Top cops accuse Chihuri of fraud

According to the officers, most of them based at the Police General Headquarters, Chihuri has given force numbers to thousands of untrained civilians and members of the youth militia, known as Green Bombers. Some of these are working as police clerks and typists, who now draw double salaries from the government.

Civilian personnel in the ZRP are employed by the Ministry of Public Service, while policemen are on the Ministry of Home Affairs’ payroll.

“The ZRP officially stopped integrating members of the Special Constabulary way back, but the Commissioner has integrated more than 15,000 unqualified civilian personnel and given them force numbers during the past few years,” said a Superintendent.

“Some of these have since been promoted to the ranks of Sergeants and Assistant Inspectors, despite having not even sat for the mandatory promotional examinations. This is done at the expense of thousands of unprocessed applications, some of which we received way back in 2011.”

Apparently, Chihuri does not trust most of the new applicants, due to his growing paranoia about suspected MDC influence in the ZRP ahead of the 2013 watershed elections and would rather work with the Green Bombers.

The integration is said to have begun in January 2012 – with the new staffers earning a basic monthly salary of at least $227, plus $95 housing allowance and $94 transport allowance every month.

The salaries are said to be equivalent to those of trained cops with full academic qualifications.

“On October 11 2012, these new ghost cops were issued with fake police identity cards with photos in which they are not wearing police uniforms,” said another police officer. “Clause number 5 on their contract of employment does not allow them to put on police uniform, but their job description did not change and they still do their old jobs of being typists and clerks.”

The contracts of employment were reportedly printed in October 2009, under the then Chief Staff Officer Human Resources, Senior Ass Commissioner Faustino Mazango, who was later replaced by Justice Chengeta.

“Some of the new cops, who are trusted by Chihuri, have since been taken to police driving school and UN peacekeeping missions ahead of regulars and continue to gobble government funds. Yet the Ministry of Finance continues to allocate their money to the Ministry of Public Service, with which they did not terminate their employment contracts,” said another senior police officer.

When government carried out an audit on its workforce in 2009, aimed at flushing out ghost workers, Chihuri allegedly instructed his subordinates to deny the auditors access to police records, in a bid to hide glaring loopholes in the ZRP.

This was after the inclusive government, at the instigation of then Public Service Minister Elphas Mukonoweshuro (now late), had embarked on the process of auditing the civil service and its payroll, in a bid to rid the system of massive corruption.

Ghost workers in the civil service are said to be running into tens of thousands. The exercise involved a physical count of all government workers, excluding the army, which does not fall under the Public Service. Although the audit was approved by cabinet, it met strong resistance from Zanu (PF), which was being accused of paying a big chunk of the taxpayer’s money to graduates from its youth militia, most of whom are too under-qualified to be civil servants and are only used to terrorise voters during elections.