The COVID-19 vaccines donated by China are uploaded to a truck at Robert Mugabe International Airport in Harare, Zimbabwe, on Feb. 15, 2021. (Xinhua/Chen Yaqin)
The COVID-19 vaccines donated by China are uploaded to a truck at Robert Mugabe International Airport. (Xinhua/Chen Yaqin)Zimbabwe’s anti-graft police last month recovered about 40 boxes of COVID-19 test kits worth thousands of dollars stolen from a public hospital in Bulawayo, the country’s second city.
A donation from UNICEF, they had been stashed in a building opposite the central bank in the capital Harare and were destined for the black market.
It was one of the latest cases of pandemic-related graft one year after the coronavirus surfaced in the country.
Zimbabwe recorded its first COVID case on March 20 last year and three-and-half months later the health minister was fired for corruption.
He was charged with irregularly awarding a foreign-based company a multi-million-dollar contract to supply personal protective equipment, test kits and drugs.
In addition, he was accused of trying to coerce the treasury to pay for 15,000 coronavirus test kits stored in Harare’s international airport. After an inspection, only 3,700 kits were found.
As the southern African country started rolling out COVID jabs last month, questions are being raised about the vaccine procurement process.
The government has set aside $100 million (83 million euros) for vaccines to inoculate 10 million of its 14.5 million population.
“People I have spoken to worry that there will be corruption, there will be looting of public funds,” said Hopewell Chin’ono, a whistleblowing journalist whose reporting brought down the health minister.
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