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

Then there is a large discrepancy between line ministries and the Ministry of Finance.  When I read the Auditor’s report and I saw the amounts amounting to US$500m mari yakawanda, US$500m could not be reconciled.  I asked the Accountant General, what on earth are you doing; if you cannot reconcile large sums like this?  On the receipts on US$3.8b, there was nearly US$200m which could not be accounted for.  This is no small money, this is big money, aggregate this, we are talking about US$2b – US$4b.

There is the extraordinary use of IDBZ, I do not know why the Ministry is using the Infrastructure Development Bank of Zimbabwe to handle very large disbursements of funds.  There seems to be no proper accounting, the bank does not seem to have the expertise to deal with this and as a result our national debt may be understated.  There is the question of the money we made available to Interfin, just three months before it went to liquidation.

Mr. Speaker, the directors of Interfin walked away from that bank with a US$100m of depositors’ funds and US$23m of that was our money.  They have not been held accountable, there has not been any prosecution, and there is absolutely no follow up whatsoever, expect a liquidator who has attempted to recover the funds from the assets of the company.  The directors have not been brought to account and I just ask, how much longer are we going to tolerate this kind of thing? If I was to steal a cow from a farmer in the rural areas, I would go to jail for 9 years. Here we have got board of directors who have stolen a $100 million of public funds and they have not been brought to account this is just impossible.

 Finally, Mr. Speaker Sir, there is the issue of the Senior Officers Housing Fund Time and time again, I have pointed to this House that there over 100 of these funds being operated by Government. In each case they have a two page Constitution and the permanent secretary is the accounting officer. In this case here, the people who control this fund have in fact benefited from it. US$837 million went through these accounts last year. US$837 million, that is more than 12% of the national budget. It is more than the budget for education.

 Now, what do we do about this? First, I want to suggest to this House that we adopt this Report now. We adopt it unanimously, there should be no divisions over this particular Report. The second thing is we must insist of follow up, the Minister must receive this Report from Parliament together with our recommendations and he must be held to account in following up. Finally, I want to suggest the Public Accounts Committee in October this year, holds another meeting on this particular Report and ask Mr. Manungo and his senior staff to come and tell us what they done about cleaning up this mess. I thank you.

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