Mnangagwa Wants Private Auditors To Audit His Command Agriculture Not The Auditor General Who Has Exposed Many
11 August 2019
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Government says it will be engaging the private sector and financial institutions in the auditing structures of the scheme, ignoring the Auditor General Mildred Chiri.

Chiri can arguably be the biggest newsmaker this year after she produced government audit reports that have condemned several top government officials for corruption and misuse of office. These include the highly incriminating NSSA forensic audit which has led to the arrest of former Minister Prisca Mupfumira.

Command Agriculture is a President Emmerson Mnangagwa initiated and managed programme, which has used huge amounts of government funds but yielded very little result raising eyebrows of possible misuse of public funds.

The programme entails providing farmers with requisite resources and technical skills, to optimally produce specific crops and was implemented by Government in the last few years as a way of stimulating agricultural production with the accent on ensuring food security.

Huge concern has been raised over the failure by some farmers including politicians and Government to pay back the money advanced to them under the scheme.

Farming seasons under the scheme have not been successful because of poor planning and misuse of funds with unsustainable claims that the El Nino induced drought impacted on production.

Repayment of loans was also very poor as beneficiaries reneged on their obligations over and above sad stories of some farmers who abused the inputs.

Former Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa revealed in his 2018 Budget presentation that the government had received 66 percent of its target loan repayments and of that only 33 percent had paid in full.

This posed a high risk to the scheme’s future as well as the country’s coffers as Government had to takeover the bad debts.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube in his 2019 National Budget Statement, also noted low loan recoveries from farmers contracted under previous facilities, which he said was due to weak management arrangements.

This weakness undermines refinancing of agricultural programmes, said Minister Ncube.

Speaking at the 2019 Mid-Term Budget Review Breakfast meeting held in Harare last week, Secretary in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development George Guvamatanga, said government was considering how other players can be involved in funding command agriculture.

“At the moment as an institution we are actually considering to see how other players such as banks and other financial institutions can play a significant role in command agriculture.”

He said as safe guard measure, Treasury is also looking at appointing private firms to “actually audit and make sure that the process works much better for us”.

In his 2019 Mid-Term Budget Review presentation, Minister Ncube also highlighted the same saying to close the “loopholes during the forthcoming agriculture season, Government is adopting a targeted approach, which select exclusively farmers with track record of honouring their loan obligations from previous Programmes and have a history of producing high yields.

“The selection of farmers will be done in a transparent way and measures will be put in place to recover all the loans,” said Minister Ncube.