mwakyembe in action. What struck me was his refusal to be theatrical when the evidence itself was devastating. He did not need to perform outrage. He simply kept asking the next question. When witnesses arrived delivering what he memorably called the Wimbo — the Song, identical scripted testimonies from officials who had clearly been coordinated from a single point — he did not expose this with dramatics. He catalogued it, methodically, until the repetition itself became the evidence.

The PPRA findings I had presented to donors in October were the tip of a documented iceberg. Mwakyembe used the Public Procurement Act of 2004 as a scalpel, working through each procedural violation with the precision of a legal scholar who also understood procurement architecture. No procurement plan. No cost estimates. Tender Board findings overridden. Contract signed after bid validity had lapsed. No performance bond. Seventeen separate deficiencies, each one documented, each one brought before witnesses who had been instructed to sing the same song.

When officials in Dar es Salaam insisted Richmond Development Company was a substantial American energy firm, Mwakyembe's response was not rhetorical — he went to look. He travelled to Texas. What the Committee found in Texas was, in effect, nothing: no operational headquarters, no generation capacity, no corporate substance. A P.O. Box. A ghost company had been awarded a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with the full connivance of the Prime Minister's office. You cannot argue with a photograph of an empty office. Mwakyembe understood this.

V. Sitta's Constitutional Gamble

The courage belonged to both men, but it expressed itself differently. Mwakyembe's was the courage of the craftsman — disciplined, technical, relentless. Sitta's was the courage of the institution-builder, which is a rarer and, in my view, more consequential thing. To understand what he actually did requires understanding the parliamentary environment he was operating in — and how much of it he had to construct before the inquiry could begin.

Sitta had been elected Speaker in December 2005 and set immediately about transforming Bunge from a ratification chamber into a functioning legislature. The structural obstacles were formidable. CCM held 274 seats against a combined opposition of 55.⁸ Inside estimates at the time suggested roughly 40% of MPs genuinely wanted institutional reform, 40% were loyal to the party machine, and 20% were undecided — a majority for the status quo if the machine chose to enforce it. Under the old Standing Orders, any request for a parliamentary committee of inquiry into a matter of public controversy was routinely quashed by the ruling party. In 2006 no such request had even been proposed. The reflex of the CCM bloc was to treat oversight as threat, and to treat any MP willing to exercise the challenge function as a problem to be managed.

Sitta spent two years quietly changing the rules. The revised Standing Orders he pushed through in 2007 were the procedural foundation on which everything else rested. They expanded the supervisory powers of parliamentary committees, enhanced MPs' rights to speak freely and introduce legislation, and established the select committee mechanism that Richmond would require. In parallel, he secured the creation of a National Assembly Fund that gave Parliament direct budgetary independence from the executive for the first time — Parliament no longer had to channel funding requests through the civil service. As Sitta himself wrote in 2008, this was a sign that the government had accepted that Parliament should be completely independent.⁹ He understood that financial dependence and procedural dependence were two sides of the same constraint, and he addressed both.

Then, in July 2007 — four months before the Select Committee was authorised — Sitta told the Africa Research Institute's director categorically that the majority party would veto any proposal for a parliamentary inquiry into an issue of serious public controversy.¹⁰ He said this not as a complaint but as a description of reality. He was the Speaker of an institution he had spent two years reforming, and he still assessed it as incapable of doing what needed to be done. What changed between July and November was not the institution — it was Sitta's decision to act as if it were capable, and to use the procedural architecture he had built to force the question.

The trigger, when it came, was William Shelukindo, chairman of the Trade and Investment Committee, who raised concerns about the Richmond contract in Parliament. Sitta used that as the constitutional entry point and authorised the Select Committee on November 13, 2007. He then invested extraordinary care in protecting its integrity: televised sessions, a technically competent committee, a refusal to allow the Executive to constrain the Committee's access to documents, a flat rejection of Permanent Secretary Mwakapugi's attempt to restrict the inquiry to pre-selected pages. Mwakyembe, for his part, confirmed in an interview conducted at the time that the committee resolved early on to be circumspect — too much disclosure of their findings, too early in the process, would have jeopardised everything.¹¹ A deliberate strategy of controlled silence, holding the real conclusions back until the Bunge session that would make them impossible to suppress.

There was a story doing the rounds in Dar es Salaam at the time — one I heard from people close to the inquiry and cannot independently corroborate, but which I set down here because it captures the atmosphere of those months better than anything verifiable. During the inquiry, the pressure from the Executive to discover the committee's findings before the formal presentation was intense. Sitta was travelling in London when, it was said, his briefcase was taken by a hotel attendant between the lobby and his room — and returned with its contents copied. A draft of the report had been in it. Lowassa's camp read what they found, concluded the committee had uncovered nothing of significance, and relaxed. They were, accordingly, unprepared for what Mwakyembe stood up and read to the Bunge on February 8, 2008. The draft in the briefcase, the story goes, had been a plant — a decoy document, left precisely to be found. Whether or not the account is true in every detail, it describes something that those of us watching from the inside found entirely plausible. Sitta was not merely brave. He was, by every account, several moves ahead.

