The Sunday News
THERE is confusion over the selection process to appoint National Railways of Zimbabwe general manager with the board adamant that it has competed the selection process and short-listed three candidates while the parent ministry has said the process must be redone from scratch.
Transport and Infrastructural Development Minister Dr Joram Gumbo advised the board to re-advertise the post to give qualified candidates who might not have applied previously the opportunity to do so, but the board says it has concluded the process and has already short-listed and submitted three names to Government for the final decision which goes through the responsible minister and Cabinet.
In an interview on Friday, NRZ board chairman Engineer Alvord Mabena said they were not aware of the directive to re-advertise the post and said the Minister had advised them to “complete the process”. Eng Mabena said three names had been submitted and the board had made its recommendations although the final decision lies with Government.
“There was never a time that the Minister said we must re-advertise. We had a meeting with him on Monday and that is not quite the way he asked us to proceed.
“The main problem we have is that we submitted the papers to former Minister Dr Obert Mpofu and those papers have not been submitted to Minister Gumbo. It is either a process is facilitated that he receives those papers from his predecessor or we re-submit them,” he said.
He added that the board had gone through the whole complex exercise and said they did a thorough job and came up with results in consultation with the employment agency they were working with. He said what he was aware of was that the newly appointed Minister wanted this whole process to be concluded as soon as possible.
“The stage that we are at right now is that once we submit to the Ministry our papers which we have already done, the Minister goes through them and then submits to Cabinet for the normal vetting before we get a go ahead. That is the process we are going through,” Eng Mabena said.
He could not, however, divulge information on whether the three candidates were Zimbabwe based or from the Diaspora saying by so doing he would be pre- empting the names although he confirmed that all the candidates were Zimbabweans.
“All I know is this selection process was professionally and thoroughly conducted,” said Eng Mabena.
However, in a separate interview on Thursday, Dr Gumbo who earlier this week ordered the NRZ board to re-advertise the position of the parastatal’s general manager reiterated that the position must be re-advertised and filled by a local person.
“There could be others out there who did not apply but might want to apply now because they qualify. Let us see when we go to the second round, those who might not have wanted to apply will apply,” said Dr Gumbo.
Earlier this year, the board announced that all the 40 local candidates who had applied for the position of general manager at the ailing parastatal had failed to make the grade.
This prompted the board to look outside the country for the right candidate, a process which resulted in three candidates being short-listed.
Dr Gumbo said if NRZ had failed to find a suitable candidate, the way to go was to re-advertise.
He said if a candidate could not be found locally only then would the parastatal seek externally.
“We will cross the bridge when we get there. If we find that we cannot find anybody locally then maybe we might have to go external if that becomes necessary,” Dr Gumbo said adding that re-advertising would help give others the opportunity to apply.
The Minister said he was not aware (that the board had shortlisted three candidates) but what he knew was that there was no general manager at NRZ.
He said he had instructed all parastatals not to employ or dismiss any worker without communicating to him.
“I have instructed them to stop appointing anybody until I give the instructions. I am going to tell them to advertise that post. If they told you that, well then it’s something I am not aware of,”said Dr Gumbo.
The NRZ general manager’s position has been vacant since August 2013 following the death of Air Commodore Retired Mike Karakadzai in a car accident. Engineer Lewis Mukwada is acting general manager. The parastatal has already filled the positions of finance director and that of director of operations.
Meanwhile, Dr Gumbo said his ministry was looking at improving and rehabilitating the railway system which is now in a very deplorable state and added that they hoped to sign some Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) with Chinese companies before December for this and other projects that the ministry is working on.
