Zimbabwe’s Deputy Finance Minister, Terrence
Mukupe, stunned guests during a round-table discussion in Harare, that nation’s
capital, when he said corruption could be positive for the country.
The Deputy Finance Minister
referenced an article which he read highlighting that the scourge of corruption
would benefit the country.
“I read an article to the effect
that corruption can be also positive for the country. After going through that
article, I can actually give you some life lessons I had. I remember when I was
advisor to ESSAR (An Indian company that wanted to invest in Ziscosteel) and
ESSAR wanted to come into Zimbabwe, someone approached me and said the
fundamental mistake you are making with ESSAR is that you don’t have a local
partner.
“Make sure that you have a local
partner if your things are going to work well. And I remember the Indian
investor said to me; but the government is my partner and I would like to
believe that everything would work well.
“And the response that this guy
made was that government is not a person and it does not eat, it does not
breath, it is not motivated to make the transaction work well. So by you giving
away part of your transaction to someone else, that person is going to make
sure that they wake up every day because they are motivated to make sure that
the transaction works. So that is a case of positive corruption,” New Zimbabwe
quoted him as saying.
Mukupe said at one point, a
minister in former President Robert Mugabe’s cabinet, who was accused of
massive corruption, turned out to be the one who contributed more than any
other person to the national purse.
“So how do you then explain that?
So I guess it’s an issue that if we were to assume that he was corrupt, then I
guess his goals were aligned with the goals of government and everything else
was moving on well and it became positive corruption for the country,” he said.
Mukupe said legislation could
only do so much to address the issue of corruption as it was deep-rooted in the
society whose moral fibre had decayed so much that people were now normalizing
the abnormal.
“It’s the moral fibre of our
society and what I always say is that as Zimbabweans we are generally corrupt
people and the reason why I say we are generally a corrupt people is that if we
were to do a quick survey privately, anonymously in this room here probably over
90 percent of the people here have bribed some police officer sometime,” he
said.
Mukupe was recently accused of
assaulting a senior accounts officer in the ministry of finance for giving him
what he thought was small travel allowance.
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