His doctrine of Kasi na Viwango — Speed and Standard — was not a slogan. It was a diagnostic of everything that African legislatures had been failing to provide: timely, high-quality oversight that the public could trust and the Executive could not dismiss. In his own words, the ideal was to have the teeth, and also to have the meat to chew on. Richmond was the meat. The revised Standing Orders, the National Assembly Fund, the select committee mechanism — those were the teeth he had spent two years sharpening before the public knew they existed.

The machine understood what had happened. When Sitta's term as Speaker ended in 2010, he was not reappointed.¹² Political analysts in Dar es Salaam noted at the time that the ruling party had replaced him with a more moderate successor specifically to reduce the intensity of parliamentary debate. MPs who had served under him said openly that Parliament no longer enjoyed the same powers and that no subsequent Speaker had commanded the House with the same authority. The CCM machine's delayed answer to Richmond was to remove the man who had made it possible.

VI. What the Reformer's Lens Demands We Notice

I write for an audience that follows multilateral development bank reform, public financial management, and institutional accountability across Africa. The Richmond case is instructive precisely because it did not unfold as the standard accountability model predicts it should.

The standard model assumes sequential logic: external diagnostics surface problems, donors apply leverage, governments reform. Tanzania had working diagnostics — the PPRA was functioning, the annual review process was rigorous, the World Bank's PEFAR assessments were technically credible. Tanzania had donor leverage — $800 million a year in budget support concentrates minds. None of it had resolved the structural corruption in the energy sector: not the IPTL arrangements, not the Songas capacity charges, not the governance vacuum at TANESCO. And none of it produced executive accountability for Richmond.

What produced accountability was a Speaker who chose to act and a committee chair who knew how to use what had already been documented. This is not an argument against diagnostics or donor leverage — the parliamentary inquiry drew directly on the evidentiary record that the PPRA and PEFA processes had established. It is an argument about what the limiting factor actually is. The Richmond inquiry demonstrates that the problem is almost never the absence of documented evidence. Mwakyembe did not need more information. He needed the mandate, the protection, and the personal fortitude to act on what was already known. Sitta provided the first two. Mwakyembe provided the third.

The structural pathology of Tanzania's energy sector — the IPP cost trap, the governance vacuum, the decade of normalised procurement failure — remained largely unresolved after the Richmond inquiry. Lowassa resigned. The contract was cancelled. The deeper architecture that had made Richmond possible continued. That is not a criticism of Sitta and Mwakyembe; it is a measure of how deeply embedded structural corruption becomes when it is allowed to compound over years. What they achieved was to establish, irrefutably, that accountability was possible. That matters. It changes the political calculus for every subsequent actor in every subsequent crisis.

VII. The Price They Paid

I have used the phrase 'considerable personal and political cost' in this article. I want to be precise about what that meant for both men — and for those closest to them — because the record deserves to be stated plainly.

On 21 May 2009, more than a year after the Richmond report was tabled and Lowassa had resigned, Mwakyembe was travelling from his Kyela constituency toward Dar es Salaam when his vehicle left the road and overturned in the Ihemi area of Iringa Vijijini, while swerving to avoid a lorry. He lost consciousness and sustained serious injuries. Parliament dispatched a plane and he was airlifted to Dar es Salaam for treatment. The accident was reported the same day on Tanzanian Swahili blogs¹³, which noted the swerving-lorry account and the parliamentary airlift. Within days the Inspector General of Police had constituted a special committee — led by Road Safety Unit chief James Kombe — to investigate.

The committee concluded on 26 May, widely reported in Tanzania Daima and the Michuzi Blog, that Mwakyembe's driver Joseph Msuya had been at fault for speeding, and that there was no physical evidence the vehicle had been struck by another vehicle. The driver was charged. Mwakyembe was told not to speak to the media.

On 28 May, from his home in Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam, Mwakyembe issued his own signed statement. He noted that when the accident first happened his instinct had been that it was a normal accident. But the subsequent conduct of the police — what he called in Swahili 'purukushani za Polisi za funika kombe mwanaharamu apite,' the police shenanigans of trying to cover things up — had made him suspicious that it was not. He noted that the lorry driver who had appeared in Tanzania Daima giving a firsthand account had never been questioned by the committee, that neither he nor his own driver had been allowed to speak publicly while Kombe spoke freely to the press, and that standard procedures applied to every other road accident in Tanzania had been altered in his case. He left final judgment to God and signed off: MUNGU IBARIKI TANZANIA, Dk. Harrison G. Mwakyembe, Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam, 28/05/09.¹⁴

The question he raised — why the lorry driver was never questioned — was never publicly answered. I was aware of what was being said in Tanzanian political circles at the time. I do not assert more than the record shows. What I can say is that no one who knew what Mwakyembe had done, and what he had cost the people around the Prime Minister's office, would have been surprised that something happened to him on that road.

