Biswicks Burden.
Synopsis of the life crisis of Biswick Tiyamalu Kaswaswa for blowing the whistle on corrupt oil deals and trade-based money laundering in South Sudan: 2018 to 2023.
Biswick Tiyamalu Kaswaswa (born 1981) excelled in his primary, secondary and tertiary education levels. While at college he was recruited by Deloitte Malawi — a member of a leading international partnership of Chartered Accountants — and after rapid progression as an audit clerk he completed his Association of Certified Chartered Accountants UK board exams in record time and was admitted as a professional Chartered Accountant above the average of his peers in 2006. He was transferred to Deloitte Barbados and learned the practice of excellent auditing between 2007 to 2011, whereupon he returned to Malawi. He worked in various jobs, while also teaching undergraduate students in accounting part time.
In June 2018 he and another Malawian national were recruited by a South Sudanese energy company known as Trinity Energy Ltd to serve as their Financial Manager working in their head office in Juba, South Sudan. He was alarmed to find that in extreme contrast to the standards of good governance that he had been taught to promote in his career thus far, the company operated its network of filling stations on a mainly cash basis, with thousands of South Sudanese pounds and US dollars kept in sacks. This cash was collected and exchanged without any controls, checks or balances, and with no systems to ensure the control and reconciliation of stocks of fuel with cash received, or the use of the banking system to ensure safekeeping and the proper authorisation of expenditures and disbursements.
He reported his concerns to the Board of Directors. They pretended to share his concern, but as soon as he tried to implement changes in the way that Trinity was doing business, he experienced resistance, and his relationship with his employers began to rapidly deteriorate.
By October 2018, four months into his contract, he realised that Trinity Energy was in fact a sophisticated money laundering operation dispensing bribes to Government officials and corrupted politicians, under the veneer of a legitimate commercial fuel distribution operation. Based on his professional code of ethics and personal values he made a conscientious decision to become a whistleblower.
After considering his options, he decided to make a weekend trip to the Malawian Embassy in Dar Es Salaam to report to Malawian diplomats that that he was amassing damning information that would have considerable ramifications once publicly released. It would put him at increasing risk because of his refusal to condone the corrupting business model that had become the culture of the company.
However, he did not realise that the company surveillance apparatus was closely monitoring his movements. His flight to Dar required a stopover in Kigali Rwanda. While waiting for his connecting flight, with only his passport, $26,000 of his earnings in his wallet, and the clothes he was wearing, two police officers intercepted him. He never made it to the Malawian embassy but instead found himself taken into custody, searched and effectively kidnapped by his employer in collusion with corrupted authorities in both Rwanda and South Sudan. He spent a month in the notorious Mageregere Prison while Rwandan authorities ‘investigated’ an allegation from Trinity Energy that Biswick was fleeing the country having stolen $350,000. Without any proper due process of a formal extradition hearing, and not a shred of evidence to substantiate the allegation after a month the Rwandan authorities unlawfully and against his will handcuffed him and put him on a flight back to Juba. He spent Christmas in the tender mercies of South Sudanese police officers in cahoots with private security from Trinity Energy.
Thus began a brutal ordeal of torture at the hands of corrupted officials determined to break Biswick into confessing to a non-existent crime, to stop him from his intended course of action to blow the whistle on the corrupt practices he had witnessed first-hand in Trinity Energy.
Fortunately, he proved to be far more resilient than his persecutors had bargained for, and a frantic call to his older brother in Malawi in turn enabled them to alert Amnesty International to his plight. Amnesty International quickly ensured public scrutiny and provided him with legal representation, a Juba based human rights lawyer Godfrey Victor Bulla. Advocate Bulla did a superb job to thwart the stalling tactics of Biswicks accusers to subvert a fair trial, and after sixteen months was finally able to show the presiding Judge that the complainants had completely overplayed their hand and that the process was simply a retaliation strategy to try and silence a whistleblower.
The judge found that there was no evidential basis to support the charges brought. In handing down judgement he said that the only documentary evidence before him showed that Biswick was in fact an accountable accountant — someone that any reputable company or audit firm would want to employ.
Knowing that Trinity Energy had in fact further incriminated themselves by the vexatious and meritless abuse of legal and criminal procedure, Mr Bulla advised his client to get out of South Sudan as quickly as possible, before still more drastic and terminal measures could be devised to permanently silence him.
At a time when the Covid pandemic was spreading and no planes were flying, Mr Bulla organised for Biswick to be secreted out of the country avoiding border guards and after a 3000 km road journey arrived back home into the arms of his anxiously awaiting family.
Fortified by the miraculous nature of his survival against all odds, and despite needing time to heal from the trauma, he turned back to his original mission — to expose the corrupt practices he had seen first-hand. With freedom comes responsibility. Given what he knew to be true about Trinity Energy, he still had the responsibility to complete the process that he had started. However, without a job Biswick and his family found themselves having to endure a different form of hardship — a decline in their overall psycho-social functioning as resources declined, and fears of further retaliation rose when his disclosures were eventually made public.
Fortunately The Sentry responded to his emails and commenced a methodical process of investigation to verify and corroborate his allegations. That process has taken another two years roughly equivalent to the period of his ordeal. Instead of re-entering society Biswick has had to lie low and concentrate on the task of assembling the evidence to ensure that his suffering and endurance is not wasted.
The Sentry have now released their report, paving the way for sanctions against the perpetrators to remedy the gross injustices suffered by Biswick and fortify him to continue his vocation.
Four days before the report was released he was attacked while shopping. He managed to escape in what appeared to be an attempted abduction and is back in his safe house. However the retaliation has not ceased and Trinity Energy and their corrupted government partners have resorted to a smear campaign and disinformation through the media, and legal threats against The Sentry.
While The Sentry is shielding Biswick from legal reprisals at the international level, he needs pro-bono legal representation to vindicate his rights within African governance institutions.
While the governments of Rwanda and South Sudan need to be held accountable for clear breaches of international law, the Government of Malawi by contrast can boast of a citizen who has shown exceptional ethics and conscientiousness. He deserves national and international honours.
However, international civil society and media need to continue to advocate for restorative and remedial action to ensure:
1. The recovery of his personal belongings. He left South Sudan without having been paid his salary due to him and without having had his belongings returned to him, including his laptop, external hard drive iPad, mobile phone, academic certificates, national ID, and other personal belongings.
2. Investigation and prosecution of torture in the hands of South Sudanese officials and private security staff from Trinity Energy.
3. Payment of outstanding salary arrears by Trinity.
4. Consequence management for illegal extradition by the Rwandan government.
5. Withdrawal of all trumped up charges by South Sudanese government, currently on appeal.
Despite having an impressive CV up to the point of his contract with Trinity Energy, he has had to endure disappointment, betrayal and the stigma that whistleblowers invariably suffer, another scapegoat cast out into the desert of social stigma and isolation. He is not simply unemployed, but unemployable until the five year gap in his employment record can be explained on his CV. Public awareness needs to rise and he needs to be fully vindicated and elevated to again contribute his immense potential to the common good.
He has two daughters aged 19 (in college) and 10 (in primary school) and is solely responsible for them. His siblings and friends have provided support to him over the past two years, and PPLAAF have raised funds to provide advocacy, a temporary safe house, and some sessions of psychological counselling to support him to heal from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that he has acquired through his ordeal.
Besides the normal family budget of providing for the needs of his family, transitioning back into open society requires the extra expense of close protection and security, repairs to his home which has been vandalised in his absence, and funds for further psycho-social support to heal in body, mind and spirit.
For an extensive interview with Biswick see this link on YouTube.
