Why Zimbabwe’s Auditor-General needs more bite to tackle endemic looting in parastatals

The law allows the A-G to order corrections, but it gives her no real tools to punish those that fail to comply.

Beyond strongly worded statements, there are no enforcement structures to give her role more bite.

With no consequence for poor performance or taking money out of the public cookie jar, it is no surprise that large parts of the recommendations sections of the A-G’s report look like a copy and paste job. 

A further sign of the lethargy that surrounds public accountability came from Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa this week, who admitted in Parliament that he was yet to read the A-G’s report.

One would expect he would be first to grab it, so he can know how the scarce resources he struggles to raise are being managed.

Chinamasa said it is only after pressure from MPs that his Ministry is now “putting in place people who can study and interrogate those reports so that corrective action can be taken”.

All along, “we did not have the apparatus within the Ministry to go through these Auditor-General’s reports,” Chinamasa said.

While the A-G is “independent and subject only to the law” according to the Constitution, it still depends on Treasury for funding.

With funding falling, the A-G is going to find it harder to maintain her high standards.

“In 2016 I visited 316 stations as compared to 468 in 2015, which is a decrease of 32.5%. This was mainly due to the inadequacy of financial and manpower resources,” the latest A-G report says.

A study by University of Zimbabwe’s Tawanda Zinyama, titled “Efficiency and Effectiveness in Public Sector Auditing,” found that adverse audit findings were not taken seriously by Treasury.

“Thus, audit report does not have an impact, as they do not lead to any remedial action. As a result, the Audit Office is rendered a watchdog institution without teeth to bite,” Zinyama says.

Chiri has a staff of 218 auditors and 40 support personnel, which made over 300 appointments to produce the latest report.

It is a large document with three volumes, which are a thousand pages in total.

It must have cost the A-G and her team many sleepless nights to produce.

This is a team that is putting in a hard shift, but for little return.

The press will report on all the theft and mismanagement and we will all gasp and shake our heads, but the culprits will move on, and continue in their looting ways.

It is time the laws were strengthened to give the A-G more bite to clear out the filth. – The Source

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