The threats did not stop there. In 2011, while serving as Deputy Minister of Infrastructure, Mwakyembe was hospitalised with a severe and unexplained skin condition and flown to India for specialised treatment. The Tanzanian press reported openly on allegations that he had been poisoned. A Swahili newspaper ran the headline Maisha ya Mwakyembe hatarini — Mwakyembe's life in danger.¹⁵ The government subsequently banned that newspaper for two years. The ban was imposed by Mwakyembe himself, by then serving as Minister of Information — a fact that carries its own complicated weight, and that I note without editorial comment.

The pressure extended to Sitta's family as well. In 2010 — the same period when Sitta was at the height of his influence as Speaker and when internal CCM politics were at their most turbulent — his wife Magreth Sitta was arrested and questioned by the PCCB in Tabora over allegations linked to party primary campaigning. The incident was reported in the Tanzanian mainstream press at the time. Magreth Sitta publicly dismissed the allegations as a witch-hunt. She was released without any case of substance proceeding against her.¹⁶ The timing and the instrument — the same PCCB that had declared the Richmond procurement clean — were not lost on those watching. Whether this was coincidence or calculation, it was the kind of pressure that operates below the threshold of formal sanction: designed not to convict, but to signal. This may have been pure speculation – but the talk on the street was that a joint press conference had been convened to be addressed by Sam Sitta and Dr. Willibrod Slaa — Secretary-General of CHADEMA, MP for Karatu, co-author of Bunge Lenye Meno with Sitta, and the man who would win 27% of the national presidential vote five months later — to announce “something big”. The press conference was cancelled.

I raise these episodes not to cast either man as a martyr — both would reject that framing, and their subsequent careers demonstrate two people who continued to operate with energy and purpose inside a system that had repeatedly tried to contain them. I raise them because the governance reform community has a habit of celebrating institutional courage in the abstract while glossing over what it actually extracts from those who exercise it. A near-fatal road accident. A hospitalisation with unexplained causes. A newspaper banned. A wife arrested. These are not footnotes to the Richmond story. They are part of it.

VIII. A Legacy Still Being Written

Samuel Sitta went on to serve as Minister of East African Cooperation. Harrison Mwakyembe served across multiple cabinet portfolios. That both men moved into executive roles after their parliamentary work is not without irony — but it also speaks to the nature of political courage in complex systems. They used the positions they had, when they had them, to do something that mattered.

After the report had been presented and the resignations had come, I travelled to Dodoma. Sitta hosted a gathering — around twenty key MPs around the table, drawn from across the political spectrum, still processing what they had collectively achieved. The World Bank had supported Tanzania's Parliament through the Public Financial Management Reform Programme, for which I was the Chair. It fell to me to say something on behalf of the Bank and the entire donor community. I stood up and told them that what we had witnessed in Tanzania was not merely African good practice. It was global good practice.¹⁷ I meant it. We applauded Sam Sitta and the Parliament of Tanzania. I sat in awe.

I had worked in public financial management across Sub-Saharan Africa. I had sat in rooms where parliamentary oversight was performed as theatre, where committee reports were written to be filed, where the gap between what was documented and what was acted upon was treated as a permanent feature of the landscape. What Sitta had authorised and Mwakyembe had executed was something different in kind, not just degree. The MPs around that table understood what had been said. So did Sitta.

The blueprint they built in 2007-2008 is still studied. The Richmond inquiry is taught in governance programmes, cited in parliamentary procedure reviews, and referenced in every serious discussion of African legislative oversight. It deserves to be. But more than the report, more than the resignations, more than the contract termination — what Sitta and Mwakyembe left behind was a demonstrated possibility. They showed that a parliament in Sub-Saharan Africa could, when led with integrity, hold a Prime Minister to account on the basis of documented evidence that the system had already produced but lacked the courage to use.

Demonstrated possibilities matter more than theoretical ones. They shift what reformers believe they can ask for, and what citizens believe they can expect.

I presented the PPRA findings on Richmond to Tanzania's donors on October 31, 2007. The findings went into a report. The report joined a file. Thirteen days later, Samuel Sitta did something with what was in that file that I — and most of the room that day — had not anticipated. I have been thinking about the distance between those two acts ever since. It is the distance between accountability documented and accountability delivered. Sitta and Mwakyembe closed it.

In the years before I left Tanzania, Harrison Mwakyembe and I had dinner on the beach during an accountability conference in Dar es Salaam. The conference was the Annual Accountability Conference for 2010, jointly organised by the World Bank, Tanzania's National Audit Office and Parliament, held at the Blue Pearl Hotel in Ubungo Plaza in May 2010. That year’s conference was unique. We had Parliamentarians from across East Africa. It was, in its way, a measure of how much had changed since 2007 — the discussions were real. A bridge had been crossed. It had been convened by the institutions that the Richmond inquiry had helped to rehabilitate.

I remember a moment at the reception on the first evening. The then Minister of Finance turned to the Auditor General and, nodding in my direction, asked: is this the trouble maker? It was not said with hostility. It was said with the particular dry recognition that senior officials reserve for people who have cost them a difficult afternoon and whom they have nonetheless come to respect. I had, after all, stood up at the 2007 Annual Review in front of the entire donor community and walked the MOF's own Special Secretary through the PPRA findings on Richmond until he had nothing left to say. Two and a half years later, the Minister of Finance remembered. So, evidently, did the Auditor General.

