MP says Transport Minister must be summoned to Parliament within 10 days to explain rot in ministry

 HON. CROSS: I think you would have gathered Madam Speaker from this report’s contents that this is one of the worst reports that we have presented to this House in the past three years. The principal problem at the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development was the attitude of the Permanent Secretary. He certainly did not cover himself with glory in his presentations to the Committee when he appeared before us. The problems which we encountered at the Ministry are many and have been adequately covered in the report itself.

I just want to bring to the House’s attention a couple of things which I regard as being of extreme importance.  The first thing is the magnitude of the sums which are involved here.  We are talking about in many cases millions of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands or even tens of thousands.  We are talking about a Permanent Secretary taking no action to discipline a member of staff who stole $190 000.  We are talking about a Ministry which supervises eight of the largest parastatals in the country, including critical parastatals such as Air Zimbabwe and the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), all of which are in direstraits from the financial point of view.  The NRZ is not a going concern, neither is Air Zimbabwe, all of which are running at a heavy loss.

I think the extent of administration and accounting exhibited by the Ministry Madam Speaker gives great cause for concern. I want to talk particularly today about one issue, which was the question of the licence plate fund.  We pay $160 for a licence plate that in South Africa costs you $16.  So, we pay ten times more than the South Africans.  When we investigated this, we discovered that they have no stock system. We discovered that the contractor who supplies the licence plates has been the same contractor for 23 years.  There has been no examination of costs, no scrutiny of exactly why the contractor should remain contractor for supplying number plates for 23 years and whether or not they should go to tender.

What shocked me Madam Speaker was the size of the surplus funds which were generated by this fund and the fact that the Permanent Secretary regarded these funds as being at his discretion.  I would just point out that this habit inside the Government of treating levies and funds as a form of taxation; if you add all the levies and funds which we subscribed to, they constitute 30% of the cost of employment.  If you add all these ancillary costs such as licence plates fees and things like that, it increases the cost of our operations in Zimbabwe very considerably.  Here you have a Permanent Secretary and a Ministry which is using these funds at their discretion to make $23 million loan to Air Zimbabwe without justification, without even a note on the accounts and without even asking the Ministry of Finance to authorise them to do so simply because Air Zimbabwe cannot pay their salaries.  This is unacceptable.

The fact that the Permanent Secretary has been moved from this Ministry to another Ministry without the necessary disciplinary action being taken is not good enough – [HON. MEMBERS:  Hear, hear.] –  I think what we have got to say today is that we want the Minister, Hon. Gumbo to appear before this House within ten days or as soon as possible thereafter and give a full explanation of what he has done about these issues.  I do not think we should rest until that has happened.

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