Zanu PF is a 'Thorn' in our governance flesh, Can i have a surgical blade?

While the country was ululating in both directions, positive and negative, something troubling continues to happen underneath.

The Cost of Zanu-PF's factionalism to the State and the Mirage of Mandatory restructuring. 

It is common knowledge in modern statecraft that the architecture of the state also shows its governing philosophy. It is also common that a government that prioritises delivery builds lean, strong, agile, and cohesive institutions that are capable of coordinating policies without friction and bureaucratic hurdles. Conversely, an administration consumed by political survival and elite pacification fragments the state into redundant fiefdoms. 

This observation, 'commentary, if you will', follows a recently published commentary by Richard Runyararo Mahomva, in which he attempts to justify the redundant move on 263Chat: “Why Split the Ministries: Power Play or Strategic Mandate Restructuring?” The piece, like any other that precedes it, which are more of commentaries circulating in our intellectual and policy spaces, attempts to rationalise the unending balkanization of the cabinet portfolios as visionary administrative reform. It argues that carving standalone ministries out of the integrated sectors, such as creating separate ministries for lands and rural development apart from agriculture and mechanisation, or bifurcating the Ministry of Finance from economic development and investment promotion, enhances specialisation and accelerates economic transformation. 

His commentary, an ‘analysis attempt’, while reflective and articulate, does not deviate from the norm; the analysis reflects a broader intellectual pathology and dishonesty. Its offers are purely descriptive rationalisations of political expediency rather than a prescriptive interrogation of systemic governance failure. To accept this reshuffling as a continuous strategic mandate requires ignoring the material realities of our state machinery and the fiscal wreckage documented year after year by the Office of the Auditor General. Such bureaucratic re-engineering is not taking place in a vacuum of efficiency; it is taking place inside a patronage ecosystem, where state organs are personal extension wands carved up to balance factional loyalties. When political accommodation dictates state architecture, public policy suffers, degenerating into a theatre of musical chairs, and the ordinary citizen pays the price through collapsed public services, runaway public expenditures, and an unaccountable bureaucracy.

The executive should have exercised simple wisdom: streamline duplicated portfolios, reduce wasteful executive expenditure, and place an uncompromised premium on institutional competence and performance appraisal over political patronage.

State capacity depends on policy coherence. When an economy faces structural headwinds such as liquidity crises, currency volatility, severe infrastructure deficits, and climate vulnerability, it requires the state to construct tightly integrated command structures. Instead, what we witness is artificial bureaucratic mitosis. First, consider the decision to split the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Water, Fisheries and Rural Development into two separate entities (the Ministry of Lands and Rural Development and the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Water Resources Development). From an agronomic and economic perspective, I agree that this separation defies basic logic; for instance, a farmer cannot invest in capital mechanisation or secure credit from financial institutions without secure land tenure and clearly delineated property rights. Effectively, separating the authority that administers land distribution and 99-year leases from the ministry tasked with agricultural output creates institutional friction and divorce. In addition, we all agree that modern climate-resilient agriculture depends entirely on water resources. Dividing land development from water infrastructure means two separate permanent secretaries, two distinct procurement boards, and two conflicting budgetary priorities must align before a single communal irrigation scheme can be rehabilitated. Rather than accelerating delivery, field officers and district administrators will have to spend months navigating jurisdictional disputes. Who oversees communal grazing schemes? Who adjudicates land disputes in agricultural resettlement zones? When responsibilities are diffused, accountability is erased.

A similarly glaring contradiction lies in the bifurcation of the Treasury into a standalone Ministry of Finance and a separate Ministry of Economic Development and Investment Promotion. Macroeconomic stabilisation cannot be divorced from economic planning; statecraft admits no shortcuts or economic sleight of hand, nor does it know “hocus pocus”. While the Treasury manages the purse strings by anchoring fiscal policy, tax collection via ZIMRA, cash rationing, and public debt, the Economic Development portfolio drafts industrial blueprints and seals investor pacts through ZIDA. Subordinating these complementary functions to competing cabinet ministers breeds immediate policy incoherence. While one ministry offers tax holidays and incentives to attract capital, the other, desperate to plug deficits, slaps on transaction taxes and revokes rebates. Far from experiencing “streamlined specialisation,” investors run headlong into a bureaucratic hydra of duplicate clearances, contradictory mandates, and endless red tape.