That evening, Mwakyembe and I had dinner on the beach as the sun set over the Indian Ocean. We talked about what had been built, and what remained unfinished. At some point he turned to me and said: come back, take a shamba, settle down here by the beach. It was, I will admit, a genuinely appealing proposition in that light, at that hour. I have thought about it since — not just as an invitation to a place, but as a measure of the man who extended it. A person who had survived a road accident that should have killed him, who had been flown to India for reasons that were never fully explained, who had operated for years inside a system that wanted him neutralised — and who was sitting on a beach at sunset, in good spirits, inviting a friend to stay.

That is what I want to say about Harrison Mwakyembe and Samuel Sitta. That institutional courage is not a product of circumstance. It is a choice. They made it, at considerable personal and political cost — and as I have tried to show, that cost was real — and Tanzania, and Africa, is the better for it.

Many moons after these events, a one-day retreat was organized between the Bank and President Kikwete with the full Cabinet present. All Permanent Secretaries were there. It was a multisectoral discussion covering sector reform and governance issues. Our top gurus flown in from DC. At the evening reception – after an exhausting day full of presentations and and a patient audience – in front of me – President Kikwete turned to John McIntire, the World Bank Country Director, and said, : you people have no idea how difficult it is to be the president of an African country. It was not said with hostility. It was said with the particular exhausted honesty that emerges at the end of a long day of good intentions. He was right. And in that remark lay the entire explanation for why the gap between accountability documented and accountability delivered was so persistent, and why what Sitta and Mwakyembe did was so rare.

The author is a former Lead Financial Management Specialist and Lead Governance Specialist at the World Bank, with field experience across Sub-Saharan Africa. He was Co-Team Leader of the PEFA 2007 Parastatals and Government Bodies Assessment in Tanzania and co-presented the 2008 PEFA Analysis of TANESCO with the Embassy of Sweden. He operates mdbreform.com, an independent platform for policy analysis and advocacy focused on multilateral development bank reform.

References and Sources

Annex 1 to: The Richmond Reckoning — mdbreform.com

By Parminder Brar | mdbreform.com | March 2026

The following sources were drawn upon in the preparation of the article The Richmond Reckoning and its accompanying Annex 2. Sources are organised by category. Where a source is a primary document uploaded as a supporting file on this page, this is indicated. The author's first-hand testimony — as a participant in the events described — is the primary source for several episodes in the article that are not independently documented elsewhere, and these are noted accordingly.

1. Primary Documents (available as supporting files on this page)

[1] Parminder Brar, PEFA 2007 — Performance Review of Selected Public Enterprises and Government Bodies. Presentation to the Annual Review of General Budget Support, Dar es Salaam, 31 October 2007. World Bank / Ministry of Finance Tanzania. [Supporting file: Tanzania_Annual_Review_2007_PEFA_Parastatals.ppt]

[2] Parminder Brar and Wiveca Holmgren (Embassy of Sweden), PEFA Analysis of TANESCO. Presentation to stakeholders, Dar es Salaam, 25 September 2008. World Bank / Embassy of Sweden. [Supporting file: Tanzania_PEFA_TANESCO_Analysis_2008.ppt]

[3] Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA), Procurement, Contract and Performance Audit of Tanzania Electricity Supply Company Limited (TANESCO). Final Report, August 2007. Funded by USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation; conducted by Kilimanjaro International Corporation. [Supporting file: TANESCO_PPRA_Procurement_Audit_Report_August_2007.doc] Note: This report was difficult to find on the PPRA website within days of its presentation at the Annual Review on 31 October 2007.

[4] Performance Auditing Accountability Conference, Conference Photographs. Blue Pearl Hotel, Ubungo Plaza, Dar es Salaam, 26–28 May 2010. Co-organised by the World Bank, National Audit Office of Tanzania and Tanzania Parliament. [Supporting file: Tanzania_2010_Accountability_Conference.pdf]

2. Parliamentary Record and Official Reports

[5] Parliamentary Select Committee on the Richmond Power Supply Contract, Report to the National Assembly of Tanzania. Presented by Dr Harrison George Mwakyembe, MP for Kyela, 8 February 2008. Dodoma: National Assembly of Tanzania.

[6] Government of Tanzania, Implementation of the Parliamentary Directives. Official response to the Richmond Select Committee report, August 2008.

[7] Tanzania National Assembly, Standing Orders of the National Assembly of Tanzania. Revised 2007. Dodoma: National Assembly of Tanzania.

3. Books, Policy Reports and Academic Papers

[8] Sitta, Samuel, Slaa, Willibrod and Cheyo, John Momose, Bunge Lenye Meno: A Parliament with Teeth, for Tanzania. With an introduction by Mark Ashurst. London: Africa Research Institute, 2008. ISBN 978 1 906329 02 0. Note: Appendix B contains a full interview with Dr Harrison George Mwakyembe on the Richmond inquiry, conducted at the time.

