AG should resign

via AG should resign – The Zimbabbwean 9 July 2015

The Auditor General, Mildred Chiri, must consider doing the only honourable thing given her circumstances. She must quit her job and find something decent to do.

The Zanu (PF) government hates being audited and does not see any value in upholding good corporate governance. If you are looking for transparency, professionalism and accountability, the last place you should look at is President Robert Mugabe’s government. It values only patronage, corruption, confusion and deceit.

For years, Chiri has been deploying poorly paid and demotivated staff from Burrows House to numerous ministries, government departments and parastatals to find out if they have been adhering to statutory and regulation standards. Every year her team has unearthed evidence of massive irregularities, fraud, corruption and theft and made appropriate recommendations.

Yet every year her findings have been ignored. No-one has paid any attention and the same problems persist. All with impunity. The numerous contraventions of the laws of this country are criminal. Sadly, no action has been taken against the perennial culprits.

Worst offender

The rot starts with the head. The Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) is among the worst offenders. Last year, the AG reported how senior staff in the OPC looted cellphones, cars and many other items. This has been happening for years, right under the president’s nose. Obviously, he has been informed about the contraventions but does not seem to care. In which part of the world would lesser departments be disciplined when the highest department is not? Absolutely none. One would have expected the OPC to be the cleanest department, yet it’s not.

It is telling that in her 2014 narrative audit report on appropriation accounts and miscellaneous funds, the AG does not cover the OPC. She simply claims that her scrutiny of the office was not complete when the audit was published. I smell a big rat here. My learned guess is that she was advised to keep her prying hands off the OPC because of the negative publicity that that would attract. You don’t hang the father’s dirty linen in the street, do you?

It doesn’t make any sense that Chiri would choose to go ahead and publish her audit reports without completing the process that she started. One would have expected her to wait until all was in place before going to print. Zimbabweans are not in hurry, so we would have waited until she was done with the OPC. Better late than never.

Not comfortable

I wait to see if her report for 2015 will include the OPC and if it does, whether there would be any adverse reports. Speculation aside, the fact of the matter is that the president is not comfortable with his office being scrutinised and neither are the directors and lower staff in the department. It is the Zanu (PF) culture.

Who would expect the police to swoop on those fingered in corruption, theft and all manner of illegal activities in the public service? It would take Augustine Chihuri (I wonder if he is still at work?) enormous guts to do so, considering that the Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) is ranked one of the most corrupt institutions of all time in Zimbabwe and southern Africa.

Thieves are never comfortable going out to catch other thieves. That tends to compromise their position. Nor would I expect the Attorney General to do the same. Don’t even mention our legislature which is more concerned about who to boot out of parliament and is heaving under the heavy load of hundreds of laws that still need to be aligned with the new constitution, two years after the adoption of a new people’s legal charter.

Similarly, there are more chances of a camel going through the eye of a needle than the government empowering the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) to investigate the exposés that the AG has been dishing out every year.

ZACC is a window dressing tool that the Zanu (PF) government finds useful only when it can be used to fight political foes, not criminals within its ranks.

If Chiri had not been given a free farm by the Mugabe establishment, she should start looking for one on her own. Not only is she heading a futile office that the Zanu (PF) government thinks is irrelevant and a pain in the neck; she is living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, she will cross paths with powerful people in there because of her revelations.

Then, she will be the one who will be singled out for an “audit”. That is the Zanu (PF) way of doing business. As I have said in a previous statement, that party is a cult and hates people who expose its secrets.

I wonder why so much money and resources are being wasted maintaining and sustaining an office that government doesn’t want. – To comment on this article, please contact majonitt@gmail.com