Zinara board acts on audit report

The recently appointed Zimbabwe National Road Administration board has resolved to implement the Grant Thornton audit report which unearthed deep-rooted corruption at the road authority, including illegal awarding of tenders to underserving companies.

The audit report also exposed academic corruption at the parastatal where some individuals were promoted to senior managerial positions without the requisite educational or professional qualifications.

At its first meeting on Tuesday, the new Zinara board led by Engineer Michael Madanha said they had resolved to bring to finality the issue of Zinara’s suspended chief executive, Engineer Nancy Masiyiwa.

Eng Masiyiwa was suspended over what was described by insiders as frivolous charges, including allegedly calling a senior manager a “Satanist”.

“We resolved to implement the Grant Thornton Audit Report resolutions and recommendations,” said Eng Madanha. “We also agreed to resolve the issue of the chief executive officer.

“We resolved that we cannot go further with the acting CEO – it’s either we re-engage her (Eng Masiyiwa) or we engage somebody new. We should come up with a resolution by the end of this month. We should implement that one.

“We also have some interaction with our partners, we visited the Southern Region Trading Company to familiarise ourselves on the level of our partnership. SRTC is the one which provides systems for our tollgates. All those cameras, computers and the system of reading vehicle registration is provided by SRTC.“

Eng Madanha said the board constituted committees and gave them tasks for other areas which need improvement, like revenue collection.

“To that end, we need to close all existing leakages,” he said. “By so doing, we will automatically increase our revenue collection. Thus, we are going to look at the existing systems to see where there are leakages and plug them.

“With regards to leakages, we have problems at tollgates and also with vehicle registration. Increase in revenue collection is aimed at meeting Vision 2030 whereby we must have a world class road network befitting an upper middle income economy to facilitate the movement of goods and other services so that they reach the consumer at a much lower price.” The Herald