The Zimbabwean
July 4, 2009

A legislator from Prime Minsiter Morgan Tsvangirai’s MDC party has called for an audit of the country’s debt, insisting that long-suffering tax-payers should not be made to pay for the actions of greedy and irresponsible politicians and government officials. (Pictured: Obert Gutu – Zimbabweans need to know how that colossal debt was incurred in the first place.)

Senator and lawyer Obert Gutu said he had already approached Finance Minister Tendai Biti with the proposal to urgently “interrogate the internal and external debt and see how that colossal debt was incurred in the first place.” “I told Biti that make sure we have a debt audit before we pay. You will be surprised 90 percent or more of the debt is illegitimate,” Gutu told a meeting on the national debt organised by the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD) in Harare last week.

Congo expedition
He cited the expenditure and subsequent debt incurred by President Robert Mugabe’s previous regime after his ill-conceived 1998 decision to intervene in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where rebels wanted to march on Kinshasa and topple then President Laurent Kabila.

The Zimbabwean forces, with backing from Angolan and Namibian soldiers, managed to repel the rebels but after incurring a huge burden on the fiscus. Although no official figures on the DRC adventure have been made public, it is widely believed that the war effort cost Harare more than US$10 billion at a time the economy was shrinking.

The DRC intervention is, in fact, believed by most economists as the genesis of Zimbabwe’s financial crisis. Senior members of Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) and service chiefs are also said to have benefited from mining concessions offered by the DRC government in return for military support.

Odious debt
“We should not worry about odious debt. We should simply say we are not paying it,” Gutu said. But analysts said conducting an audit of Zimbabwe’s debt would be a tall order as long as Mugabe and Zanu (PF) remain in power.

“As with other audits ordered before this one, Zanu (PF) will make sure this never happens because it remains in control of all the key institutions that would otherwise order such an investigation,” observed University of Zimbabwe political scientist John Makumbe. Previous audits that have suffered still-births include a probe into multiple farm ownerships and an investigation into how the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was run between 2003 and early this year.

Although these audits have been demanded by Zimbabwe’s international lenders, Harare has refused to take action despite promises to do so. “They will never do it as long as the audits will expose their shortcomings and underhand dealings,” said Makumbe.

Important documents
Added an analyst with a Harare-based financial institution: “In fact, all such an audit would achieve would be to cause the disappearance of important government documents.”

Zimbabwe’s external debt stood at US$5,255 billion in December 2008 and is projected to rise to more than US$7 billion in the next two years unless urgent measures are taken by the coalition government to plead for debt cancellation or debt relief by multilateral lending organisations and other donor countries.

The country owed the International Monetary Fund more than US$138 million in arrears as at the end of May and a further US$676 million to the World Bank. Arrears to the African Development Bank stood at US$438 million on April 30 this year.