[9] Ashurst, Mark, Tanzania and Senegal: Inside the Machine. London: Africa Research Institute, 2014. Briefing note.

[10] Cooksey, Brian, Fighting Corruption in Tanzania's Energy Sector: Lessons from Richmond and IPTL/Escrow Scandals. Academic paper, ResearchGate, September 2024. Notes the PCCB's conclusion on Richmond and Parliament's characterisation of it as a whitewash.

[11] Open Society Foundations, Effectiveness of Anti-Corruption Agencies in East Africa: Tanzania. 2016. Documents PCCB performance and structural constraints.

[12] Policy Forum Tanzania / PCCB, A Review of the Performance of Tanzania's Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau. Dar es Salaam, various editions.

4. Press and Media Sources

[13] Tanzanian Affairs, Report on Richmond Scandal. May 2008. www.tzaffairs.org. Contains contemporaneous account of Mwakyembe's presentation to the Bunge and the reactions of MPs.

[14] Tanzanian Affairs, The Anti-Corruption Drive. September 2009. www.tzaffairs.org. Documents government response exonerating PCCB Director General Edward Hoseah; notes no officials held legally liable.

[15] The Citizen Tanzania, Richmond, Lowassa and the Race to Ikulu. 2015. www.thecitizen.co.tz. Detailed retrospective on the Richmond affair including the Dowans ICC arbitration and the $120 million compensation payment.

[16] The Citizen Tanzania, MPs: Sitta Was a Role Model and Beacon of Courage. November 2016. www.thecitizen.co.tz. Parliamentary tributes at Sitta's death; includes Mwakyembe's personal tribute.

[17] The Citizen Tanzania, Mwakyembe's Wife Has Passed Away. 2016. www.thecitizen.co.tz. Report on the death of Lina Mwakyembe.

[18] The Citizen Tanzania, Kikwete Consoles Mwakyembe for Losing His Wife. 2016. www.thecitizen.co.tz.

[19] The Citizen Tanzania, Dismay After Govt Slaps Two-Year Ban on Mwanahalisi. 2016. www.thecitizen.co.tz. Documents newspaper ban imposed by Mwakyembe as Minister of Information, including reference to earlier story headlined Maisha ya Mwakyembe hatarini.

[20] The Citizen Tanzania, Dr Mwakyembe Forced to Defend Richmond Committee Work. 2017. www.thecitizen.co.tz. Mwakyembe defends the committee's conduct in a 2017 parliamentary session.

[21] AllAfrica (aggregating Tanzanian mainstream press including Daily News and The Citizen), Corruption Allegations — It's Witch-Hunt, Cries Mrs Sitta. 2010. Documents the arrest and questioning of Magreth Sitta by the PCCB during the CCM internal party primary campaign period in Tabora. She publicly dismissed the allegations as politically motivated and was released without any case proceeding against her.

[22] Tanzania Election Monitoring Committee (TEMCO), Election Monitoring Report. 2010. Corroborates PCCB activity targeting CCM aspirants during primary period.

[23] Shout Africa, Tanzania Gets First Female Speaker. November 2010. www.shout-africa.com. Documents political analysis of Sitta's replacement as Speaker and the CCM machine's motivations.

[24] Wikipedia, Harrison Mwakyembe. Accessed March 2026. en.wikipedia.org. Background on Mwakyembe's career and the Richmond inquiry findings.

[25] Wikipedia, Samuel Sitta. Accessed March 2026. en.wikipedia.org. Records Sitta's death on 7 November 2016 in Munich, Germany.

[26] Africa Research Institute Blog, Tanzanian Politics at a Crossroads. March 2016. www.africaresearchinstitute.org. Quotes Sitta's July 2007 statement to ARI director that the majority party would veto any inquiry.

[33] Kisima cha Fikra (Swahili blog), 21 May 2009. Contemporaneous report of the Mwakyembe road accident: vehicle swerved to avoid a lorry and overturned; Parliament dispatched an aircraft to airlift Mwakyembe to Dar es Salaam. URL: rsmiruko.blogspot.com/2009/05/

[34] Michuzi Blog (Tanzania's most-read Swahili blog), 26 May 2009. Full text of findings of IGP special committee led by Road Safety Unit chief James Kombe: driver Joseph Msuya (30) found at fault for speeding; vehicle deviated 60 metres from road, struck a tree and overturned; engineering expert Francis Mwakatundu found no physical evidence vehicle had been struck by another vehicle. URL: issamichuzi.blogspot.com/2009/05/dereva-ndiye-chanzo-cha-ajali-ya-dk.html

[35] Dr Harrison G. Mwakyembe, Personal Press Statement, 28 May 2009, Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam. Notes initial belief accident was normal; states subsequent police conduct made him suspicious it was not ('purukushani za Polisi za funika kombe mwanaharamu apite'); questions why the lorry driver who appeared in Tanzania Daima was never questioned by the committee; notes that he and his driver were told not to speak to media while police chief Kombe spoke freely. Signed: MUNGU IBARIKI TANZANIA, Dk. Harrison G. Mwakyembe (Mb), 28/05/09. Archived at rsmiruko.blogspot.com/2009/05/

[36] Tanzania Daima (Swahili daily newspaper), May 2009. Carried the lorry driver's firsthand account of the accident — a witness account not formally obtained by the IGP special committee, as noted by Mwakyembe in his press statement [ref 35].

