Chewore Safari Park case: ZimParks actually “possessed statutory power to lease”

This article examines Suscaden Investments (Pvt) Ltd v Parks & Wildlife Management Authority [2025] ZWSC 131, in which the courts treated the absence of the Minister’s signature as fatal to a long‑performed lease.

It argues that the statutory requirement under s 37(1) of the Parks and Wildlife Act is concurrence, not signature, and that Parliament’s silence on formality was overlooked.

By collapsing the statutory test into a contractual mechanism, the courts failed to consider administrative practice, institutional communication, and reporting obligations through which concurrence could have been manifested.

The article concludes that the Authority possessed statutory power to lease, and that any defect related to evidence of concurrence, not the existence of the contract.

Suscaden Investments (Pvt) Ltd v Parks & Wildlife Management Authority: When Form is Put Before Substance

Introduction

There is a familiar maxim in law that ‘hard cases make bad law.’ It is invoked often as a reminder that difficult facts can distort the shape of legal principle. Yet Suscaden Investments (Pvt) Ltd v Parks & Wildlife Management Authority [2025] ZWSC 131 (the “Case”) presents a different phenomenon. Here is a case that was not hard on its facts, but it has become hard in its consequences.

The Case appears, at first glance, to be modest. The key question was framed, argued and ultimately decided on a narrow factual inquiry: whether the Minister of Environment, Climate Change, Tourism and Hospitality Management (the “Minister”) had signed a lease for a safari park between the Parks & Wildlife Management Authority (the “Authority”) and a safari operator, Suscaden Investments (Pvt) Ltd (“Suscaden”).

The Minister at the relevant time said she did not sign the lease. The Supreme Court, upholding the decision of the High Court (together the “Court”), found that Suscaden had failed to prove that she did. From that finding, the Court concluded that the missing signature rendered the lease void from the beginning (in the language of the Court “void ab initio”).

Years of performance, invoices issued, rent received, and occupation permitted fell away in an instant and were treated as though they lacked any legal footing. It was a decisive conclusion, and it is precisely that decisiveness that invites scrutiny.

The true issue in this Case was never whether the Minister had signed the lease, but whether she had concurred to its granting in terms of section 37(1) of the Parks and Wildlife Act [Chapter 20:14] (“Section 37” of the Act). The statute required concurrence. It, however, did not prescribe how that concurrence had to be expressed.

The distinction between a statutory requirement itself and a contractual form of recording compliance with that statutory requirement matters. One is a question of evidence. The other is a question of law.

By collapsing the two, the Court allowed the form of ministerial involvement to eclipse the substance of statutory power. Once that distinction is kept in view, the analysis takes a different shape, and the result looks less certain than the judgment assumes.

This article takes a step back from the particularities of judicial reasoning in the Case and returns to first principles: the statute itself.

The Statutory Framework: Concurrence, Not Signature

The point of departure, as the Court correctly noted, is Section 37, which provides that:

‘37. Lease of sites and grant of hunting rights in safari areas

The Authority, with the concurrence of the Minister, may—

(a) lease sites in a safari area to such persons and for such purposes as it deems fit.’

Read with care, Section 37 yields two propositions that are straightforward and, for present purposes, uncontroversial. The first is that the statutory power to lease sites in a safari area is conferred upon the Authority, not the Minister. The power is not joint. It is not vested in two different institutions. It is vested in one; subject to the oversight of another. This distinction between a power and a safeguard is fundamental. It is the essence of many statutory arrangements in which government oversight is deployed to ensure accountability without burdening a Minister with contractual minutiae.

The second is that the exercise of that power is contingent upon the concurrence of the Minister. Where such concurrence exists, the Authority acts within its statutory remit; where it does not, the Authority acts without lawful authority.

Meaning of Concurrence

The most revealing feature of Section 37 (1) as it was applied by the Court lies not in what it affirms, but in what it leaves unsaid.

