MUTARE– The Office of the Auditor General (AG) is mooting instituting a special audit for the lucrative but murky mining sector to interrogate its overall contribution to national development.
By Donald Nyarota
Deputy auditor general Bornface Mukwenga said there was a need to interrogate whether revenue from the mining sector was cascading down to benefit ordinary citizens or is being siphoned through illicit financial flows.
Zimbabwe’s economic blueprint Vision 2030 hinges on positive performance of a sector which contributed 68 percent of total exports of US$1.9 billion translating to 18 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2018.
As the country targets to grow the sector to a US$12 billion mining economy to achieve the Upper Middle-Income Country (UMIC) status, Mukwenga said there should be an audit for the sector to ascertain its contribution.
He said with the vast endowments in natural resources, a value for money audit for the sector would enhance transparency.
“It’s a sector that we think we are endowed with riches as a country and whatever is coming out of that, the issue is, is it benefitting the citizens in their generality.
“We have plans afoot to audit that sector, revenues in terms of royalties, in terms of what should go to the public purse and is there value for money from those extraction activities.
“So basically, we are saying as a nation we saying, we nee to establish whether there is nothing that is going out through unorthodox means which should be benefitting the nation. We need to have a clear picture of how revenue from this sector is flowing,” he said.
“We want to enhance transparency not only in the mining sector but in terms of how we manage resources that are supposed to benefit the generality of Zimbabweans as a whole, special audit can then give us a clear picture.”
Shamiso Mtisi deputy director of the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA) contends that for Zimbabwe to fully benefit from its natural resources particularly diamonds, there should be independent auditors.
Mtisi said government aligned companies, like the Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC) must lead the way by embracing voluntary self-regulation and disclosure of disaggregated production quantities to provide warranties for the traceability of transactions.
“We urge government to maintain relevant official production, import and export data on rough diamonds, they must give a national breakdown of production from Marange voluntarily.
“There should be a voluntary system of industry self-regulation by mining companies – a system of warranties underpinned through verification by independent auditors of individual companies to help facilitate full traceability of rough diamond transactions.
“If ZCDC is quite people will continue assuming the big guys are eating all the money from Marange, share disaggregated data of revenues, contracts signed and use of resources, as Mbada Diamonds once did,” said Mtisi.
He added, “We also call for responsible mining and sourcing based on need to manage social, environmental or human rights related impacts of mining, including responding to community needs and national development needs and growth. It is about contributing to the society and the country.”
