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Herald Reporter
Government must urgently act on bosses at State-linked enterprises before ordinary people take the law into their own hands by effecting citizen arrests on implicated officials, a war veterans’ leader has said.
Cde Jabulani Sibanda, who heads the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association yesterday said ordinary citizens might start to feel they must act on their own if legal remedies are not instituted to bring to book public officials who took home massive packages using taxpayers money.

Cde Sibanda also said Government must bring to book ministers under whose watch public officials awarded themselves such salaries at the expense of service delivery.
In an interview with The Herald after addressing journalists following the ZNLWVA first meeting of 2014, Cde Sibanda said corruption was now being facilitated at policy level.

“We have people who create policies that allow them to do wrong things. So we need laws and regulations that control the management of businesses that are linked to the State and also in the private sector.

“People are being paid these obscene salaries at a time that we are under sanctions and do not have a currency of our own . . .
“It’s difficult to prosecute these people because they are protected by policies that allow such criminality. If Government doesn’t have instruments to deal with such things, the people will effect citizen’s arrests, they will act.

“We don’t want things to go that far, because citizens, when they effect arrests, are not bound by the same things that bind the police when they make arrests.
“They execute judgment there and then and we don’t want things to go that far,” he said.

Earlier at the Press conference, Cde Sibanda described some of the salaries in the public sector as “counter-revolutionary”.
“We believe that going forward, Government should establish a commission of inquiry to safeguard against this policy corruption. They should be brought to an open court and charged with corruption.

“We want all the parastatals to be investigated and we also want to know why companies such as National Railways of Zimbabwe are getting down yet they are enjoying monopoly in the rail sector.”

Cde Sibanda said ministers who superintended over those enterprises should explain why they allowed such rot to set in.
“Ministers who run those institutions know it was wrong and in the case of (suspended ZBC chief executive officer Happison) Muchechetere, he is a war veteran and he knows that what he was doing was wrong.

‘‘They (ministers) should explain to the nation how such corrupt activities happened in their  presence.”