WITH the advent of the global pandemic, coronavirus
(Covid-19), many civil society organisations have called for transparency in
the use of various donations that the government has been receiving.
Of late, allegations of corruption have been swirling
around the First Family and senior government officials, suggesting that they
were using Covid-19 resources and exploiting the situation for self-enrichment.
The Daily News on Sunday Senior Reporter Sindiso Mhlophe on
Wednesday sat down with presidential spokesperson George Charamba at his
Munhumutapa office in Harare to discuss these and other issues in greater
detail. Below are the excerpts of the interview.
Q: The first family is allegedly embroiled in a corruption
scandal with regards to procurement of Covid-19 items, what is their position
with regards to this?
A: To begin with,
you don’t establish culpability on the basis of a picture let alone an invite which
is available to the generality of Zimbabweans. There are so many people we
invite and we don’t invite them on the basis of moral rectitude. You can be a
guest of the president today and become a criminal tomorrow.
What are the facts? Drax International alongside many other
companies was tendered to supply personal protective equipment (PPEs) to
Zimbabwe. As it emerges, they won the tender and this is a matter that was
between them and the ministry of Health.
But you see, unfortunately, when it comes to procurement
rules you can then revisit your pricing. The tendering price is not necessarily
the supply price. You can argue that there were new developments like the fact
that in this case every nation was rushing for PPEs, so, there was a major difference
between the quoted and the procurement price.
Then the difference caught the attention of the government.
This was well before this issue had been publicised.
At this point in
time something else was happening. There was absolute fear because these were
the early days of the coronavirus and we were terribly unprepared in terms of
PPEs. That was also the time when doctors were up in arms, threatening
industrial action and we knew they were ill-equipped to deal with Covid-19.
Meanwhile, Drax International’s equipment had already
arrived at the airport and had been there for months. The reason why the
equipment was held at the airport was that we were haggling over the price.
Then out of desperation, we said whilst we negotiate for a downward movement in
the pricing, let’s accept the consignment and close the gap which is there.
That is how the equipment was admitted into our own system
minus the payment, because the payment was still being negotiated. We were
putting pressure on them and we were saying if you don’t reduce your prices, we
will not pay you; we are a government.
So, what has now happened is that the payment of the money
that is being talked about has been divorced from the quantities. If you read
the amounts paid out against the quantities received you will realise that the
unit price does not get anywhere close to the US$28 that is being quoted for
propaganda purposes.
Something else also happened and this is the unsaid story. Godwin Matanga, the
police commissioner-general, then brought a security report from Interpol which
said this company (Drax International) had been blacklisted by Interpol. No one
knows that. People are busy focusing on the pricing issue. Cabinet then took a
decision that over and above the company’s abuse of pricing they are also on
the
Interpol blacklist, that supply contract must be cancelled.
So, this letter that is being quoted in the media is just a matter of delays in
the communication process.
As far as we are concerned there is no connection between
Drax International and the first family. Secondly, this is not a live issue.
The government had long dealt with this issue well before it even hit the
headlines. What you are looking at is not even smoke, these are dead ambers of
a fire that was long put out.
The instruction to stop and cancel the supply came from the
president; it was not even the Cabinet. It came from the president. In fact the
matter was raised from the president’s office. Remember the president’s office
is not only reliant on information from line ministers, we have our own sources
of information. There is not a single minister who is privy to the security
report, the security report is for the president’s eyes only and that is where
the Interpol issue was raised and he (the president) took a decision based on
that.
Q: How is the procurement process being handled given that
with the Drax International issue, ministries, the National Pharmaceutical
Company of Zimbabwe (Natpharm) and the Procurement Regulatory Authority of
Zimbabwe (Praz) have all been distancing themselves from the procurement
question?
A: We took a policy
decision a long time ago to increasingly move out of middle people and try to
arrive at supply agreements with governments. We have done that with India and
we are trying to do the same with China. There are two main issues which need
to be addressed.
Firstly, there is the whole supply chain of the procurement
of drugs where western middlemen have been dominating the supply chain. So, you
will never have a Zimbabwe, which will go to the manufacturer, but you will
have a Zimbabwe which reaches the manufacturer through a middleman and of
course this makes the whole procurement process expensive.
Secondly, and this has been a problem which we have had for
a very long time, the licensing of drugs is riddled with corruption. We are not
talking of corruption on a small scale; it’s on a massive scale as global
powers disapproved some drugs from coming to Zimbabwe.
These are drugs which are cheap and coming from non-western
manufactures such as the Indians, Chinese and Iranians. Their drugs are blocked
at the registration stage. This is a challenge because if a pharmacist
dispenses drugs which have not been licensed by the drug council, the
punishment is not visited upon the business, but on the dispensing pharmacist
in his personal capacity. So, there has been that problem in the same way that
there is a problem in registering foreign doctors to practice in the country.
Of course, Natpharm has its challenges and the minister of
Health, Obadiah Moyo, has been instructed to dig a little deeper in that matter
to unearth just how that (Drax International) contract was awarded. Natpharm
has historically been a bad entity and I think the cleansing process is not yet
completed because so many bad things have happened there.
In terms of the tender process, if you are a permanent
secretary you may not participate in the tendering process of a parastatal
under you because if there are problems people come to report to you. Now, if
you are already part and parcel of the tendering process, you can’t stand in
judgment. So, there has been a lot of leeway that has been given which has
historically resulted in challenges.
How tenders are handled has also worsened because we have
adjusted the Praz role. Praz no longer participates in the procurement process;
it now sets the broad policy parameters because it’s now an authority.
Some purchases can actually be done with minimum
involvement from Praz because in the past many people were complaining that
Praz was slowing down the procurement process, more so due to currency
volatility issues.
If someone had an allocation by the time Praz finishes the
process, the money would only buy a few items. So, the idea was then to release
the ministries to speed up procurement decisions while Praz plays an oversight
role. That’s why Praz can say we were not intimately involved in the decision.
However, the error that we made was that as we loosened
Praz’s involvement, we didn’t trigger the processes which would ensure that
there is an accompanying growth of capacity and integrity from the emerging
procurement entities. That balance is what we are trying to deal with.
Procurement is complex and an economy is as good as it procures, if you don’t
get it, it affects economic performance. Daily News
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