[37] JamiiForums (Tanzania's leading online discussion forum), 2013. Retrospective analysis of pressures on Mwakyembe post-Richmond, describing the accident as 'ajali iliyotajwa kusababishwa kwa makusudi na lori dhidi ya Mwakyembe' — an accident claimed to have been caused deliberately by a lorry. URL: jamiiforums.com/threads/siri-ya-waziri-mwakyembe-kutonunua-ndege-yafichuka.455628/

[38] The Citizen Tanzania, report on government ban on Mwanahalisi newspaper, 2016. Documents the two-year ban including reference to an earlier story headlined 'Maisha ya Mwakyembe hatarini' (Mwakyembe's life in danger), reporting allegations that Mwakyembe had been poisoned during his 2011 hospitalisation and medical evacuation to India. The ban was imposed by Mwakyembe himself as Minister of Information. URL: thecitizen.co.tz

[39] Dr Willibrod Peter Slaa (born 29 October 1948, Karatu, Manyara Region). At the time of the Performance Auditing Accountability Conference, May 2010, Dr Slaa was Secretary-General of CHADEMA (Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo), MP for Karatu (elected 1995), and co-author of Bunge Lenye Meno: A Parliament with Teeth (Africa Research Institute, 2008) alongside Speaker Sitta and PAC Chairman John Cheyo [see ref 8]. He had been one of the most effective parliamentary accountability voices of the period, playing a central role in bringing corruption scandals before the National Assembly. Five months after the conference he ran as CHADEMA's presidential candidate in the October 2010 election, winning 27.1% of the national vote — Tanzania's strongest opposition presidential showing to that point. A photograph of Dr Slaa seated alongside the author at the 2010 Accountability Conference is published with this article.

[40] Wikipedia, Willibrod Slaa. Accessed March 2026. en.wikipedia.org. Records his background: attended Kibosho Seminary School (philosophy certificate, 1973) and Kipalapala Seminary in Tabora (theology certificate, 1977); served as Secretary-General of the Tanzania Episcopal Conference 1985-1991; joined Chadema and won Karatu seat 1995 after CCM blocked his constituency nomination in favour of a presidential favourite; re-elected consistently; elected CHADEMA Secretary-General 2002; CHADEMA presidential candidate 2010, winning 27.1% of the national vote and 48 parliamentary seats — the party's strongest showing to that date.

[41] The Citizen Tanzania, Tracing Slaa's Diplomatic, Political Ups and Downs. September 2023. www.thecitizen.co.tz. Profiles his career arc: from priesthood to parliament to presidential candidacy to resignation over the Lowassa affair (2015) to ambassadorship to Sweden (2017, appointed by President Magufuli) to renewed opposition activism. Notes his reputation as a formidable parliamentary debater and a vocal proponent of social equity and justice. Documents his 2023 arrest following criticism of the controversial DP World port deal — a reminder that the pattern of using state institutions against government critics did not end with the Richmond era.

[42] Africa Research Institute, Bunge Lenye Meno: A Parliament with Teeth [see ref 8]. Appendix contribution by Dr Slaa as Secretary-General of CHADEMA. His chapter documents the opposition's role in the accountability reforms of 2007-2008, including the cross-party cooperation that made the Richmond inquiry possible. He and Sitta — one the ruling party's Speaker, the other the leading opposition figure — co-published under the same cover, a measure of the unusual alignment of purpose that the Richmond period produced.

[43] The Chanzo, Is Willibrod Slaa Officially Back to Tanzania's Opposition Party CHADEMA? February 2024. thechanzo.com. Documents his political journey after 2015 and his gradual return to opposition politics; notes his reputation as a serious political debater who built strong arguments and commanded respect across party lines. His resignation in 2015 rather than accept Edward Lowassa — the man whose removal the Richmond inquiry had demanded — as the opposition presidential candidate was widely seen as a final act of principled consistency.

5. Author's Direct Testimony

The following episodes in the article are based on the author's first-hand participation or direct knowledge and are not independently documented in publicly available sources. They are presented as personal testimony from a named participant.

[27] The Annual Review of General Budget Support, Dar es Salaam, 31 October 2007. The author's presentation of the PPRA findings; the confrontation with the Special Secretary of the Ministry of Finance; and the subsequent order to remove the PPRA report from the PPRA website. Direct participation.

[28] The gathering in Dodoma hosted by Speaker Samuel Sitta following the Richmond report and ministerial resignations, at which the author spoke on behalf of the World Bank and the donor community. Direct participation.

