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Top1. Introduction
Tharp (2009) highlights that culture is the glue that binds an organisation together. The influence that organisational culture has on corporate governance practices within Zimbabwe has been scanty with a lot of scholarly work focusing on corporate governance and performance mainly. The public sector in Zimbabwe has adopted corporate governance practices and has recently adopted legislation to anchor the corporate governance systems within the public sector. However, issues of mismanagement continue to rise daily, in fact ever since the adoption of corporate governance practices the public sector began to embroiled in governance scandals than ever before (Sangarwe,2014). This alone attest that it is not corporate governance which is the challenge confronting the public sector but a culture which has not changed which continues to impact the public sector. Porumbescu (2015) in a study conducted within the western alluded that corporate governance factors are affected by organisation culture and if a culture is not changed practicing corporate governance will be nothing but a futile exercise.
The collapse of big corporations like Enron, others has made governments, corporations and society to recognize the importance of adopting corporate governance within the public sector to improve service delivery to the citizens. According to Sangarwe (2014) the government has invested a lot of resources to achieve this objective but however the problems confronting the public sector regarding corporate governance continues to grow. Corporate governance has been employed world over to combat corruption, malfeseacnce, address conflict of interest but this has not been the case in Zimbabwe because of the organisational culture norms, beliefs, values and organisational climate which has been instilled and created by employees and their leaders (Zvavahera & Ndoda,2014).The most widely used definition of corporate governance is “the system by which companies are directed and controlled” (Cadbury Committee, 1992).The role of corporate governance has been rendered useless by the values and norms existing within the public sector of Zimbabwe.
As evidenced by the Auditors general report of (2018) all of the public sector parastals were all embroiled in corporate governance scandals. NSSA was involved in an investment deal with Metbank of treasury bills which were invested amounting to $20 000 00. The bank further placed $62, 25 million worth of Treasury Bills with Metbank and this was done without the approval of the board causing serious corporate governance challenges. According to the Auditor general report (2018) The NSSA board chairman acted as the chairperson of the investment and procurement a practice not in line with good practice as impacts on the oversight function. The trend of corporate governance at NSSA reveal that there is a culture problem which is affecting the parastals this is reinforced that even in the Audit report of 2013 and 2014 NSSA experienced the same corporate governance issues it still faced in 2018 there making corporate governance irrelevant (NSSA 2018). In 2014 NSSA operated with a Board whose term had expired in 2006 despite being a governance provision that no board member should hold office for a period exceeding five years. The parastals was operating with a board which was not recognized at law despite there being corporate governance practices which were put in place to mitigate these issues. The problem of corporate governance emanating at NSSA is as a result of cultural values and shared beliefs values which Giorgi, Lockwood and Glynn (2015) highlights are driving forces of any organisation. As long as the values and shared beliefs do not change which members have corporate governance will remain a problem, the current values at NSSA are self-enrichment and malfeasance and these have to change.