For Helping to Fight Down Its Own Corruption, Zisco Steel Made Me to Pay a Price

Brian Tawanda Manyati, 19 December 2020

The Strive Masiyiwa personal story on Zisco Steel reminded me of own ordeal at the same company where I lost my job without recompense even when it came out that I was only a victim of an evil system that needed not any shining light amidst it.

Quite unfairly, I got dismissed without even undergoing a fair hearing and yet I was fighting to clean its own corruption, the declared massive theft that was ongoing at one of its distribution centers in Harare.

This was a distribution center that on record as topping in theft cases out of all the 13 branches country wide and even beyond borders where Zisco Steel also operated.

Upon excelling at the interviews, the then Chief Accountant warned me by saying “youngster you are going into the deep end albeit the job is yours on merit.”

I had just received my ACCA certified accounting technician results, where I passed all the final four modules at once, of which I was one among only three who managed that feat at Open Learning Centre in Harare’s Avenues area.

After having collected the results on a Thursday, the next Friday while on cloud nine, I went to work and shared the good news with fellow workmates and I was very ecstatic all day.

In all that excitement, little did I know that on Saturday, things would get twisted in 360 degree fashion.

It started with a proposition by my immediate subordinate that she would not be at work that coming day and so I offered to come and stand up for her, even though this was unusual as Saturdays I was booked at Open Learning Centre for my ACCA mainstream classes already penciled to start that weekend just as I used to do at the CAT level.

Little did I know I was falling into some form of a trap, that would eventually cost me dearly since that Saturday morning we got robbed smartly and then horror started for me.

I never got back home as police took me to the cells, and from cells to remand prison only to be placed on bail for nearly two strenuous years while reporting to police every Friday.

Unforgettable to me are the excruciating beatings that I went through in police cells and how I escaped by sheer grace the whips of prison officers in remand prison.

It was basically a “guilty before trial” with the officers who whipped like what happens to cattle at an entrance point into a cattle pen.

Jehovah survived me in a torrid remand time in those two or so weeks that were like eternity but that is my story for another day.

A family friend who is a lawyer (but now a magistrate) covered the bail application part but he was unable to stand for me for the rest of the two years or so stretching ordeal of court attendances and postponements up until the trial day.

To my next employment interviews, I did not hide this. I got given job posts all the same. To be true, none segregated me or stigmatized me after telling.

By the end of just the first year of my being posted to man the distribution center’s finances we had a year-end party for all 13 branches held at our center for we had turned around a situation, and others needed an example of how to do it.

In two months from that December party, I had been nailed hard on a cross of some sort. I only got acquitted after some painful years and never got compensated for lack of representation.

Even in the court of law, I faced cross examination by both the prosecutor and magistrate on my own. I had a fair chance to cross examine fellow employees who took the witness stand.

I was probably the youngest Accounting Officer posted to a distribution center handling finances on his own with my junior team of an accounts clerk, two sales clerks, stores clerk, and the warehouse team was directly under my charge merely reporting to the Administrator.

The Administrator was by and large a ceremonial role kept for a crony to the system and not on merit it looked like.

I had an intimidation experience on my induction day right at the Harare head office by an employee serving Lancashire Steel then but his office premised at the Zisco Steel Harare head office.

I was asked midway being introduced, “if you are to catch someone stealing what would you do?” to which I responded, “I send them packing” and this answer got to my workstation mates before me through a telephone call someone made in advance.

By the time I arrived later on that day, others needed to verify what I meant from what I said while at the head office. As I had said on day one, I was surely to send two heads packing with proof and evidence beyond reasonable doubt.

With my first work theft victim, a serial player at it, a customer came by one day to let the cat out and left in my hands documentary proof with which to check with a fraudulent transaction that was underway right beneath my sniffing noses. This permitted enough a trap.

With the second head, I was now a bit eyes wide open, it is how I sent home the culprits.

However, what I had missed was that it was a collusive practice that I had challenged and so I had gotten myself in for a fix.

I had gotten to be too switched on, too lights on, not out and uncaring for who is who.

Through a granted request for internal auditors, I had help to clear the first set of traceable book variances. This I achieved in the first six months. Then the second six months I got physical setting out working traps. It is how I got myself in for it.

When the robbery occurred, one thing impromptly leading to another, I had just moved out from my parents’ place that very month.

I had only paid my new landlord one month’s rental, and because I was taken abruptly, after some two weeks of letting in, they didn’t get to hear from me for potentially some two months that followed.

When police made me surrender all I had on me, they had not cared or listened to the need to call on my parents that that their son had unexpectedly gotten into a tricky mix of things, for nearly two weeks they held me there, family remained unaware.

I forever regretted leaving my promotion at Exor Petroleum where I was to head the Accounts Department at Exor Lubricants upon coming across the Zisco Steel job advert.

Yes the senior Accountant at Exor Petroleum had cherry picked me out of his Head Office staff to be on my own again at the Exor Lubricants branch along Birmingham road if my memory serves me well.

However, then I had felt he had not given me a chance to grow enough under some form of handholding, since from a mere clerk to an announced branch accountant where all the Exor Lubricants production team looked up to me to set up systems from scratch.

I felt I was inadequately prepared and if I had remained, I thought that would embarrass me and so the call out to the Zisco Steel had come up as a big relief, but again, I got given my own branch to man up.

I thought finding steel bars was easier to deal with than lubricants manufacturing and accounting which already required a lot of cost and management accounting than just financial accounting and reporting.

Brian Tawanda Manyati is a C2C subscribed member contactable on +263772815211. He is also a Chartered Governor and Accounting Technician.