The statute says nothing about how concurrence must be expressed. It prescribes no form, imposes no formalities, and demands no particular mode of manifestation. There is no requirement of writing, no demands of signature, no stipulation of publication in the Gazette, nor any other ceremonial act by which concurrence is to be clothed.

This silence is neither casual nor inadvertent.

Throughout the Act, Parliament demonstrates that it knows precisely how to insist upon formality when formality is intended. Where action is to be taken in writing, or subject to defined procedural steps, the language is explicit.

By way of example, section 6 (2) of the Act provides that ‘…before giving the Board a direction in terms of subsection (1), the Minister shall inform the Board, in writing, of the proposed direction and the Board….’  (emphasis added)

This provision is cited merely by way of illustration and not because of its relevance to the issues at hand. It, however, underlines that where the legislature intends to prescribe both form and procedure, it does so expressly and in unambiguous terms.

The absence of any comparable language in Section 37 (1) is therefore meaningful. It reflects a deliberate choice to prefer substance over form, substantive agreement over ceremonial proof.

In administrative law, concurrence denotes a state of agreement between institutional actors, reflected in their coordinated exercise of statutory functions, rather than the completion of any particular formality. It may be demonstrated in a variety of ways, including, without limitation, through minutes of meetings, correspondence, recorded decisions, policy approvals, or a sustained course of conduct that shows knowledge and assent.

Whether concurrence exists is thus a question of fact, shaped by the statutory relationship between the Minister and the Authority. Respectfully, this is the question the Court ought to have been asking for it is the test the statute itself sets.

It might be thought that the inquiry calls for a survey of comparative authority such as how they would deal with a similar case in South Africa. It does not. This is, at its core, an exercise in statutory interpretation, and the statute speaks plainly enough on its own terms. his case turns not on international doctrine, but on the careful reading of a domestic statute, and on what Parliament did, and did not, require.

The Minister’s Role: Oversight Without Obligation to Sign

Section 37 confirms this understanding. The Minister is a guardian of the process, not a participant in the transaction. The Minister’s responsibilities under the Act revolve around ensuring that the Authority’s exercise of power aligns with policy considerations, conservation priorities, and other governmental objectives.

Nothing in the Act requires her to sign leases or bind herself to their terms. All the Minister is required to do is to concur with the action of the Authority. A signature may be one way to express that concurrence, but it is neither the only way nor a prescribed one under Section 37.

To make signature the touchstone of statutory compliance is to mutate the Minister’s role into something Parliament never intended.

Evidence, Administrative Practice and the Inquiry That Never Happened

Against that backdrop, the narrowness of the factual enquiry becomes striking. The difficulty with the Court’s analysis is not merely its destination but the path it declined to take.

Once it found that the Minister had not signed the lease, the analysis effectively stopped. The broader statutory question of whether the Minister had concurred was left unexplored.

The judgment does not expressly articulate the analytical path by which the absence of signature came to be equated with absence of concurrence.

The conclusion nevertheless appears to proceed on an implicit assumption that the contractual requirement of ministerial signature was similar in effect with the statutory requirement of concurrence.

Once that assumption is adopted, the enquiry effectively collapses into a single factual question. Yet the statute itself does not make that equivalence. It requires concurrence, not any particular mode of its expression.

The contract may record compliance, but it cannot redefine the content of the statutory condition.

It is, therefore, this absence of enquiry, rather than the factual finding itself, that invites closer attention.

The Act leaves open the ways in which concurrence may be expressed. Far from being a defect, that openness reflects Parliament’s understanding that public administration is not always a world of ceremony.

A court, confronted with such statutory silence, is required to look more broadly, and with care, at how agreement is ordinarily manifested within the institutional relationship the Act creates. Here, that enquiry never began.

To appreciate what was missed, it is helpful to group the potential sources by which concurrence could responsibly have been tested: administrative practices, witness testimony, and the Act’s reporting architecture. Each points toward the same question the Court did not ask.

Administrative Practices

The first source lies in the Authority’s own established routines. Evidence was led of the ordinary channels through which information about leases travelled to the Minister’s office. The Court characterised elements of that practice as “a bizarre way of handling official documents.” Perhaps so. But efficiency was not the issue.

