Massive corruption, looting at Home Affairs Ministry departments

Massive corruption and looting in departments under the Home Affairs Ministry, including the police force, is robbing Zimbabwe of many millions of dollars every month, Finance Minister Tendai Biti has revealed.

Biti, who is also MDC-T secretary general, was quoted in a newsletter from the Prime Minister's office saying the Ministry of Home Affairs and everything that is below it are not remitting to Treasury, as there are "people with degrees of looting and stealing."

"For instance, the Passport office collects an average of $1.5 million a week although they claim its $800,000. It is not coming to us.

"At roadblocks, the police are collecting about $2 million a month, the money is not coming to us. It is a breach of the law as section 103 of the Constitution stipulates that every cent that is collected in Zimbabwe must be accounted to the Consolidated Revenue Fund, which is under Parliament although administered by Ministry of Finance. It is not happening," Biti revealed.

Home Affairs Minister Theresa Makoni said Biti is correct in his assessment and said none of the ministries have been remitting money directly to the Treasury. "Most departments are still retaining everything they receive. They are still taking advantage of the variation which was made during the Zimbabwe dollar era."

Responding to the allegations of police corruption, especially at roadblocks, Makone urged the public to insist on getting receipts from the police as one of the ways of dealing with corrupt officers.

A government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there is rampant corruption in every government ministry and it applies to every department in government. Our source said: "All government departments that deal with money are keeping that money for recurrent expenditure and the minister will never know how much exactly is being collected, because it is happening at much lower levels of the departments."

The source gave an example of the Ministry of Tourism where hunting licenses are given but there is no transparent accounting system.

Biti, who is battling to find election funding for this year, recently said Zimbabwe should not be looking for money from outside the country as there are enough resources internally to pay for the election. But he said there was also ongoing theft of diamond revenue in Zimbabwe.

"Our diamonds exports last year were $800 million and only $45 million came to Zimbabwe. Why are those running diamond firms not patriots or nationalists when they belong to a nationalist party? Predatory and primitive accumulation is killing this country. The cancer of this economy is corruption," Biti said.

Despite this, the government official claimed his ministry has worked hard to combat corruption with 80% of the laws passed since the formation of the coalition government in 2009 coming from the Ministry of Finance.

"We are proud of what we have done on the reform agenda. The new Public Finance Management Act, the amendments to the Reserve Bank Act, the amendments to the Revenue Act, a new Audit Office Bill, the amendments to the Security Commissions Bill, amendments to the Banking Act and more are still to come."