Editorial Comment: Together we can bring corruption to an end

13 Dec, 2020 - 00:12 0 Views
Editorial Comment: Together we can bring corruption to an end Mr Tafadzwa Muguti

The Sunday Mail

In the ongoing battle against corruption, which we are starting to win, we need to remember that the corrupt are not just those who take bribes.

They are not just those who abuse their public office to enrich themselves or do favours for family and friends, but also those who pay bribes and those who ask their uncle to arrange a stand.

New Harare Provincial Development Coordinator Mr Tafadzwa Muguti brought this to the fore recently when he was as critical of those who bought dubious housing stands and built houses without going through the simple approval process laid down in by-laws as he was of land barons who criminally created and sold the stands, and of local government officials who acquiesced in the process or declined to do their job and stop the deals early.

Clichés like “desperate home-seekers” have helped to create the impression that customers of land barons are innocent victims.

Some probably are, but most must have suspected that something improper was going on. Big clues were zero title deeds, zero services, and most importantly the suggestion that the home builders should just ignore the legal processes and rely on the corrupt baron to sort everything out in a guaranteed regularisation process.

So the demolitions in the last couple of weeks in Chitungwiza and Harare are not targeting the totally innocent.

Those affected are people who decided to take a risk and engage in practices they knew, or had very good reason to suspect, were legally dubious or actually criminal in the hope that, in a generally corrupt society, things would be sorted out.

Mr Muguti actually went further and suggested that the customers of land barons should also be liable to criminal prosecution.

In many cases, he has a point.

There were some more sophisticated schemes, such as those run by allegedly corrupt council officials who created numbered plots on council land and sold them in a system that was almost regular.

But even in these cases, as the unravelling set of corrupt practices in parts of Chitungwiza is revealing, many of the stand buyers must have known that something was wrong when they were asked for “processing fees” and given backdated receipts.

The culture of corruption can drag in many. To take another example, in the dying days of the First Republic, traffic police officers were running a fines racket, the first thing stopped on the swearing in of President Mnangagwa. Everyone caught at roadblocks just paid, because it was simpler and easier and, admittedly, because police officers threatened formal arrest and a night in the holding cells before taking anyone to court.

But if everyone had insisted on their rights to a fair trial, and here some of those human rights lawyers who continually criticise without themselves taking action could have been most helpful. The whole racket could have destroyed in a matter of weeks.

It was the same in many other Government offices, or council offices, with people prepared to hand over small sums to get someone just to do their duty, or, regrettably, to bend the rules “just a little bit”. But those small bribes when amalgamated came to surprisingly large sums.

One Zimra officer, against whom nothing could be proved beyond reasonable doubt, even managed to build a luxury northern suburbs house using funds that a civil action, successfully seeking the forfeiture of that house, could not have been earned legally.

So, while the heavy artillery of the anti-corruption process is being targeted on the kingpins and the big shots in positions of authority in the public sector, we need to remember that a lot of other people are involved, and often ourselves, because we did not have the courage to stand up and simply say “no”.

But even when the public figure is arrested and charged, the investigating and prosecuting authorities should go after all involved.

We have councillors who have been charged with manipulating council allocation systems to assign stands to relatives and friends, going through all sorts of weird processes such s assigning low waiting list numbers that actually belong to others.

What is needed is to have those relatives and friends standing in the dock, alongside the principle, as a co-accused or as an accomplice. The law does allow this in most crimes. Sometimes this can be used by the prosecution to gain evidence using accomplice witnesses, getting someone whose involvement is modest to give evidence in return for immunity, but that immunity coming from the court, not the investigators, and granted only if the court is satisfied that the accomplice witness has been totally open.

In such prosecutions, incidentally, there has to be corroborating evidence; you cannot jail or fine someone solely on accomplice evidence.

In some of these dubious procurement deals, we have seen the supplier also charged, which is a good start.

Of course, there is the problem of proving that a bribe or other inducement was paid. This is why we now use, so often, the charge of criminal abuse of office against public office holders, being able to get a guilty verdict if the procedures laid down were not followed.

At other times proof even at that level is hard, but even here bad managerial decisions can be subject to civil action, disciplinary action. But we should, even when criminal action is impossible to prove, be able to take civil action against private sector enterprises that have won grossly over-priced contracts against honest tenderers who priced correctly.

We might not be able to prove money-filled envelopes were passed under the table, but we can certainly do something to get the peel off the proceeds of corrupt practices.

And that in itself will be a deterrent, along with damaging the reputation of the suspected supplier.

But the main point, and the point Mr Muguti was making, is that corruption involves all of us. If we engage in a corrupt practices, even if at the lowest level, we are morally as guilty as those at the top of the chain.

If everyone was honest, if all businesses followed the rules, then the corrupt would be isolated and unable to operate.

So the battle against corruption is not just the deeds of the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission and the others leading the fight.

It must involve all of us in a universal change of culture, that we all resolve to be clean and honest, insisting on our Constitutional and legal rights, and insisting that we are all treated equally and fairly.

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