Anti-corruption police get their hands on a stack of Covid tests. Value several thousand euros. Offered by Unicef, they were looted from a public hospital in Zimbabwe, pending resale on the black market.
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The loot was stored in Harare, the capital, in a building opposite the central bank. This discovery last month is just the latest in a string of scams in a stricken economy country that survives on foolproofness.
Zimbabwe detected its first case of contamination with the coronavirus in March 2020. Three months later, the Minister of Health, Obadiah Moyo, jumps for corruption.
A foreign company irregularly obtained a government contract worth several million euros to provide protective equipment and tests.
The minister is also accused of having demanded the payment of 15,000 screening tests which were to be kept at the airport: upon inspection, the Ministry of Finance discovered that only 3,700 kits were delivered.
In February, during the first vaccines, doubts about the transparency of their acquisition immediately arose. The government has set aside more than 80 million euros to immunize its population of 14.5 million.
“Around me, people quickly worried that public funds were being looted through the vaccination campaign,” Corruption-obsessed journalist Hopewell Chin’ono told AFP, whose investigations notably helped to bring down the Minister of Health.
Last month, on his release from a third stay in prison for tweets having displeased the power, this provocative made a splash with a video to a reggae tune. “Dem loot” (they loot), an improvised song listing the effects of state corruption, goes viral.
500 for daddy, uncle …
Pandemic funds are easy targets for increasingly greedy officials and officials.
Chief government epidemiologist Portia Manangazira was recently arrested for enlisting 28 members of her family, including her own father, in a coronavirus awareness program funded by Africa CDC.
This three-day training, planned for 800 caregivers, allowed each of their relatives to touch the equivalent of more than 500 euros.
An anti-corruption observatory, appointed by the government, is investigating a dozen cases linked to the pandemic, “mainly around suspicions about the acquisition of equipment”, explains its spokesperson John Makamure.
“Suspected abuses by public officials, fraud and theft of protective equipment”, he lists, without going into detail.
The Zimbabwean branch of the NGO Transparency International told AFP that it was alerted last year to 1,400 cases of corruption in public health, the police and humanitarian aid linked to the pandemic.
Caregivers are devastated by the lack of equipment supposed to protect them, a dearth attributed, again and again, to corruption.
“The situation is insane”, breathes Simbarashe Tafirenyika, president of a nurses’ union, while the coronavirus has killed more than 1,500 Zimbabweans out of nearly 37,000 recorded cases, according to official figures likely to be underestimated.
The peak of the second wave, in February, cruelly exposed the disastrous state of public hospitals, already ravaged by twenty years of a severe economic crisis.
Many Zimbabweans have thus turned to social networks to exchange information and find space in a health center.
Private clinics have been accused of making their fill of this desperation, by charging exorbitant sums, up to more than 2,000 euros, to families at bay, for a ventilator.
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