Hopewell Chin’ono: Mnangagwa government’s weakest link is incompetence, corruption and nepotistic appointments

By Hopewell Chin’ono

A good friend of mine and leading Zimbabwean media academic, Pedzisai Ruhanya, got me thinking with his recent social media post about Zimbabwe’s problems.

To me it is a very simple and self-evident dual catastrophe, our problems lie on two main issues that I have always talked about and articulated calling them our prominent national enemy!

Our dual albatross that is being accentuated by President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s style of governance is gross incompetence and rampant corruption.

Rwanda has succeeded where we have failed without democracy because its president, Paul Kagame supports meritocracy over irrational cult loyalty that underpins President Mnangagwa’s style of governance!

Even if President Mnangagwa had democratized the state and national politics, something that he has dismally failed to do, his government would still not succeed without hiring competent people to run the civil service!

Just look at his top civil service line up and you will understand why this point is very important when trying to answer why we are failing regardless of Mugabe’s removal!

As of end of last year, we had over 100 permanent secretaries, many of whom are simply given the title in order to find a space on the feeding trough of an economically battered country and state.

These folks are all from an era that President Mnangagwa purports to be moving away from, the world is not stupid!

So I would imagine that if he had been big on meritocracy and small government that emphasizes on hiring young well educated thinkers, academics, scholars, experts and managers, he would have done well.

His lack of democratic credentials has been graphically exposed and further accentuated by his failure to tame rampant corruption and his failure to hire competent folks!

As another good friend of mine remarked to me this morning in reference to a newspaper article, the President leads a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and loyalty above expertise.

So far it is now very clear that President Mnangagwa and his group took power away from former President Mugabe without a plan, and they have also been exposed as the hammer behind Mugabe’s brutality and political irrationality!

Mugabe was a political thinker, an irrational one but he was not stupid, his decisions were devious but well calculated and he could argue his case, something that the current lot can’t be accused of or credited with.

They are big on violence, threats and intimidation and they have failed to listen to ideas in order to enhance their rule and stay in power, they are running a disorganized administration and the world is laughing at us.

Anyone still trying to defend their irrational actions is either a pathetic sycophant or a beneficiary of their rampant corrupt machinery.

Under President Mnangagwa corruption has become much worse than under Robert Mugabe, something that takes a great effort considering how low Mugabe had set the bar.

It has also led to many meaningful and potential investors staying away from Zimbabwe as evidenced by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote’s allegations of bribe demands.

His executives told me that government officials were asking for bribes.

Another Zimbabwean investment executive Shami Fred went on the record saying that ministers and civil service bureaucrats were asking investors for bribes and she reported the matter but nothing was done.

As General Josiah Magama Tongogara prophetically said, “we are fighting to see that this oppressive system crashed.”

We have a system of corruption that is thriving under this administration and as Shami Fred said, reporting corruption to a corrupt system is futile and a waste of time.

The type of investor coming to Zimbabwe under President Mnangagwa’s Presidency is the not the type that would turn around the economy or transform the lives of our people.

It is the buccaneer businessman who is predatory and is coming to partner those in power to loot the country’s natural resources for the benefit of the crooked investor and those in power who keep the citizens at bay with instruments of brutality and violence as we have seen in the past days.

It is the types like Zunaid Moti who recently spent two months in a Germany jail for fraud and yet when he is in Zimbabwe he is seen in the company of those very close to the President, his sons even pick him up from the airport in the public glare.

The rulers are determined to put their businesses and those of their friends at the center of the economy and are making irrational decisions that are meant to protect their business interests.

This is now very self evident and as such it makes a mockery of their initial argument that they were targeting the criminals around Robert Mugabe.

No it was a lie meant to appeal to our sensitivities and national moral compass, they have not send anyone to jail for corruption and they will never do so because they too are equally culpable of the same crimes that they accused Mugabe’s bootlickers of being involved in!

Our second and central problem is gross historical incompetence, the President has not made even the slightest attempt to appoint people on merit and track record!

He has continued with the patronage system that has seen the country collapse on its knees due to the system’s reliance on corruption driven by these nepotistic appointments.

He rewards irrational loyalty over competence and merit, that is why his Presidency will fail and that is why his Presidency will be a rocky one and a difficult time for himself and the nation.

What we saw this past week is just the beginning of five seasons of economic pain unless the President turns to meritocracy, competence and ability in his appointments.

But how many sensible people would now want to be part of a government that maims and kills citizens for having a different point of view to its own and for expressing their economic exasperation and suffering?

The President is also mainly surrounded by men (and some women) who were the bedrock of Robert Mugabe’s administration, many citizens have drawn ethnic and nepotistic conclusions to their appointments.

Indeed many around him have sung the ethnic song, what has now come to be mockingly known as “chinhu chedu” by the citizens.

Ambassadors of both African and Western countries have also started whispering this evident reality in the President’s appointments, something that recedes him from being a national leader to a regional baron.

These appointments are made not on behalf of an ethnic group but on behalf of a particular clique, it is a few that financially benefit from these arragements, so the ordinary citizen should not be drawn into any of these ethnic schisms.

In as much as the beneficiaries want to advance a false narrative that they are eating on behalf of their clans, they are not, they are merely using ethnic politics to camouflage their deceptive narrative and corruption.

These appointments have energized the equally ethnic barons who pushed a tribal agenda in the Robert Mugabe administration, they have simply made a bad situation worse!

They have been unfortunately underpinned by a lack of meritocracy, they attract sycophants who are not known for their competences, they attract people desperate for jobs and a place on the feeding trough.

This will assist in making Emmerson Mnangagwa’s presidency thoroughly inconsequential and historically irrelevant in the story of both our full national journey and postcolonial state.

Instead of being angry and dismissive at critical and yet constructive interventions by scholars, journalists, business people, opinion and thought leaders, the President should reflect and engage with these people and unite the nation under one theme of honesty, capability and a genuine anti-corruption dispensation instead of the current deceptive tactics.

Leading requires one to listen to his critics with an open ear and not to shoot their concerns down without interrogating them.

If the President’s aim is to build a critical mass against his Presidency, then he is going about it the right way.

Hopewell Chin’ono is an award winning Zimbabwean international Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker. He is a Harvard University Nieman Fellow and a CNN African Journalist of the year.

He is also a Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Africa Leadership Institute.

Hopewell has a new documentary film looking at mental illness in Zimbabwe called State of Mind, which was launched to critical acclaim.

It was recently nominated for a big award at the Festival International du Film Pan-Africain de Cannes in France. You can watch the documentary trailer below.