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

The Permanent Secretary for Finance Willard Manungo should appear before Parliament’s  Public Accounts Committee in October to explain  what he has done to clean up the mess at the ministry, Bulawayo South Member of Parliament Eddie Cross says.

In his contribution to the debate on the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the auditor-general report for 2014, Cross said the ministry should take its business seriously because it was dealing with huge sums of money on which the country depended.

“Mr. Speaker Sir, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development in Zimbabwe controls a budget of about US$6b, that makes it ten times the size of Delta Corporation, ten times the size of T.M. Supermarkets, ten times the size of OK Bazaars Group, it makes it the single biggest financial institution in the country.  Its assets exceed the combined assets of all the commercial banks in the country and therefore, the manner in which the accounts of this ministry are conducted is of critical importance to us as a nation,” he said.

Cross said he was baffled that the government had no idea of the value of its assets since dollarization in 2009.

“I want to highlight the following points raised by the Committee Chairperson in her report today.  The first is this, that regarding the accumulated assets of the Government of Zimbabwe, up to 2009 – the Government only has a physical record of the assets.  It has no idea what the value is….

“ Mr. Speaker Sir this does not involve small money; this represents many billions of dollars.  I cannot understand how any organisation can operate because we are now some seven years after 2009 and we still do not have the value of the assets in our books in 2009.  This is a matter which requires the urgent attention of government.  It is not a small matter, it is a major issue.”

Cross said he was upset that senior ministry officials had misappropriated millions and got away with it.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

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