Dirty Laundry and Transparency

Many families are adverse to `washing their laundry in public‘ out of a sense of loyalty to its members and a fear of reducing the status of the family in the public image. This is understandable in many situations and not wise in others such as when the person continues or will continue to be a threat to the family or community.

Farmers Intersection – Mutasa Auction Floor (FI-maf) found and finds itself in such a dilemma.

When FI-maf started operating in 2016 it soon discovered how out of synchronisation the smallholder farmer production was with the market requirements. FI-maf realising the solution involved smallholder farmer and others mind-set changes initiated a corrective measure involving district stakeholders resulting in the district (Agritex) releasing the Mutasa Agricultural Marketing Strategy (MAMS) in August 2018. While this was ongoing FI-maf started marketing bananas for farmers in January 2017 and had to curtail the exercise by mid-March due to the buyer `playing games’ and the lack of internal discipline. FI-maf tried a couple of other transactions after that but internal discipline issues surfaced again. We later discovered that our Procurement Officer was undermining and disrupting our operations and `doing his own thing’.We were again obliged to curtail attempts to start up the market solution service to smallholder farmers in the district as we attempted to resolve the issues created. It was and is a very testing time for FI-maf.

We were obliged to put a notice in the 17 May 2019 edition of the Manica Post to clarify that the Procurement Officer was no longer working with FI-maf and a GRV book missing. Investigations led to our discovering deliberate fraudulent activities which were reported to the police and investigations are in process, a painfully slow process.

Auction Floors are a form of Stock Exchange and stock exchanges require the confidence of their clients. Confidence comes from transparency in interactions and transactions which is founded on integrity.

FI-maf takes the trust of its clients very seriously and is acutely conscious that it is dealing with their trust and their money. It has to have an internal culture of zero tolerance to theft and related breaches of client trust.

To this end, as in this case, FI-maf is pursuing misdeeds to their conclusions for both justice and transparency’s sake. It is not a pleasant task but FI-maf are building foundations that it can stand on and safeguard the relationships with and resources of its clients. FI-maf know well that `trust’ has to be earned and maintained with every transaction be it big or small.

Below is the outcome of the first case we have managed to get to court. US207.00 was defrauded but the Procurement Officer only repaid ZWL207.00 as that is how the law works. Effectively 69kgs of product was stolen and only 2.75kg paid for due to our situation in Zimbabwe. Never-the-less, a conviction was secured and we continue.