POOR ACCOUNTABILITY OF ELCT

(Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania)

and its international "Northern Partners" ("The Missions") in Tanzania leads to the creation of criminal and corrupt elites further damaging the social fabric of the Tanzanian democratic society by external uncontrolled influence.

The LMC (Lutheran Mission Cooperation) is a long existing informal, non registered gathering of donors ("Missions" - "Northern Partners") with the representatives of the ELCT (Lutheran Church of Tanzania) in Tanzania. It is said to work under the legal ownership of the ELCT.

Mission representatives are deciding about important money transfers to Tanzania on a years schedule and are therefore exerting tremendous influence in Tanzania. The tricky construction of LMC will make it diffucult to hold these criminals legaly responsible. In addition, these structures have decided to hide behind the cloth of bishops and pastors and have taken religous believers hostage who still respect them as men of god.

Every year, LMC distributes hundreds of millions of Tanzanian Shillings, but cannot assure the well meaning donors in Europe and the US, that the money ends up to be used for the betterment of the poor in Tanzania. Nevertheless, overseas missions are going on to state in their hand outs, media outlets and church speeches that all the monies and ressources are used in the right way. As a further abuse, they are using the pictures of african children and the poor in order to keep the hearts and wallets of the church goers open.

The criminal and deadly attitude against People Living with HIV/AIDS (PIUMA http://www.piuma-simba.org/site/) and the community in Makete in Southwestern Tanzania may just present the tip of the iceberg of human rights abuses and theft in the Lutheran Church.

According to their own (LMC) publications, only half of the projects and dioceses are internally audited by the church's own audit departement. The audited part of the dioceses and projects are again getting desastrous reports in half of the cases. This means that the church itself is only sure for about 25% of the cases, that everything is put in order.

External audits are not performed for ELCT projects and dioceses as a routine, though, this is a demand of international audit standards and the regulations of TANZANIA.

See the follwing facsimile from the LMC Manual 2007.