ACTING President Constantino Chiwenga’s recent sentiments over deepening graft in Zimbabwe were very loud and clear.
Corruption is eating at the core of the moral, social, economic and political fabrics of this beautiful nation thus cannot be allowed to go unpunished.
Corrupt elements have taken the vice to a new level with some of them bragging that nothing will happen to them because they are well-connected.
Sadly, they have become demigods among the poor youths, who now regard them as idols.
In his address at the burial of three national heroes — Chenhamo Chakezha Chimutengwende, Ambassador John Shumba Mvundura and Retired Major General Solomon Siziba — at the National Heroes Acre in Harare on Wednesday, Chiwenga admonished corrupt elements.
“We can only realise our vision of attaining an empowered and prosperous upper-middle-income society by guarding against and desisting from all forms of actions and misdeeds which undermine the national interests and these include foremost corruption and all forms of related unethical and selfish conduct, especially in respect of business transactions at whatever level, small, medium to large economic units,” he said.
Said Pratibha Patil, an Indian politician and lawyer who served as the 12th president of India from 2007 to 2012: “Corruption is the enemy of development and of good governance. It must be got rid of. Both the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this national objective.”
The government must take the lead in the fight the scourge.
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We have the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission, a Chapter 12 commission, whose mandate is to go after all suspected corrupt elements and hand over cases to the National Prosecuting Authority of Zimbabwe for prosecution at the courts.
We all want to see the Judiciary independently exercising its mandate.
Accusations have been thrown around that the Executive at times upends the decisions of the courts, but that has not been proven.
Indeed, “no society can thrive when corruption has become the norm” and “let’s be the change agents, fostering a culture of integrity and accountability.”
As far back as 1989, Chimurenga music icon Thomas “Mukanya” Mapfumo red-flagged graft, when he released the album Corruption, named after the title track.
He sang in part:
You can’t get something, if you can’t give away.
In the streets, there is corruption.
In private companies, there is corruption.
Everywhere, there is corruption.
Some of us are corrupt.
Everywhere, there is corruption.
The chorus: Something for something, nothing for nothing was repeated eight times.
The whole country expects President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government take bold steps towards the eradication of corruption.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell that corrupt elements are taking our country’s developmental trajectory decades backwards.
Zimbabwe is the 149th least corrupt nation out of 180 countries, according to the 2023 Corruption Perception Index compiled by Transparency International.
Zimbabwe's corruption ranking averaged 129.65 from 1998 until 2023, reaching an all-time high of 166.00 in 2008 and a record low of 43.00 in 1998.
The figure is too high for an investment-starved nation such as ours.
It is highly likely that investors will shun such a nation, considering they might be asked to pay hundreds of thousands of United States dollars as kickbacks for bureaucrats to sign their investment papers.
If graft is left to reign supreme, as is the case now, government’s upper-middle-income economy target by 2030 will remain a pie in the sky.
The fight against corruption must not end as rhetoric.
There must be blood on the floor, not a tap on the wrist that we often see being publicly flaunted as an anti-corruption crusade.