To conclude on these irrational duplications, the persistent digital and media duality between the Ministry of Information Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services and the Ministry of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services presents an equally absurd contradiction. In an era defined by digital convergence, where telecommunications infrastructure, broadband rollout, digital commerce, data governance, and broadcasting occupy the exact same technological ecosystem, maintaining two separate ministerial apparatuses is an administrative farce. Why should one cabinet minister oversee the installation of physical fibre-optic cables while another governs the informational content flowing through those very same conduits? The rationale has never been technical or functional efficiency; it is purely political. One manages technological modernisation, while the other serves as an instrument for state communications and media surveillance. The net result is that ordinary taxpayers must bankroll two complete sets of ministerial overheads, executive fleets, and redundant directorates merely to sustain a political priority.

While defenders of cabinet expansion routinely claim that multiplying ministries allows for closer monitoring and superior resource deployment, the incontrovertible empirical record exposes this as pure fiction. A close look at the Auditor-General of Zimbabwe's annual reports across central government, parastatals, and state enterprises reveals a horrifying, unbroken continuum of governance decay, procurement violations, asset dissipation, and fiscal anarchy. In almost every audit of Appropriation Accounts, line ministries systematically fail to maintain reliable asset registers, allowing vehicles, heavy road-construction machinery, drilling rigs, and IT hardware purchased with public funds to vanish from official records. When a ministry is split, this chaos deepens, as public assets are shifted without proper handover reconciliations, leading to unrecorded transfers, informal dual claims, and the quiet privatisation of state property by departing political elites

Furthermore, the Auditor-General repeatedly documents gross violations of the Public Finance Management Act, where hundreds of millions of dollars are released as advance payments to private contractors for capital equipment, hospital supplies, and vehicles with neither delivery bonds nor tracking mechanisms. Years pass without the goods arriving, and when portfolios are fragmented, accountability slips through administrative cracks: the preceding ministry initiated the procurement, the successor ministry disowns the contractual liability, and the treasury vote sits elsewhere while suppliers walk away with public funds untouched. Compounding this malpractice is the rampant misuse of statutory and ring-fenced development funds, which are routinely drained to finance unauthorised operational expenses, luxury fleet acquisitions, and executive travel, leaving tens of millions marooned in unreconciled suspense accounts processed outside the Public Financial Management System. If unified ministries could not comply with baseline accounting standards, on what empirical basis can anyone argue that creating more ministries, each demanding separate accounting officers, finance directorates, and sub-accounts, will suddenly foster efficiency? In truth, splitting portfolios does not enhance oversight; it merely decentralises financial mismanagement and multiplies the vectors of systemic corruption.

Every time a ministerial split occurs, official public relations narratives frame the exercise as a harmless administrative realignment of desks. Creating a single new ministry triggers an immediate, multi-million-dollar cascade of recurrent expenditure. Under the current state benefits structure, each standalone portfolio demands a complete executive apparatus, beginning with the minister, a deputy minister, and a permanent secretary, all accompanied by their respective support staff and personal aides. This top tier is supplied with a fleet of top-of-the-range executive vehicles, often comprising luxury four-wheel-drive SUVs, executive sedans, and support double-cabs acquired with scarce foreign currency, paired with monthly fuel allowances running into thousands of litres. Beyond the political principles, the split necessitates establishing an entire bureaucratic directorate, including dedicated directors, deputy directors, and principal officers for human resources, finance, administration, procurement management units, and legal affairs. These expanding teams require rented commercial office space in central business districts, executive furniture fittings, boardroom facilities, residential security detachments, and generous travel budgets for domestic and foreign delegations. When this expanding administrative apparatus absorbs public expenditure, it directly cannibalises capital spending, leaving hospitals without basic medicines, public infrastructure projects stalled, and civil servants underpaid. While the state frequently cites fiscal constraints when citizens demand living wages or basic amenities, the deficit is not an absolute lack of resources; it is the deliberate misallocation of public funds to sustain an unsustainable executive architecture.

