Paul Nyathi|Forty-four serving and former Cabinet ministers, permanent secretaries, parastatal bosses and legislators are facing “imminent” arrest for corruption, Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) chairperson Justice Loice Matanda-Moyo has said. She said the commission was mainly focusing on criminal abuse of office, theft of funds, bribery and flouting of tender procedures, among other offences.
“We are working round-the-clock to ensure all the corrupt ones are brought to book. The fight against corruption is real and we will not rest until we arrest all the perpetrators of corruption,” said Justice Matanda-Moyo.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has vowed to deal decisively with corruption which he described as deep-seated in most State institutions.
Speaking in a special Independence Day interview with ZBC at State House this year, President Mnangagwa said the various hurdles in successfully uprooting the scourge meant “the fight is so wide and deep”.
“I now realise that corruption is deep-rooted. I thought that by pronouncing that let’s fight corruption, those who are corrupt will fear and stop; it’s not like that. It’s so rooted that you have to fight it from A to Z. (In) most systems, structures and institutions, there is an element of corruption,” said President Mnangagwa.
“To fight it, you need the police to unearth, investigate; but also within the police, there is corruption. The next stage, you need prosecution, that is the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA).
“They need to prosecute the cases, so once the case passes the corruption in the police, it has to pass the corruption in the NPA; then it must go to the courts and there is an element of corruption in the courts. So the fight is so wide and deep.”
Fighting corruption, he said, was a collective responsibility.
The President said his office would not interfere with judicial processes.
“However, I am happy that you find people who support the fight against corruption in all these institutions. In the police, not everybody is corrupt; in prosecution institutions, not everybody is corrupt; in the Judiciary, not everybody is corrupt. So because of that we are gaining traction slowly, but not as speedily as I had expected. As you realise, there are so many cases of corruption now in the courts,” he said.
President Mnangagwa expressed frustration at the snail’s pace of some of the cases before the courts. A clean society, he added, would help the country to “develop faster” and lead to satisfactory service delivery.
President Mnangagwa committed to fight corruption by strengthening and restructuring key institutions such as the NPA, the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) and the Special Anti-Corruption Unit in the Office of the President and Cabinet.
Source: State Media