By Charles T.M.J. Dube

THE overall objective of my contribution is to put building blocks to a correct mindset, which is a sine qua non to our imminent industrial and economic take-off.
Those among us who will remain inflexible and rigid because they are either gaining from entrenchment in privilege, greed, corruption and/or patronage will either be crushed by the inescapable movements of history or get exposed for the charlatans and Judas Iscariots they are.
We have written about the parallel agenda before in this series and I have stated: “Newton’s Law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
So is the case with revolution and social development.
Even in traditional societies, where there are good benevolent spirits, there are also malevolent spirits that counter their good works; while with God on one side, Satan stands opposite with a counter agenda to mankind.
On the social side, I have termed this the parallel agenda.
The parallel agenda is a law of life and begins even at the individual level; forces of progress and negation fighting each other.
Where there is a revolution, there will always be counter-revolutionary forces at play.
Even in our own rural set-up, we always have our own anti-social elements who find pleasure in defecating in the village well despite it being their source of drinking water as well.”
In the same article on parallel agenda, I also wrote: “There was the imperialist agenda, intended to introduce perennial dependence and derail any semblance of economic independence and genuine development.
In this, the imperialist had to enlist foot soldiers from among the ranks of the cadres of the new Government and its leadership.
Even without being recruited, some among the political leadership found themselves pursuing the parallel agenda due to their own autosuggestions.
The temptation to concentrate on own families as opposed to concentrating on delivery on the sumumbonum (total good) was enormous and many among the leadership succumbed to that.
Once the parallel agenda of self-interest won the hearts of the bulk of the leadership, the rest became history as the imperialist agenda got penalty and free kicks.”
It is against this background that we have to approach the question of business integrity in the public sector.
In this series which will run up to 12 articles, we will revert between public/private sector integrity and or even the international/capital dimension to all this.
It is my intention that as the series progresses towards the end, it begins to cite current cases of lack of integrity in both the public and private sectors and give feedback to the reader on how many of them will have earned jail sentences as the question of integrity is vital to our breakthroughs and will call for a counter through some dry-hands boxing bouts as it were and no longer the kid gloves that have seen the reporting of scandals and cases of integrity as some form of entertainment to the reading public.
In Part Five of this series, I made reference to how I used to run escrow accounts making payments to corporate and individual accounts.
I bemoaned how such a scenario was unattainable with our current civil service cadres.
When I joined the public service in 1980 at independence, integrity was not really an issue.
Not that there were no people of no integrity in the public sector, but rather they were a rarity and more of an exception than the general expectation that the public service has been reduced to.
There were reported cases of fraud and convictions here and there, which were generally frowned upon by both the general public and fellow bureaucrats.
It was the silent pungent fart that my brother and friend Jameson Kurasha always wants to talk about in matters of ethics.
But then what happened?
Was it just the hard times?
I will maintain, just as I have always maintained in earlier writings or even consultant reports, that what came first was this silent pungent fart and that it was an exogenously-induced variable calculated to create a looting ground for our natural resources as self-interest and not public service gained centre stage.
It was well organised, premeditated and implemented with utmost precision. The first point of attack was ‘systems’ and in this, even the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General had no clean hands.
My first direct encounter of lack of integrity was with this very office.
When I moved in as assistant secretary to the Aid Accounting and Monitoring Section of the Treasury in January 1983, all the previous year’s accounts had already been audited.
By accident or design, the undersecretary, assistant secretary and senior administration officers had all just left.
Before I had even settled in, somebody with no clue to basic double entry was laterally moved as undersecretary to head this accounting division.
In her first week in the office, she was pulling out all expenditure returns from the Ministries and mixing them up in a confused and disorganised state.
Exactly a week later, a daft auditor was in the office asking for the same returns, insisting he had been asked to re-audit the accounts because he had been instructed the person who had done the audit in the first place was not senior enough.
We ran two accounts for foreign assistance; the National Development Fund, and the National Fund for Reconstruction and Development.
We reported and accounted for these funds differently.
Our ‘senior’ auditor then rewrote the accounts and proceeded to qualify them on the basis that they were not backed by a specific formatted report from the Ministries, which we provided specifically to the British Government for the Land Resettlement Programme.
No amount of explaining could move him from his position and we had to move all the way to the Public Accounts Committee come 1984.
In as much as our briefs to the new secretary to the Treasury, Elisha Mushayakarara, for the Committee appearances, eventually it would prove much ado about nothing. But the damage had already been done through populist press reports on the general breakdown in governance by the new administration.
I want the reader to understand the political economy of loss of integrity so that he/she will eventually be able to put the current scenario into perspective and envisage even in his/her own mind the solutions thereto.