ZACC urges council to draft anti-graft policy

Ivan Zhakata

Herald Correspondent

The Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) has urged the City of Harare’s Audit and Integrity Committee to draft an anti-graft policy and be diligent when dealing with corporate governance issues.

Speaking during the draft exercise, ZACC Commissioner Thandiwe Mlomane said an anti-graft policy would help plug holes in the administration of statutory obligations.

Commissioner Mlomane noted that the local authority had been the first of the 92 local authorities to engage ZACC in coming up with a policy that will ease the governance challenges.

“I must applaud the Harare City Council’s Audit Committee for initiating this policy engagement. ZACC is a key stakeholder that must help local authorities understand the laws governing their practices.

“It must be mentioned that we consider Harare, which is the second largest governing authority in the country after Government, as a pacesetter on this exercise which I feel should open the doors for other local authorities to come out with such policies,” she said.

Town clerk Engineer Hosea Chisango thanked the Audit and Integrity Committee chairperson Cllr Keith Charumbira for organising the exercise.

“An audit and integrity policy will make our compliance issues with Government and all stakeholders easy as we will generate a corporate governance framework and standard operating procedures to use in our service delivery.

“The policy will be our tool kit that will cover all our service chain deliverables in terms of the law. This will curb incidences of toxic relationships with compliance arms of governance that have often found us on the wrong side,” Eng Chisango said.

The audit and compliance policy, a first of its kind by any local authority, is a signature of commitment by the local authority, which will help strengthen internal control systems and improve service delivery.

Harare has had problems accounting for all income and expenditure because it dropped the South African provider of the accounting system it was using and transferred to a more expensive but far simpler system largely used by middle-sized businesses.

Auditor General Mildred Chiri has complained that the switch made it impossible for her to audit all transactions and said that council staff were unable to help her track down some spending simply because of the accounting system.