BUJUMBURA, February 8th (ABP) – The Ombudsman of Burundi, Mrs. Aimée Laurentine Kanyana, presented on Thursday, February 1, 2024, in front of the National Assembly, the annual report of the activities carried out from November 22, 2022 to December 31, 2023.
Mrs. Kanyana said that to properly accomplish the missions assigned to her, she organized awareness sessions across the country by popularizing the constitutional provisions and the law that govern the institution. Such popularization, she informed, was done through administrative meetings and the media. The importance of this action, she emphasizes, was to arouse interest in the institution among the people. For public services and institutions, its importance was to inform the people in advance on how to contact the Ombudsman. She reassured that the result of those extension activities was satisfactory, adding that the institution experienced massive use of its services by the people.
Indeed, Mrs. Kanyana recalled that the first mission of the Ombudsman institution is to mediate the administration and citizens. This is how the institution received and examined complaints, conducted investigations and ensured mediation between certain public administrations and citizens who felt wronged by the latter. Among the complaints received, some result in mediation, either directly or after analysis and processing within the departments.
The Ombudsman announced that from November 22, 2022 to December 31, 2023, the Ombudsman institution recorded 1,101 complaint files. 191 complaint files were carried over from 2022 and were analyzed during 2023. Among all those files processed in 2023, 1,194 are closed and 98 are being processed. Including the gender dimension, for judicial files especially land ones, out of 1235 files, 185 were presented by women or 14.9% and out of 57 files in the administrative field, 12 were also presented by women or 21 %, she reported.
Concerning the session for collecting and listening to citizens’ grievances, the Ombudsman was able to organize several listening sessions and noted that citizens’ concerns mainly related to judicial decisions. Injustice and delaying tactics were observed during the processing of files. The complaints were mainly linked to the functioning of justice and land disputes involving the administration. As a result, Mrs. Kanyana took the opportunity to appeal to the courts to properly administer justice.
From the files processed within the framework of mediation, the Ombudsman institution has collected a lot of information and acquired a great deal of experience on the problems of Burundian society which can constitute obstacles to progress towards the vision of Burundi 2040-2060. In this case, she initiated a major awareness program for the people in general and administrative officials working in different sectors of national life in particular, so that they assume their functions as fully responsible leaders.