Government will recover all the money looted at the
Zimbabwe National Road Administration, President Mnangagwa has said.
An audit report by Grant Thornton at the national
administrator unearthed massive looting of public funds and financial leakages
that were exacerbated by incompetence by senior managers to negotiate contracts
beneficial to the parastatal.
A committee instituted by then Transport and
Infrastructural Development Minister Joram Gumbo recommended a lifestyle audit
of Zinara bosses, some of whom had been parachuted to senior positions without
the requisite qualifications.
Addressing traditional chiefs at the 2018 Annual Chiefs
Conference in Kadoma on Monday, President Mnangagwa said Government was now
aware of where all the missing money collected for road development was.
The President was updating the chiefs on the progress made
by Government in refurbishing the country’s roads.
President Mnangagwa said for several years toll fees and
other collections were not being accounted for and Government would recover that
money.
“There is an issue that was raised here relating to road
maintenance,” said President Mnangagwa.
“If you look at most roads they are being refurbished and
most of our roads were in a bad state. Those in areas that have not been
attended to will say there is nothing that is happening but those in areas
where they have witnessed this development should testify that Government is
refurbishing the roads. We also have the Beitbridge-Chirundu Highway. We
started by giving the tender to dualise the road to a company called Geiger
International. They spent close to year making promises that they will start
work soon.
“In the new dispensation we asked them to show us the money
for the project and evidence that they once did a project of a similar nature
stretching over 100 km in another country and they failed. So eventually we
fired them. Now we are in the middle of negotiations with another company, but
we are not going to give them the tender before they show us the money. But as
Government, we have already started work on our own using our own local
resources. We realised that as the Government of Zimbabwe we have the capacity
and expertise and what was lacking was the money to undertake the project.
“We then sought to understand how our money from tollgates
was being utilised and other collections from Zinara. We now know where that
money which has been missing for several years is and that is the money we are
using for this project. We are going to recover some of the funds that went
missing in that regard.”
President Mnangagwa also told the chiefs that his
Government will do everything to fight corruption.
“Corruption is rampant in urban areas but we are fighting
the scourge,” he said.
“We take all the cases of corruption to the judiciary. We
are hearing now that there is a cartel of corruption starting from the highest
court — Constitutional Court — to the magistrates’ courts but we are going to
deal with that.” Herald
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