[29] The road accident involving Harrison Mwakyembe, 21 May 2009, Ihemi area, Iringa Vijijini (travelling from Kyela toward Dar es Salaam). Primary sources: (a) Kisima cha Fikra blog (Swahili), 21 May 2009 — contemporaneous report that the vehicle swerved to avoid a lorry and overturned, and that Parliament dispatched an aircraft to airlift Mwakyembe to Dar es Salaam. (b) Michuzi Blog (Tanzania's most-read Swahili blog), 26 May 2009 — full text of the findings of the special committee constituted by IGP Said Mwema, led by Road Safety Unit chief James Kombe, concluding that driver Joseph Msuya (30) was at fault for speeding; vehicle had deviated 60 metres from the road, struck a tree and overturned. Committee comprised Police, TANROADS, vehicle engineering expert Francis Mwakatundu, and a forensic doctor. (c) Tanzania Daima, 26 May 2009 — carried the lorry driver's own account (as referenced in Mwakyembe's statement). (d) Mwakyembe's own signed press statement, 28 May 2009, from Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam: noted initial belief it was a normal accident; expressed suspicion based on subsequent police conduct ('purukushani za Polisi za funika kombe mwanaharamu apite'); questioned why the lorry driver who appeared in Tanzania Daima was never questioned by the committee; noted that Mwakyembe and his driver were told not to speak to the media while Kombe spoke freely. Signed: MUNGU IBARIKI TANZANIA, Dk. Harrison G. Mwakyembe (Mb), Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam, 28/05/09.

[30] The Performance Auditing Accountability Conference, Blue Pearl Hotel, Dar es Salaam, May 2010. The Minister of Finance's remark to the Auditor General ('is this the trouble maker?'). The author's beach dinner with Harrison Mwakyembe and Mwakyembe's invitation. Direct participation.

[31] John McIntire's role as World Bank Country Director for Tanzania and his support for accountability-based diagnostic work was outstanding. He won the World Bank Staff Association Award for best Country Director for 2010.

[32] The briefcase episode in London during the inquiry. Heard by the author from sources close to the inquiry at the time; cannot be independently corroborated and is presented in the article explicitly as a story doing the rounds, not as established fact.

Parminder Brar was Lead Financial Management Specialist and Lead Governance Specialist at the World Bank, and Co-Team Leader of the PEFA 2007 Parastatals and Government Bodies Assessment in Tanzania. He operates mdbreform.com, an independent platform for policy analysis focused on multilateral development bank reform and accountability in development finance.

The Richmond Contract: What the PPRA Found

Annex 2: The Richmond Reckoning — mdbreform.com

Source: Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA), Procurement, Contract and Performance Audit of TANESCO, Final Report, August 2007. Tender Reference: PC/10/2006 — Emergency Power Supply from Rental Gas Based Generating Plant of 100MW, Dar es Salaam.

The PPRA audit of TANESCO was conducted at TANESCO headquarters over three weeks beginning 10 April 2007. It covered the full 2006 fiscal year. The findings on the Richmond contract — Tender PC/10/2006 — are documented across the main body of the report (Case 1) and in Annex 1, the detailed tender-by-tender breakdown. What follows is a systematic summary of those findings, presented in the sequence in which events occurred.

The PPRA report was published in August 2007 and presented to the donor community at the Annual Review of General Budget Support in Dar es Salaam on 31 October 2007. It was subsequently ordered removed from the PPRA website within days of that presentation. The full report is available as a supporting document to this article.

1. TANESCO's Procurement Process: Functioning Correctly

The audit establishes clearly that TANESCO's own procurement machinery identified and rejected Richmond at every stage of the process at which it was allowed to operate.

Tender opening: 20 March 2006. Eight firms submitted bids.

Tender Board decision: At meetings on 28 and 29 March 2006, the Tender Board disqualified all eight bids as non-responsive. TANESCO's evaluation, before it was abandoned, had identified Renco SPA of Italy and Real Energy of United Kingdom as more relatively responsive to the bid requirements than Richmond Development Company LLC.

Evaluation criteria: The evaluation process was not completed following the stated criteria. Bid security requirements were waived. Weighted scores were revised from the stated criteria to 60% technical and 40% commercial. The evaluation was redone with substantial flexing of the original criteria.

Personal declarations: No conflict of interest or personal covenant forms were signed by any member of the evaluation team — a direct breach of Section 37(6) of the Public Procurement Act 2004.

The core finding at this stage is unambiguous: Richmond was the weakest proposal among those evaluated. TANESCO's professional procurement staff had assessed it, compared it against two European competitors, and ranked it last. The Tender Board had acted on that assessment and cancelled the process.

2. The Intervention: Ministry Overrides TANESCO

On 4 April 2006 — six days after the Tender Board's disqualification decision — the process was taken out of TANESCO's hands entirely.

The instruction: The Chairman of the Tender Board received instructions from the Board of Directors, acting on directives from the Government, to recall all eight bidders and seek clarifications with a view to finding a viable contractor.

The Tender Board's response: The TB recorded its objection, advised that the procedure was inconsistent with public procurement rules, and was overruled. The TB minutes of 10 April 2006 record the moment of override precisely:

"at 16:20 hours while the discussions were proceeding, a notice was brought to the Tender Board by the Company Secretary that the Board Chairman has directed to suspend the tender process with immediate effect until further notice."

