The Sunday Mail
The change of guard at the Ministry of Energy and Power Development on Friday exerts pressure on incoming Minister Soda Zhemu to ensure that he meets not just the President’s expectations, but those of just about everyone in Zimbabwe since we all rely on energy.
His two big areas of oversight are Zesa and the supply and distribution of petroleum fuels. Both have problems, both have had crises or near crises for years, and both need to be fixed, permanently, if Zimbabwe is to develop and grow.
It is clear there are serious problems within Zesa, where there is at the very least a serious management dogfight and at worst corruption.
This is beyond the more normal technical requirement to make up for lost decades of deferred maintenance and commissioning of new power sources.
But the abnormal problems mean Zesa cannot do the job it is supposed to do, a critical job of not just ensuring Zimbabweans have electricity today, but that they have it tomorrow and that Zesa can, in fact, power the dramatic expansion in production that Vision 2030 requires.
The change came barely eight days after President Mnangagwa suspended the entire Zesa board, including executive chair Dr Sydney Gata, and ordered the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) to undertake a high-priority investigation of Zesa and report back within four weeks.
Those suspensions have not been lifted, neither have the instructions to Zacc been reversed. The investigations are still in progress. We do not know if there have been preliminary reports clearing anyone or confirming at least some of the allegations.
So Minister Zhemu inherits the whole Zesa conundrum and comes into office at a difficult moment.
In appointing a management expert from the back benches, President Mnangagwa clearly sees the need for the person with oversight responsibilities to be able to at least identify potential weaknesses and ask the right questions.
Ministers do not run State enterprises under their ministries, but are expected to ensure they are properly managed by the technocrats they have either appointed or whose appointments they have recommended. They need to know enough to ensure the management systems in place are the right ones and are working properly.
The minister does not have to be an energy expert. He has those on his payroll. Zimbabwean engineers, including those who lose sleep keeping Zesa running in difficult times, have a good reputation, as can be seen by the number who have been snapped up by utilities outside the country. It is not so much a manpower problem, or expertise problem, but a managerial problem he faces.
While Minister Zhemu can tap the technical expertise, he does have to ensure that these experts are doing their job, not fighting each other or abusing their posts, and that those who are willing to work together, competently and honestly, to keep the wheels of the economy turning can do so without looking over their shoulders or having to navigate internecine management wars.
The complex management systems that are needed must not just ensure that things run properly and that inherited foul-ups are cleaned out, but must also reward innovation, new solutions and better ways of performing, albeit after sober reflection before they are introduced and careful monitoring afterwards. And even new systems might need change if they do not work out as planned.
A good hard look is needed at the whole Zesa managerial set up, including the split into different companies, the success or otherwise of the experiment of having the board chairman and chief executive being the same person, and the actual people at the top.
Zesa needs to get a lot of things right so it can be three times the size it is now in 10 years if Vision 2030 is to be fulfilled.
The other major responsibility Minister Zhemu inherits is petroleum fuel supply and sales. Here he has a complex system of public and private enterprises that are supposed to work together under an independent regulator, and with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) playing an active role in either providing the required foreign exchange for the initial imports, or ensuring that private importers are following its rules.
Again, the minister does not work on a service station forecourt pumping fuel and taking money, but he does need to ensure that everyone in the sector is doing what they are supposed to do, that rules are obeyed and if rules need to be changed, deleted or added then the right changes are made so that everyone wins, regardless of whether they are in the sector as suppliers or dispensers, or whether they are customers trying to keep their businesses afloat.
The Ministry of Energy and Power Development is one of the handful of deep-level infrastructure providers.
If it, and its parastatals and State enterprises, are not doing their job then the economy tanks and the dreams of a fast-growing economy and middle-income status in a decade become empty daydreams of what could have been.
It underpins the rest of the Government’s economic agenda. Farmers cannot grow more food and more raw materials for industrial processing and export if they cannot buy fuel to plough their fields and buy electricity to run their pumps. Miners cannot double production if they cannot buy fuel for their equipment and electricity for their machines.
Industrialists cannot build factories that have no lights nor bring in materials and deliver goods if their trucks are parked with empty tanks.
Even the fiscal and monetary technocrats busy and successfully overhauling the inherited mess in our financial systems need a growing number of profitable taxpayers and dedicated exporters to do their job, and those taxpayers and exporters need energy.
So Minister Zhemu is no doubt having a busy weekend with the critical files and will have some pertinent questions to ask when he moves into his new office on Monday and starts quizzing his officials and experts and sorting out what the President saw as a growing potential disaster that required rapid and decisive action.
And, of course, both he and the rest of his Cabinet colleagues need to understand that President Mnangagwa is serious when he demands results.
If you cannot do your Government business in a way that meets “the President’s expectations”, then someone else will be sitting in your office who probably can. When the President talks about “accountability”, as he did over the Heroes Day holiday, he means it, in all its senses.
