Surely, someone must be jailed

IF EVER there was need for evidence to highlight the extent to which the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority has been culpable of significant revenue leakages — especially under the old guard — one simply has to look at the headlines in the last 14 months.

Police statistics show that in eight days between January 2 and January 10 last year, more than 257 bales of second-hand clothes were seized, 136 of them in Marange, Manicaland province.

But the contraband was only accounted for after action-packed, movie-style drama.

Police details who had been tipped off on the two trucks that were going to transport the wares through Forbes Border Post unsuccessfully tried to flag them down.

One of the vehicles sped off and made good its escape, while the other truck, whose front tyre was deflated by a gunshot, veered off the road.

The truck driver, however, bolted into the night.

The same drama was to repeat itself again in the capital on May 31, 2016 when a truck driver – Mandlaenkosi Dube — who was purportedly carrying bananas was stopped for a routine check by the Vehicle Inspection Department.

Dube tried to escape when the officers tried to commandeer the truck to VID’s Eastlea depot. He was not so lucky and was arrested after ramming into the VID patrol truck.

His consignment, which included 296 bales of second-hand clothes and 32 bales of second-hand shoes, was valued at US$131 200.

Perhaps the biggest scandal so far has been the confiscation of four tankers supposedly carrying 140 000 litres of diesel to the Democratic Republic of Congo on January 30 this year.

Zimra officials at Chirundu Border Post only discovered that the trucks were in fact filled with water after the contents had been offloaded somewhere between the two transit points.

The alleged smugglers potentially prejudiced Zimra of more than US$56 000.

Notably, the Electronic Cargo Tracking System (ECTS), which was installed on January 1, 2017, had alerted the authorities of a possible offence.

From the sheer value of the recovered consignments it can be easily inferred that those responsible for the offences are not small-time criminals. They are obviously people of means prejudicing the revenue authority on a an industrial scale.

Last year, by Zimra’s own admission, revenue collections during the first seven months of the year, grew by 50 percent from a year earlier after most fiscal devices that had curiously been installed by retailers five years earlier were connected to the Authority’s servers.