Sata instructed me to dissolve the ZAWA board – Masebo

President Michael Sata instructed me to dissolve the ZAWA board, Tourism and Arts Minister Sylvia Masebo told the Tribunal probing her on Thursday, March 6.

This is in a matter Masebo is being probed by the Roydah Kaoma headed Tribunal for alleged professional misconduct in relation to operations at ZAWA.

Giving her testimony today, ZNBC reports that Masebo also revealed that she was warned that if she allowed the board to continue, it was going to undermine her authority as a Minister.

She also informed the Tribunal that she had to remove the then ZAWA management and cancel the tendering process of 19 safari hunting blocks due to many complaints that came through the President, the Vice President and her office.

Masebo explained that ZAWA had many problems, among them, failure to manage wildlife and inability to pay statutory fees. She said  they were many scams at ZAWA among them failure to issue audited reports.

She said ZAWA then had a debt in access of over K2 Million kwacha in unpaid fees. She told the Tribunal that if ZAWA was a private company it would have winded up or closed.

Masebo told the three-member Tribunal that there was so much “rot” in ZAWA management. She added that management had become so powerful that no one would control them.

She disclosed that even some Ministers allegedly fell prey to the operators by being in the pocket of the safari operators.

Meanwhile, Masebo has also revealed that in the initial stages of her being Minister of Tourism, she unearthed a scam of an illegal exportation of 2-hundred and 35 sable animals destined for South Africa.

She has added that during her familiarization and meetings with stakeholders, she discovered that ivory stock file was not safe. She stated that Zambia was losing a lot of ivory through illegal exportation of the commodity, adding that some ZAWA managers were involved in this.

The Minister testified that Zambia was also used as a transit point for illegal exportation of ivory to the Far East.

Masebo has further testified that ZAWA officials were fully aware of the illegal activities and no action was taken to curtail the situation.

And Ms. Masebo testified that she suspects that she was dribbled by ZAWA officials when she instructed them to include the chiefs on the evaluation process of the tenders of the safari hunting blocks.

She has doubted whether the chiefs were brought to Lusaka for the evaluation process.

She has further narrated that some safari operators had already been selected even before the evaluation process was completed.