HARARE – Zimbabwe is facing a “pandemic of corruption” which is now a “huge threat to the existence of the country as a nation state,” former finance minister and MDC Alliance vice president Tendai Biti said on Sunday.
Biti warned that there was an “incestuous relationship” between corrupt cartels and President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, and tackling corruption would only come with “political change.”
“The scourge of corruption has become so key and structural in our country it has become easily the biggest existential threat that our country faces, and since the coup of November 2017 corruption has become entrenched and deep-rooted,” Biti said while delivering a lecture broadcast on YouTube and Facebook.
“The challenge with this corruption is that it affects every length and breadth of Zimbabwe, it affects every sphere of life it has become a huge threat to people’s livelihoods… to the existence of Zimbabwe itself as a nation state.”
Biti said the corruption was being perpetrated by “roving bandits” in fuel, procurement, transport, at the finance ministry, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe and mining.
“Zimbabwe has essentially become a criminal enterprise, a mafia state and a kakistocracy,” said Biti. “Those that are presiding over the state are essentially engaged in the total emasculation of Zimbabwe to ensure the continued reproduction of extractive relations in the rent-seeking behaviour and only one thing matters to those that are running our country: the power attention agenda.
“They will do anything for the purposes of power retention including stealing elections and killing people as we saw on August 1, 2018; killing people and raping women as we saw in January 2019; the emasculation of civic society and dismantling of the official opposition, the MDC Alliance.”
The ministry of finance has abandoned its oversight role and since 2014 has failed to account for US$14.5 billion, Biti claimed.
An estimated US$1.5 billion is lost annually through gold smuggling, US$5 billion through illicit financial flows, US$3 billion through cigarette smuggling and “millions and millions of carats” of diamonds are finding their way to Dubai and India with no accountability.
An omnipresent figure in the corruption, said Biti, is the oligarch Kudakwashe Tagwirei and his company, Sakunda Holdings.
Tagwirei snapped up more than half-a-dozen mining companies from the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Company in an opaque deal, Biti said, and won contracts to supply buses to ZUPCO at inflated prices without going to tender.
Along with ethanol tycoon Billy Rautenbach, Biti said Tagwirei enjoyed a monopoly in the fuel sector through his control of the Beira pipeline. The central bank, meanwhile, has granted Tagwirei preferential access to foreign currency at fixed rates which he was selling on the parallel market and reaping huge profits.
“This inevitably makes the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe a commanding height of corruption,” Biti charged.
“We’ve lived with people like Suharto (former Indonesia kleptocrat) for instance, and the (Emmanuel) Marcos Sr. regime in in the Philippines. The key challenge with Zimbabwe is that it’s dominated by roving bandits, now there’s a difference between roving bandits and stationary bandits. Stationary bandits are like Suharto, stationary bandits are like Marcos, they will steal but they will make sure the economy and citizens also benefit.
“Zimbabwe’s roving bandits leave nothing for the ordinary person, they leave nothing for Zimbabwe. So Zimbabwe is extremely poor yet it’s generating billions and billions of dollars, it’s only them and their children who are eating.
“If you go to Sam Levi Village you will see Lamborghinis being driven there, you see Ferraris being driven, yet 79 percent of our people are living in extreme poverty surviving on less than US$1.25 per day. Our maternal mortality rates are now 96 out of a thousand mothers; in the last two years teachers have not gone to school because they’re being paid peanuts; the public health system, the public transport system and the public education system have collapsed thanks to the roving bandits.
“The difference between a roving bandit and the stationary bandit is that the stationary bandits will milk six barrels of milk, steal two and leave four for the population. The roving bandits will extract six pitchers of milk, steal those six jugs and also steal the cow so that there is no cow to be milked. That’s the biggest challenge with Zimbabwe, it’s full of roving bandits.”
Biti said corrupt cartels were hiding their money in places like Dubai, Malaysia, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Mauritius, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa.
He called for the creation of an African agency to track illicit financial flows and disrupt money laundering activities.
Zimbabwe’s agencies tasked with investigating corruption were not up to the task, Biti said, and MPs were not playing their oversight role. Public servants should also be forced to declare their assets.
“Lastly, we need political change because without political change, without free and fair elections, without a government elected by the people with legitimacy, without resolving the electoral issues, everything that I’ve said is a waste of time. So political change is the precondition to all these things,” Biti added.
