By Charles T.M.J. Dube

IN our last article, we laid foundation to the political economy of corruption and loss of integrity in the public sector.
I attributed loss of integrity to the parallel agenda and an exogenously premeditated affront that was directed at our systems of internal checks, controls and ethics.
In my research with the University of Ottawa titled ‘Options and Possibilities in a Post-Colonial Economy’ of December 1988, I address the economic problem of Zimbabwe being one of an accelerated integration in the international economic system.
There were various instruments used by Bretton Woods Institutions and others of a similar agenda to attain this objective.
They probably did not mean any harm, but just wanted to control our resources, but with the parallel agenda and all, what merely meant to integrate resulted in overkill.
Initially, because men of integrity in the public sector were still plenty, corruption crept in through deceptive information management, influence peddling and name dropping.
My first scare of corruption was sometime in 1985 when I, as part of a Government Tender Board, went to Bulawayo to investigate and evaluate, on the ground, army tenders for supply of fresh produce.
At our Sun Hotel base, we were wined and dined by one of the competitors, whiskies and all.
We were also given free tickets to some very expensive party fundraising dinner. The middle level army officer responsible for army supplies came by air and not by road like the rest of us.
It was apparent he had used his own money.
A day later, his girlfriend came by air to join him.
At the hotel, one was left in no doubt the young man commanded a lot of power and influence over the who-is-who in the Bulawayo Party Province as they all visited our lodgings to pay their respects.
Apparently the Indian suppliers exercised patronage over most of them as direct employers or through business fronts.
Some of them eventually rose to become MPs.
It was therefore not surprising that when we got back to Harare I simply told my teammates: “Thanks for the team spirit, but I am going to do the evaluations on my own and give my own recommendations on the way forward.”
Apparently being the Treasury representative to the tender board who also wrote the rules for the procurement and safeguarded Government assets, I wielded a lot of power on the board.
After all, we also controlled the purse.
I angrily went through the tender evaluation process, but interestingly enough, at the end of it all, the very influence-peddling Indians were the best in terms of quality, price, infrastructure, reliability of supplies and all.
I recommended that they get the tender and they got it.
Let the reader be taken back to my intro on the kind of corruption I said was prevalent then.
There was apparently no prejudice to the state and yet it was a very dangerous undercurrent of collusion between business and bureaucracy.
The corrupt element armed with inside information would create the impression that a supplier was faced with impossibilities and then appear as saviour for financial gain.
We will leave the details for a book.
In this article, like in the previous, I am laying foundation to the infiltration of dishonesty in the public sector.
I have so far singled out the parallel agenda and the exogenous variable.
It is important to not skip another important vehicle interrelated with the same, viz patronage and regional loyalties.
In one of the usual Tender Board meetings, an urgent item was brought up by the District Development Fund (DDF).
The item and justification read something like this: “There is going to be a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Harare shortly.
Some of the visiting heads of state might want to visit the Prime Minister’s mother. It is therefore urgent that the DDF be authorised to tar the road to Zvimba.”
I could not help a disdainful laugh for a minute or so which interrupted the meeting.
I then came in to make suggestions on how the DDF would have to normalise their application and all through the Public Sector Investment Programme in the Treasury.
Let the reader note that in terms of responsibility, all tarred roads and major dust roads fall under the Ministry of Transport (then Roads), while the DDF is responsible for feeder roads which are obviously dust roads.
In my response in the meeting, I had not even referred to that, but alluded to issues of procedure only and was being sincere.
Of course I was also 100 percent sure that the PM had not been anywhere near that DDF urgency note and the whole thing was just name-dropping and coming from Treasury we had become used to those, which is why I could afford to laugh.
By the following week, I had been technically withdrawn from the Tender Board as my secretary had written a minute instructing that henceforth, all Tender Board representation was going to be from the level of undersecretary and above.
I had been trained in procurement and also trained civil servants in procurement matters, apart from writing the rules for Government procurement and asset/money controls.
I was replaced by an undersecretary who had no knowledge of all this for a few weeks and allowed to go back when the dust had settled.
I have deliberately picked on this example because often enough, people’s names have been used to attain sectional or personal parallel agenda interests and there are some names that are more abused than others, often without the knowledge of their proprietors.
Name-dropping has been one of the commonest vehicles for extracting preferential treatment and this has been mostly made possible or easier by patronage and nepotistic appointees who lack professional backbone and the guts to say no to improprieties.
I have so far managed to demonstrate that the most dominant forms of impropriety were not the hands-in-the-till kind.
However, during the two years of 1985 and 1986 when I was in charge of the section dealing with Government Accounting Systems, hands in the till reports started filtering in from local authorities and grant funded health institutions.
It was easy to mop this up through reviewing Treasury Instructions andAccounting Officers’ manuals.
Apparently a number of them were nabbed in 1987 and 1988 when these came into effect.
With the advent of the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), in came the ‘hands-in-the-till’, direct extortion and corruption kind of improprieties.
This was as true of the public sector as it was for the private sector and parastatals, and even non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and church institutions.
This included interference with procurement, stores management, the coming in of the middleman and the monetisation of influence-peddling and patronage.
In future articles we will have a closer look at these forms of lack of integrity which led the economy into a comatose and ‘virtuous’ poverty in a land filled with resources.
We will also try and add more flesh to the construct of this albatross of corruption which we must get rid of with the same anger and resentment we dealt the colonial one.
We must work on our mindsets as a matter of urgency for we owe it both to ourselves and future generations.