Zimbabwe Finance Secretary given until October to clean up the mess at the ministry

Mr. Speaker, I am not dealing with millions of dollars, I am talking about billions and members of this House needs to understand what a thousand million dollars looks like.  It is a substantial sum of money; it is an enormous sum of money in any country.  In addition to this, in the Auditor General’s Report, we found that the Accountant General’s Office in the past had been grossly understaffed, undermanned and under trained.   The new Accountant General which has being appointed in the last six months is doing a fantastic job and I am deeply grateful to the people who were responsible for the recruitment of a really top official to occupy this post.  His predecessor had to be dismissed for maladministration.  This new person is in fact beginning to make a substantial impact on the accounting activities of the Ministry of Finance.

It points Mr. Speaker Sir, to the need to strengthen our civil service; we need to make sure that they have adequate staff for their responsibilities.  We need to make sure that they are properly remunerated.  I understand that the Accountant General receives a basic salary which is less than I earn as a Member of Parliament.  Mr. Speaker, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.   There is no doubt in my mind that our top civil servants, our key technicians are under remunerated and we need to do something about it.  If we dismiss five solders, we could improve these conditions of service without an additional cost to us.  I just point out that a lot of our expenditure is on unproductive labour, these are key positions.

Finally on training, you need to provide adequate training to the people you are employing in these key positions.  When it comes to the misappropriation of funds, I have been in this Committee now for 8 years and time and time again we have seen misappropriation of funds not on a small scale but on a large scale.  This misappropriation in the Ministry of Finance will involve millions of dollars.  The staff was dismissed after the prosecuting authorities failed to gain a conviction in a court of law.

So, these individuals walked away from the Ministry of Finance scot free, they did not serve time; the only penalty that they incurred was that they lost their jobs.  There was no recovery of funds and this point to the problem of prosecution of corruption; it is very difficult to prosecute corruption.  We must find a way to recover funds and to make sure that the perpetrators are properly punished for what they are doing.

In respect to the Farmers World debt, this is a tip of the iceberg, it involves about US$12m. We were unable to discover who owns this company.  How can they be given a substantial sum of money, this is a substantial sum of money, US$12m is more than half the budget of this National Assembly for twelve months.  It is more than the total salary bill for Parliament and yet this loan was made to Farmers World and no attempt has been made either to identify who was involved or to recover the money from the company.

Mr. Speaker, any Chief Executive who did not follow up a debt of this magnitude would be fired instantly.  In this case here Manungo, I think the Secretary for the Ministry of Finance, must be brought to account.  He must explain why this matter has not been pursued.  I say this is the tip of the iceberg more than US$200m of the Debt Assumption Bill was involved in this kind of activity and these funds have simply vanished.

Continued next page

(158 VIEWS)