This fiscal haemorrhage highlights the fundamental shortcoming of commentators like Richard Runyararo Mahomva, who analyse state realignments through descriptive apologetics rather than interrogating governance failure. Analysts in the public square frequently retreat into theoretical taxonomies, classifying state fragmentation as strategic administrative reform or developmental state interventions while treating official press statements as empirical truth. A rigorous and patriotic policy critique must look past public relations and state plainly that this churn of portfolios reflects factional arithmetic rather than administrative optimisation. It pacifies regional factions, distributes state rents, and rewards partisan loyalty ahead of political contests. If these restructurings were genuine attempts to improve delivery, they would be preceded by published performance audits showing that an existing ministry had exceeded its targets and required expansion. Instead, cabinet expansion proceeds alongside deteriorating service delivery, illustrating an acute case of institutional hypertrophy where the bureaucratic machinery swells while its actual delivery capacity shrinks. Because political accommodation supersedes competence, public officials are rarely appointed on merit or held accountable for failure; an underperforming minister is simply shifted to another portfolio or accommodated through a newly carved entity, perpetuating a system with no consequences for mismanagement and no incentive for reform.

Meaningful state renewal requires abandoning this patronage-driven model in favour of an institutional architecture grounded in consolidation, enforced accountability, and statutory compliance. First, the executive must streamline redundant portfolios, proving that an economy of this size can be governed effectively with no more than fourteen to sixteen consolidated ministries. Agriculture, land tenure, water resources, and rural development should fall under a single command centre, so land administration and water rights translate directly into agricultural productivity. Similarly, the Treasury must be reintegrated with economic planning and investment promotion under a single macroeconomic framework, while digital infrastructure and public broadcasting should be merged into a unified communications portfolio. Second, performance appraisals for public officials must become binding legal covenants rather than ceremonial public relations exercises. Independent panels of academic experts, professional bodies, and civil society representatives should evaluate ministerial performance contracts, with failure to meet verified delivery benchmarks resulting in dismissal rather than routine reassignment. At the administrative level, permanent secretaries must be recruited through competitive, public processes to depoliticise the civil service. Finally, the Auditor-General's perennial findings must be given real statutory force. The Treasury should be legally barred from releasing recurrent funds to ministries with unresolved audit queries regarding missing assets or unsupported expenditures; automatic statutory mechanisms must refer procurement violations directly to the National Prosecuting Authority; and accounting officers who authorise payments for undelivered goods must face personal financial liability. Only through this structural discipline can the state transition from a vehicle for political patronage into an effective instrument of public service delivery.

The intellectual debate surrounding ministerial restructuring is not an academic exercise in administrative theory, but a matter of fundamental national survival. Every single dollar diverted to bankroll an unneeded ministerial motorcade, an overseas per diem delegation, or a duplicated ministerial headquarters is a dollar effectively stolen from a rural clinic, a dilapidated classroom, or an industrial power grid. The state cannot claim to combat systemic poverty while simultaneously multiplying the machinery of executive privilege. For commentators like Mahomva and others who interpret these shifts through optimistic, descriptive lenses, the urgent imperative is to look past official press statements and confront the hard, cold ledger of empirical governance. Focusing exclusively on restructuring rhetoric without holding power accountable to measurable performance is an abdication of intellectual responsibility. A government genuinely committed to national transformation does not continually reshuffle the deck to pacify competing political factions; rather, it constructs a lean, disciplined, and high-performing institutional apparatus dedicated to public service delivery. Until political accommodation is discarded in favour of genuine institutional competence, every bureaucratic realignment will remain nothing more than rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship of public welfare. True statecraft does not lie in multiplying ministerial portfolios, but in mastering the administrative discipline required to make the state serve its citizens.