Aid group says Zimbabwe squandered $7.3 million

The actions by Zimbabwe have deprived the organisation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, of resources it needs and damaged efforts to expand lifesaving treatment, said the inspector general of the organization John Parsons. Zimbabwe’s actions also jeopardize a more ambitious $188 million Global Fund grant to Zimbabwe.

The Global Fund has continued to demand that Zimbabwe return the money, and Global Fund officials say Zimbabwean financial officials have promised to do so by Thursday. But Parsons said Zimbabwean officials also said they had not repaid the money because they did not have enough foreign currency.

The breakdown of trust between the Global Fund and the Government of Zimbabwe comes at a moment of widening humanitarian crisis and casts further doubt on the willingness of Western donors to invest in rebuilding the economically broken nation as long as Mugabe is in charge. Parsons said that last year the Global Fund deposited $12.3 million in foreign currency into Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank. He declined to speculate on how the $7.3 million it was seeking to be returned had been spent.

Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank, the custodian of the Global Fund’s money, has been spending large sums on a range of things, according to reports in Zimbabwe’s state-owned media. Gono gave the country’s judges new vehicles, satellite dishes and televisions and allocated 79 vehicles for the Information Ministry. He announced the provision of 3,000 tractors, 105 combine harvesters and 100,000 plows for the country’s farm mechanisation programme.

Civic groups and Opposition officials contend that Gono and the Reserve Bank help finance the governing party’s patronage operation. Aid groups and UN agencies say the country’s annual Inflation rate of more than 230 million percent and rules imposed by the Reserve Bank have complicated the logistics of helping impoverished people.

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