The statutory question was always whether concurrence existed in substance, not whether the internal choreography of paperwork conformed to an ideal administrative model. What mattered was whether the Minister had approved, not how tidily that approval was recorded. Once the statute’s focus is kept firmly in view, administrative practice becomes relevant not for its elegance, but because that was the ordinary machinery through which concurrence, if it existed, would have been communicated.

Witness Evidence

The second source was more direct. A former senior official of the Authority (employed at the relevant time) testified that he believed the Minister had signed the lease. His belief may have rested on administrative practice rather than direct observation, but senior officials do not lightly assume ministerial assent where none exists.

His understanding, even if imperfectly recorded, formed part of the institutional reality within which statutory powers were exercised.

The Court rejected his conclusion on the narrow point of signature. Even if that rejection was justified, it did not however resolve the statutory question of concurrence. On the contrary, that testimony should have prompted a deeper enquiry: If the Minister did not sign, then how, in this institutional setting, was concurrence ordinarily conveyed?

That question remained untouched.

Statutory Reports

Beyond witness testimony, a third and more formal channel through which concurrence might have been discerned was available. Schedule 12, paragraph 18 requires the Authority to submit annual reports to the Minister, which the Minister must lay before Parliament.

This is not a decorative duty. It is a statutory mechanism designed to ensure transparency in the Authority’s operations.

A long‑term, revenue‑generating lease of this size is precisely the kind of transaction that would ordinarily appear, whether directly or indirectly, in such reports. Quite apart from the administrative practices the Court could have asked whether the lease was reported, how it was described, and whether the Minister raised any objection or concern. Each of those inquiries bore directly on concurrence. None was pursued.

By equating concurrence with signature, the Court foreclosed the very enquiry that the statute required. The conclusion of invalidity was therefore reached not because non‑concurrence was demonstrated, but because concurrence was never examined.

A More Measured Judicial Enquiry

It might be argued that requiring a ministerial signature promotes certainty by creating a visible, verifiable formality, and that tacit concurrence risks administrative opacity. However, certainty cannot be purchased at the price of rewriting the statute.

When Parliament wishes to insist on writing, it says so. Here, it did not. It instead relied on oversight, reporting, and the Minister’s power to withhold concurrence, which are mechanisms that reflect a public‑law architecture designed for substance rather than ceremony.

A court beginning from the statutory question would have traced how information moved within the Authority, how it reached the Minister, and how concurrence was ordinarily given or withheld. It would have considered correspondence, reporting cycles, and comparable leases concluded in the same period. Had that enquiry been undertaken, a pattern consistent with concurrence might well have emerged.

The problem is not that the Court found no concurrence.

It is that the Court never asked whether concurrence existed at all.

The 2025 Amendment: Clarification, Not Transformation

Against this background, the 2025 amendment to the Act offers a useful light. On 4 November 2025, Parliament amended the Act to introduce section 37(3), which provides:

(3) In this section the phrase “with the concurrence of the Minister” means that once the board has submitted to the Minister its resolution recommending that the Minister concur to the particular lease or agreement concerned, or to any particular batch of such lease or agreement concerned, or to any particular batch of such leases or agreement concerned, the Minister is deemed to have concurred to such lease, agreement or batch of them (without the need for him or her to sign them), unless, within thirty days of the date of submission by the Board of the relevant resolution, the Minister in writing rejects such lease, agreement or batch of them back to the board for further consideration in line with his or her directions to the Board.

This provision was not in force when the High Court heard the matter. It was, however, part of the statute book by the time the Supreme Court delivered its judgment. Its presence is therefore not raised in this article to suggest that it should have been applied to the facts; it could not have been. The Supreme Court was rightly concerned only with the law as it stood at the time of the High Court’s decision.

The amendment, however, remains significant for another reason. Its language, particularly the explicit phrase ‘without the need for him or her to sign,’ is not the language of innovation. It is the language of clarification. Parliament was not charting a new course. It was confirming the meaning that concurrence already had within the structure of section 37(1): a form of institutional assent that does not depend upon signature or a specific ceremony.

