By Shamiso Ndangana
Gweru Urban legislator Brian Dube says the government is deliberately not digitalising its processes so that it can hide things from citizens.
Most government institutions in Zimbabwe including the police, run their operations using manual systems which makes it difficult for the Auditor General to institute checks and balances.
The manual way of doing things has reportedly seen the Auditor General taking long to release the eagerly awaited 2019 report
Speaking in an interview, on Tuesday-Talk, Honourable Dube said “I will not want to indicate that it is difficult to digitalize, but it is designed to make sure that our systems are slow, it is designed to make sure that we defeat the exact purpose of transparency and accountability. So do not think that there is an inability to digitalize but there is unwillingness.
“Zimbabwe is not a country which is unable to digitalize but it is unwilling to digitalize because they desire to make sure that a lot is hidden within those papers, it will be very difficult for you to get everything, if you are to get it then you will get it out of time like what is happening now where you have to overlap by another year to produce a particular report.
“So, what we then need to do is to make a serious demand that the government must make sure that everything is digitalized for the purpose of making sure that we do our things quickly. The easier of doing business is actually through computerization as well as digitalization of everything”, he said.
Honourable Dube added that the country should strive to do the rights things to help safeguard against misuse of resources.
“We need to be honest as a country and accept to do things the right way and make sure that we do not hide things but correct our way of doing business and make sure that the resources of Zimbabwe are not continuously misused like what is happening now.
“Like l indicated to you, this is the system that is deliberately designed to defeat the end of justice. The system is designed to make it difficult for those who want to know the truth and to get to the truth.
‘’So the parastatals and the public entities are deliberately delaying submitting things and in the process also making sure that they submit them in the format that is very difficult to analyse and work with in form of those physical big files and documents.
“So l confirm and agree with you that yes indeed the intension is to defeat the ends of justice, the intension is to hide the truth from the people of Zimbabwe but what l can assure you is also that it will no longer be business as usual, we have as a committee agreed on a plan that we are going to implement were we will make it very difficult for anyone to continue to misbehave,” he added.
