Bright Simons fires back, rejects claims he used AI to critique SIGA report

IMANI Africa Vice President Bright Simons has rejected claims by State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA) Director-General Michael Kpessa-Whyte that he relied heavily on artificial intelligence to critique SIGA’s latest report.

Speaking on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday, September 5, Mr Simons described the suggestion that he had delegated his analysis to AI as “absolutely offensive.”

Prof Kpessa-Whyte had questioned how Mr Simons was able to produce a detailed assessment shortly after the 448-page report was published, claiming that SIGA’s checks showed that “most of what he had raised was generated from AI.”

He further alleged that the AI analysis relied on “previous figures and not the figures that were in the report.”

Prof. Kpessa-Whyte therefore urged commentators to read the report thoroughly before making public statements.

Mr Simons fired back, insisting that technology was used only to assist with data extraction and did not replace his professional judgment.

“To suggest that we don’t read the reports and we delegate our thinking to AI is absolutely offensive,” he said.

He explained that his team used tools such as Tabula to extract figures from PDF documents and Excel Power Query to process the data.

“Nobody has time to go and copy and paste every single number in the PDF into an Excel before they do the analysis,” he said.

“I have never delegated my thinking to AI over 20 years of policy analysis in this country,” Mr Simons added.

He said his experience enabled him to quickly identify areas requiring scrutiny.

“We know exactly where the fault lines are,” he said.

Mr Simons maintained that the central issue was not whether AI tools were used but whether SIGA had adequately responded to the specific errors he identified.

He alleged that some cost figures had been repeated across several years, affecting the reliability of the reported ratios.

“When you put a situation where your costs, the cash number, for 13 years are repeated in aggregates, and it’s simply a copy and paste from one year to the other, that number becomes unreliable,” he said.

He also challenged SIGA’s treatment of foreign-exchange and revaluation gains and questioned its consolidation of transactions between entities.

“We’ve shown you, for instance, how the way you’ve done your consolidation… you’ve not reconciled them,” Mr Simons said.

“And having done so, or failing to do so, means, therefore, that the consolidation you perform is not reliable.”

Mr Simons said these were specific technical concerns that SIGA had yet to address.

“These are very specific claims,” he said.

“But you suggest that we have done nothing and we just simply relied on the AI to say things we don’t know. I don’t think it’s fair.”