Courts routinely treat such amendments as declaratory where they clarify existing ambiguity rather than introduce new obligations.

Seen in this light, the amendment does not alter the statute; it reveals it.

It brings into focus the point that ultimately shaped the litigation. The statutory power to lease exercised by the Authority, and subject only to the Minister’s concurrence, was never examined on its own terms.

Signature: Statutory Test or Contractual Device

Once the statutory landscape is properly appreciated, it becomes instructive to analyse how the litigation came to revolve around a signature.

The lease agreement itself provided in its preamble that the Minister’s signature ‘signifying concurrence to this lease is a condition precedent to the validity of this agreement.’

Evidently, the parties had chosen signature as their way of recording the Authority’s compliance with section 37(1). It was not an irrational choice. A signature is an obvious and convenient way of showing ministerial assent.

But it remained a contractual device.

A contract may arrange the internal machinery by which the parties satisfy themselves that a statutory condition has been met. What it may not do, however, is redefine the condition itself. The statutory question was always whether the Minister concurred.

The contractual mechanism for demonstrating that concurrence could never replace the statutory test. It, therefore, does not follow that the absence of a signature is conclusive evidence of statutory invalidity.

Conditions Precedent: Existence or Enforceability?

Even at the level of contract, the reasoning in the Case omits an analytical step that has long been recognised in the law of obligations.

Conditions precedent operate on two different levels: either on the formation of the contract or on its enforceability. This distinction matters, because it determines whether the parties are without a contract at all or merely without an immediately enforceable one.

A condition aimed at formation prevents any contract from coming into existence until the condition is satisfied. A condition directed at enforceability suspends the exercise of rights until fulfilment, but it does not necessarily prevent the contract from existing.

That the parties agreed all the essential terms, took occupation, paid and received rent, and conducted themselves as bound over many years, is a significant consideration. Commercial reality carries weight. To treat such an arrangement as void from inception is to elevate form above reality and to prefer a legal fiction over the reality the parties lived.

Seen in that light, the absence of the Minister’s signature may have meant that the contract’s enforceability was imperfect. It does not follow, however, that the contract itself was erased. The parties’ conduct, measured against established principles of conditional obligations, supports the view that the agreement existed, even if its full enforceability awaited the completion of some further step.

Waiver

The analysis moves a step further. The law recognises that a party may, expressly or through conduct, waive contractual protection or forego the need for strict compliance with a contractual requirement that exists for its own benefit. This principle is neither novel nor exotic. It has particular force in a setting where one party alone is responsible for fulfilling the condition in question.

The signature requirement, as framed in the lease, operated to protect the Authority. It was the Authority’s mechanism for satisfying itself that ministerial involvement had occurred. It was also a step that lay entirely within the Authority’s own institutional control.

The lessee could do little more than rely on the Authority’s assurances and performance. It had no means of procuring ministerial engagement, no power to compel an internal governmental formality, and no mechanism for verifying compliance other than the Authority’s conduct.

Against that background, the Authority’s conduct over many years raises a natural question: did it intend to insist on strict compliance with the signature requirement at all?

Its behaviour in issuing invoices, accepting rent, permitting occupation, and assuring Suscaden’s representative that the Minister had signed sits awkwardly with the later contention that the contract was void. That pattern of conduct is at least consistent with a decision to waive the formality of signature.

At the very least, the doctrine of waiver demanded careful examination. It required the Court to ask whether the Authority, by its conduct, had relinquished its right to rely on the contractual condition or had made it inequitable to insist upon it. Those questions were central to the character of the contractual relationship, and to the coherence of the conclusion that the lease was void from inception. Yet they were not explored.

Relying on One’s Own Default

Even if the Authority did not waive the signature requirement, the analysis does not end there. A related rule of contract intervenes. Where the fulfilment of a condition lies within one party’s control, that party may not rely on its own failure to bring about the condition in order to escape the bargain. Under this prevention principle, reflected in Gowan v Bowern 1924 AD 550 and applied more recently in Gasela v Malinga HB 12‑10, the law will not permit a party to profit from its own default where performance was within its power.

