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MPs protested in Parliament when Minister Biti claimed that Portfolio Committee reports presented by various respective chairpersons were written by Permanent Secretaries and that they lacked depth.
Business in the House came to a standstill for about seven minutes as legislators protested and jeered at the Minister accusing him of denigrating them.

The legislators demanded that Minister Biti retract his statement.
Kambuzuma Member of the House of Assembly, Mr Wilias Madzimure (MDC-T), who was temporary Speaker of the House of Assembly at the time, urged the Minister to respect the committees.

Mr Madzimure, however, could not accede to the request to have the Minister retract his statement, prompting further protests.
Speaker of Parliament, Mr Lovemore Moyo, who had temporarily left the House, returned to his chair and ordered the Minister to retract the statement.

“The allegations are unfounded and undermine the inte-grity of Parliament unless the Honourable Minister has evidence which he should have brought to the Speaker, he should withdraw,” said Mr Moyo.

Mr Biti then said: “It was meant to be a metaphor, but I withdraw.”
The Minister made the allegation while responding to various concerns raised by Portfolio Committees shadowing various ministries and departments saying the money was inadequate.

The committee — which has recently been receiving evidence from Government Ministries through Permanent Secretaries on the budget — had also raised concern over their low salaries.

In his lengthy response, Minister Biti said it was important to note that Portfolio Committees were not allocation committees.
“Portfolio Committees are not allocation committees. They are not spokespersons of the departments in Govern-ment,” said Minister Biti.

“They are not spokespersons of Permanent Secretaries. Portfolio Committees are created to have oversight function on the Executive.
“The 99 percent of the Portfolio Committees reports were virtually written by the Permanent Secretaries in various ministries. With respect, Mr Speaker Sir, there was no analysis and there was no attempt to analyse…”

The legislators, Minister Biti said, had merely complained that the money given to one ministry or department was inadequate without offering a solution on which budget vote the Minister was supposed to redirect resources.

“It is not enough to say, for lack of a better example, BEAM should have gotten US$60 million without telling us which vote you want that money to come from. It is not just good enough because you are dealing with an inelastic envelope of US$2,7 billion, which in fact was US$2,5 billion, if you look at our macro-economic framework. So we had to panel beat the US$2,5 to US$2,7 billion,” he said.

Minister Biti said it was important to realise that the budget was a collective document by the Executive.
To this end, it should not be viewed as an individual document.

Meanwhile, legislators had to abandon their threat to block the passage of the budget should Minister Biti fail to raise their salaries to US$3 000 each and that of civil servants.
The motion that was moved by the Mwenezi East MP …. and adopted was abandoned after it emerged that the MDC-T had whipped its legislators to support the Bill.

This saw the easy passage of the Finance Bill and Appropriation Bill yesterday that seeks to give legal effect to the budget statement.
Goromonzi North Member of House of Assembly, Cde Paddy Zhanda (Zanu-PF) who had implored against whipping of MPs said he was disappointed by what MDC-T had done.

MDC-T Chief Whip, Mr Innocent Gonese declined to comment saying he did not know about the alleged whipping of his colleagues.
Ironically, Mr Gonese and his deputy, Bulawayo Central MP, Ms Dorcas Sibanda could be seen counting their MPs just before commencement of the debate in anticipation of the division of the House.