Recall of documents: The Ministry of Energy and Minerals recalled all bid documents submitted by the eight bidders from TANESCO and processed them itself — a process which eventually produced Richmond Development Company LLC as the selected contractor.

Negotiation team: Negotiations with Richmond were conducted by a Government Negotiation Team appointed by the Ministry, not by TANESCO. TANESCO had no role in the negotiation process.

3. The Contract: Signed at Night, at the Ministry

The circumstances in which the contract was executed are documented in the PPRA audit with remarkable specificity. They are set out here in full because they constitute, individually and cumulatively, a record of deliberate procedural destruction.

Date of signing: 23 June 2006 — 35 days after the bid validity deadline of 19 May 2006 had expired. No request was made to extend bid validity before signing.

Location and time: The contract between TANESCO and Richmond Development Company LLC was signed at night, at the Ministry of Energy and Minerals.

TANESCO's position: TANESCO's Board was ordered by the Ministry of Energy and Minerals to sign the contract despite TANESCO's initial resistance, particularly given that the process which produced the winner had been handled entirely outside TANESCO's procurement system.

Review of the contract: There was no room for TANESCO to review the draft contract prior to signing.

Identity of drafter: The PPRA auditors record that the Company Secretary does not know who drafted the contract.

Performance bond: No performance bond was included in the contract. The PPRA audit establishes that the performance guarantee was withdrawn from the requirements list by the Government during the negotiation period with Richmond, against TANESCO's explicit wishes that it remain.

Contract rate: The power rental agreement was for two years at US$0.0499/kWh for 100MW — equivalent to a capacity price of US$34.61 per KW per month.

The PPRA audit characterises the signing as occurring 'in strange circumstances.' That is the language of an official regulatory body. The circumstances it describes — night, a ministry building, a TANESCO board ordered to sign a contract it could not review, drafted by an unknown hand, stripped of its performance protection — are not administrative irregularities. They are the operational signature of a contract designed to be unenforceable by the party it was supposed to protect.

4. The Collapse and Its Financial Consequences

Richmond did not deliver. The generators arrived late and did not perform as required. The timeline of collapse and its financial trail are documented in the PPRA audit.

Dowans substitution: Richmond failed to honour the agreement. The contract did not provide for re-assignment to another party, but political influence forced TANESCO to waive this contractual principle. An indemnification agreement was reached requiring Dowans Holdings SA to assume all of Richmond's liabilities.

Liquidated damages: Running from 2 February 2007 — the official commercial operating date, 150 days after the Letter of Credit was issued — at US$10,000 per day. The PPRA audit records that there was no agreement between the parties as to how this amount would be claimed from Dowans Holdings.

Advance payment: By the time the PPRA audit was completed, an advance payment of US$15 million had already been paid to Dowans. All plants had arrived and were in the process of installation at Ubungo.

Post-lease proposals: The PPRA audit notes that proposals were already circulating that the power plants be sold to the Government after the two-year lease period — a further transaction that would eventually generate its own controversy.

5. The Systemic Context

The PPRA auditors were careful to situate the Richmond case within a wider pattern of procurement failure at TANESCO. Their findings on this systemic context are relevant to the article's argument that Richmond was not an isolated event but the logical product of a sector whose governance architecture had collapsed.

Procurement staff testimony: TANESCO's own procurement officers told auditors they knew the correct procedures but that their professional advice was consistently ignored. In the report's precise formulation: 'The PMU personnel know the procedures to follow but they are not listened to when they provide their professional advice.'

No procurement plan: No annual procurement plan was prepared for 2006. A draft plan for 2007 was halted by new management and had not been approved or revised by 25 May 2007.

Ministry interference in advertising: On the 100MW generating plant advertisement, the Ministry of Energy and Minerals directed TANESCO to advertise an International Competitive Bid with a ten-day window rather than the legally mandated 45 days. PPRA had refused a waiver and advised against the process. The Government proceeded regardless. The TB minutes record that the advertisement had already been sent to newspapers before the TB meeting, with a warning that 'severe consequences would fall upon respective officials' if the Ministry's directive was not followed.

Board override: The audit notes instances across multiple tenders in which decisions of the Tender Board were overruled by higher authorities within TANESCO or by Central Government. This pattern of override was not specific to Richmond. It was the operating norm.

The PPRA audit was a statutory exercise by Tanzania's own regulatory authority, funded by USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, conducted at TANESCO's headquarters in April 2007. Its findings were not contested by TANESCO or the Government of Tanzania at the time of publication. The report was difficult to find on the PPRA's public website within days of its presentation to the donor community on 31 October 2007.

It is the primary documentary record of what happened to Tender PC/10/2006. Mwakyembe's committee subsequently unearthed a lot of additional information – but the core issue had been properly documented in the PPRA report.

This annex was prepared by Parminder Brar for mdbreform.com. The author was Co-Team Leader of the PEFA 2007 Parastatals and Government Bodies Assessment in Tanzania and presented the PPRA findings on Richmond to Tanzania's budget support donor community at the Annual Review on 31 October 2007. The full PPRA audit report is available as a supporting document to the article The Richmond Reckoning on mdbreform.com.