The procurement – or, rather, the recording – of ministerial concurrence was a step squarely within the Authority’s institutional domain. The lease’s signature stipulation was the Authority’s chosen evidentiary device for demonstrating a statutory state of affairs.

If concurrence existed in substance, the Authority could not set up the absence of its own evidentiary formality as a defence to the agreement it spent years treating as operative. In prevention terms, the condition is treated as satisfied; and in legal parlance, fictional fulfilment meets the equities of the case.

On that footing, the Authority’s position becomes difficult to maintain. This is because:

• it chose the form;
• it controlled the process by which the form would be completed; and
• it proceeded for years as if the requirement had been met.

The prevention principle would simply prevent the Authority from invoking its own non‑performance of that internal step to defeat the transaction. The point is not punitive. It is structural. Conditions exist to allocate risk, not to provide a party with a belated escape from a bargain it has already enjoyed.

Legal Consequences

A conclusion of nullity brings with it consequences the law should be reluctant to embrace. If the lease were void from inception, it would mean that the Authority spent years issuing invoices to a trespasser, accepting rent to which it had no entitlement, and permitting unlawful occupation. Those outcomes strain the boundaries of both administrative and contractual coherence.

This invariably treats the Authority’s conduct as ultra vires. That casts the Authority’s receipts as irregular, invites questions about the propriety of its financial reporting, and raises, at least in principle, issues of institutional responsibility for allowing an arrangement to proceed long after the supposed defect emerged. None of this requires personal criticism of individual Board members; but it does underline the gravity of choosing nullity over a diagnosis of imperfect enforceability.

At a more fundamental level, the Case reflects a failure to distinguish between absence of statutory power and defective exercise of that power. Only the former renders an act void ab initio; the latter ordinarily produces a remediable irregularity.

Section 37 vests leasing power in the Authority, subject to ministerial concurrence.

The Authority therefore possessed the power to contract. Any defect in how concurrence was evidenced could, at most, affect the regularity or enforceability of the transaction, not its existence.

In the circumstances, the more principled conclusion is that the contract existed. Any defect laid in the contractual machinery chosen to demonstrate statutory compliance, not in the Authority’s statutory power itself. That interpretation aligns with the text of the Act, with the commercial reality the parties lived, and with the broader law of obligations.

Seen this way, legal certainty is best served not by erasing the transaction, but by calibrating the consequences to the true nature of the defect.

Conclusion – Commercial Certainty and Statutory Trust

The central lesson of the Suscaden Case is not about wildlife, leases, or ministerial signatures. It is about statutory interpretation. When Parliament sets a requirement, that requirement must be applied as written. Not supplemented. Not replaced. Not overshadowed by contractual devices whose convenience may conceal their legal fragility.

By allowing the absence of a signature to eclipse the question of concurrence, the Court moved away from the statute and toward a contractual formality that Parliament did not impose. That shift has consequences for commercial actors, for public authorities, and for the coherence of administrative law.

The approach adopted in the Case risks enabling public authorities to retrospectively avoid long-performed contracts by invoking internal procedural lapses entirely within their own control, undermining both commercial certainty and confidence in statutory governance.

A clearer, more structured approach would have examined:

• whether the statute’s requirement of concurrence was satisfied;
• whether the parties’ contractual condition was fulfilled; and
• what legal consequences flowed from any failure.

Had the Case been analysed in that order, nullity would not have been a legally sustainable outcome. The transaction may not have been perfect. But it would not have been void. And the law would be on firmer ground.

Clarity in statutory interpretation is not a luxury. It is the foundation upon which legal certainty rests. And certainty, in turn, is what allows commercial actors to trust that the law will mean tomorrow what it means today.

Irvine Chiwara is a lawyer registered in Zimbabwe and works as a Principal at Fresh Legal Perspectives (www.flp.legal) and is reachable on [email protected].