Looting of agric inputs worrying

Source: Looting of agric inputs worrying – DailyNews Live January 3, 2017

HARARE – Reports that top Zanu PF and army officials have been leading the
looting of the State-sponsored $500 million Command Agriculture inputs are
very worrying, given Zimbabwe’s history of another plundered agricultural
fund – the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ)-run Farm Mechanisation scheme.

The revelations, carried in yesterday’s edition of the Daily News, were
made to Acting President Emmerson Mnangagwa – who heads the programme – by
Mashonaland Central provincial Affairs minister Martin Dinha last week,
reminding Zimbabweans of the chaotic land reform exercise of the early
2000s.

The ill-fated programme has been one of the major sources of the current
food insecurity bedevilling the country, forcing Zimbabwe to drop from
being the bread-basket to the basket case of southern African region.

While the senior Zanu PF and army officials were dipping their hands into
the cookie jar, thousands of farmers were spending days on end without
accessing the inputs government promised to provide.

Perhaps even more scaring are the prospects of who the ultimate funders of
Command Agriculture will be. As with the farm Mechanisation programme,
there is a real risk that the taxpayer will in the end pay for the looted
inputs.

Those who benefitted from the scheme then – mostly high-ranking as well as
well-connected individuals – have not paid back even a single cent.

The central bank only managed to recover funds for the farm Mechanisation
programme through the controversial debt-assumption law.

There appears to be nothing new as most government programmes are hijacked
by top Zanu PF officials, at times dangling these before the rural poor as
their own for political expediency.

Looting has almost become a State-sanctioned practice, leading to the
coining of terms such as “lootocracy” and “lootocrats”, while intended
beneficiaries continue to wallow in abject poverty.

It is high time government comes out clean on its methodology in rolling
out such public assistance programmes so that they benefit the intended
people and cease to be feeding troughs for top Zanu PF and army officials.

State-run programmes must not be turned into feeding troughs of top
politicians. The land reform programme, for instance, in the end became a
mere travesty of what it was supposed to be with top Zanu PF officials and
their relatives owning multiple farms, some of which have become derelict
after being cannibalised of whatever valuables they had.

Production on the farms has fallen to catastrophic levels. The President
Robert Mugabe-led Zanu PF has destroyed any trace of viability the
Zimbabwean economy had in the past with high-level corruption gnawing at
the very core of the country’s existence.