Almost $3bn has vanished into a failed food security scheme launched by President Emmerson Mnangagwa, say opposition politicians.
"It is fair to say that the new regime is redefining corruption in Zimbabwe," the MDC Alliance's Tendai Biti told fellow MPs on Friday during a debate on command agriculture.
He said unbudgeted amounts of $1.5bn and $1.4bn had been "transferred directly from Treasury to unknown actors of command agriculture" in the past two years.
"There is no documentation or vouchers to support these transactions," Biti, chair of the parliamentary budget & finance committee, told its members.
In August 2016, when Mnangagwa was vice-president, he chaired the cabinet committee on food security & nutrition, which introduced command agriculture in an effort to ensure food security.
It targeted 2,000 farmers who could each plant at least 200ha of maize. Each farmer had to commit 5t per hectare towards repayment of loans for irrigation equipment, inputs, chemicals, mechanised equipment, electricity and water. Farmers would retain any surplus.
With an initial budget of $500m, each farmer who signed a three-year contract was earmarked to receive a loan of $250,000, but as well as failing to meet its crop targets, the scheme recovered maize worth only $50.2m in its first season.
Despite this, it received the further $2.9bn. The command agriculture budget for the 2019/2020 season is $250m.
MDC treasurer-general David Coltart told the Sunday Times: "It is common cause that Mnangagwa was the lead actor in command agriculture, which is where this money disappeared. This is a scandal of unfathomable proportions. But all we get is silence from the regime."
Finance & economic development minister Mthuli Ncube sounded the alarm about command agriculture when he appeared before Biti's committee in June, saying it appeared to have been abused from the outset.
This was seen as confirmation of claims by Mnangagwa's long-standing Zanu-PF rival, Jonathan Moyo, that the scheme was a gimmick to permit looting and part of an "ugly culture" of corruption.
Treasury officials failed to answer questions posed by Biti in parliament on Friday, and he responded: "You have two senior officers of the [finance] ministry, permanent secretary and finance secretary, and they do not know anything, virtually, about this $1.4bn and $1.5bn."
Finance ministry permanent secretary George Guvamatanga told the Sunday Times a report on Biti's claims would be prepared for the committee. "The ministry records show a different number as funding for agriculture to those indicated," he said.
Command agriculture's initial two-year budget was increased by a factor of six by the unbudgeted amounts that were paid out immediately after Mnangagwa took over the presidency in November 2017.
Companies that play a leading role in the scheme, such as Kuda Tagwirei's Sakunda Holdings, are close to the presidium, and former presidential adviser Chris Mutsvangwa claimed last year that Tagwirei was given preferential treatment in the allocation of foreign currency to import fuel. Tagwirei divided the presidium because of his role in strategic national projects such as command agriculture, according to Mutsvangwa.
Coltart said Tagwirei's influence was one of the reasons the MDC Alliance believed the whereabouts of the missing $2.9bn was likely to remain an unsolved mystery.
About 200 organisations and companies linked to command agriculture are being investigated by justice Loice Matanda-Moyo, who Mnangagwa appointed to chair the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission.
"For now we are still doing the investigations. We have the auditor-general's report, the National Social Security Authority, the Hwange [Colliery Company] and command agriculture," Matanda-Moyo told journalists at her swearing-in ceremony last week.
Professor Philani Moyo, director of the Fort Hare Institute for Social and Economic Research, in SA, said Zanu-PF had been unable to fight corruption since the Mugabe era. "Expecting the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission to make arrests is like waiting to see cabinet ministers and the powerfully connected rich going to jail," he said.
Despite command agriculture being hailed by Mnangagwa as a brilliant idea to move Zimbabwe towards food security, the 2018/2019 maize crop was only 776,600t, 45% of the yield before the scheme began.
According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, more than 5-million people in cities and rural areas will need food aid before this year's rainy season. To avert hunger, the government has undertaken to import 800,000t of maize, and has placed restrictions on possession of maize.
A new statutory instrument makes the Grain Marketing Board the only authorised importer and seller of maize.
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