The Sunday News
Outside the dictated tenets of the 2013 Constitution, President Mnangagwa has prioritised devolution as a matter of urgent national reform to re-engineer Zimbabwe’s economic turn-around by 2030.
Over the years, devolution has been touted as a subject of perpetuating superficial tensions to nation-building.
The potential of devolution to power distribution has tested academic backing. Mupava (2015:184) submits that:
“Centralisation in local governance is when most decision-making powers are vested in Central Government with local authorities having no or very little power to make independent decisions. In that case, local authorities are there to implement Central Government policies and ideologies.
On the other hand, decentralisation is the antithesis of centralisation and entails empowering lower tiers of Government with decision-making powers.”
Mupava (2015: 184) further argues that devolution is a modern world trending phenomenon, “Political reforms across the globe have come to support decentralisation as a viable option against centralised systems of Local Government.
“He further goes on to state that,
“Decentralised political systems have been characterised by power-sharing structures between central and Local Government structures.’’
Zimbabwe’s provinces are nucleons of the country’s economic growth. W
hile it is critical to emphasise the obvious economic benefits that devolution can give to Zimbabwe’s poverty stricken rural communities, it is also important to discuss the framework of public sector accountability to community resource exploration.
Our targets for measuring devolution’s outputs must reside in measurable economic growth.
While our historically marginalised people and those who consistently support the grand vision of the Second-Republic may be all working towards the expedite implementation of devolution, some may drag the project to failure.
The advent of devolution in Zimbabwe might inherit post-colonial corrupt practices.
This is because devolution as a post-colonial political paradigm is heavily endangered by the ineptitude associated with the erstwhile comforts in the monopoly and centralisation power by some public administrators.
This calls for the review of the functions of district and provincial offices.
If there is need to replace old skills with new skills that hard route will have to be taken.
A localised level of transparency leads to reduced levels of corruption.
There is need to appreciate that grand levels of corruption occur largely at a more centralised system that rewards rather than persecutes officials and civilians misappropriating funds owing to their political status or family connections.
Corruption has been bedevilling the country with seemingly limited efforts in curbing it largely from the government actors cascading to the general populace.
Ncube (2015:4) reflects on the First-Republic under the former President, Cde Robert Mugabe, and argues that Zimbabwe became the, “sole legitimate conduit for development and various class sectional patronage driven wealth (in case of blacks) and political protection in case of white commercial farmers and capital.”
It was this mantra that necessitated the rise of patronage politics. Ncube (2015) further points out that from 1980 to 2000, this rule of the benevolent state worked as a viable conduit that ensured speedy access to corridors of wealth by blacks under the black empowerment discourse.
It was this black empowerment mantra that saw influential politicians soon after independence using their positions to engage in grand levels of corruption.
Likewise contemporary use of pan-African undertones in shaping Zimbabwe’s political discourse are not different from those of socialism that were used soon after independence in promoting state-elites’ indulgence in illicit financial flows.
The idea of socialism made sense then as the nation was still caught up in the whims of shaping an equality centred distribution of the political-economy yet in the real sense the opposite was true.
During this period (1980-2000), there was limited political will in dealing with cases of corruption and also the same commitment was noted in promoting a high level socialist state which guised the growth of corruption by political elites.
For devolution to gain its traction in following the vision of the Second-Republic two key principles must be forcefully applied; that of craft-literacy and craft-competence (Moyo 1993).
The two principles entail that economic national development is sustained by a resourceful state man-power (craft competence) guided by state blueprints aimed at providing transparency (craft literacy).
Competence in public office has been channelled towards corruption instead of promoting public transparency.
This serves as a great challenge which may only be resolved through closer monitoring of systems to do with public administration.
As such devolution is aptly situated in the reform methodologies that can curb corruption and transparency deficits if it is centred on legally embedded terms of local governance.
Devolution gives capacity to local man-power with a direct experience of the challenges and prospects of harnessing the resources in a particular region.
This is unlike a situation whereby resources of a particular region are administered from one bureaucratic centre which is inevitably blamed for promoting underdevelopment.
In the case of Zimbabwe this is inevitable factoring in that the existing source of craft-competence and craft-literacy has not only been in the helm of power, but also at the apex of advancing corruption.
This merit goes along with the Human-Factor approach (Chivaura and Mararike 1998: 1-7) which is deemed as a people-centred approach to grass-root development.
Fayayo and Ncube (2015) state that local governance should be guided by “people oriented policy processes.”
This proposition entails that for good governance to be meaningful and above all promoting accountability and transparency it must be people-centred and this is only possible in a devolved governance culture.
Chivaura and Mararike (1998) claim that people at any level should be responsible for their development.
Development is grass-root centred. It should not be centralised at the apex. Self-determination of a people defines their development.
Development cannot be chiefly facilitated by institutions including political parties with absolute exclusion of the people to whom policies are intended.
In further support of a people-centred approach, Ndungu (2014:11) points that by distributing authority over public goods and revenues, devolution makes it difficult for individuals and officials to collude in engaging in corrupt practices as there is immediate monitoring and evaluation.
It is this seeming conceptualisation that opportunities for development can be realised.
The source of decision making has been centralised leading to the augmented levels of monopoly that need to be dismantled.
As asserted from the onset of the study, devolution of power presents a refreshing approach to the otherwise dissolute thinking in the local governance.
If anything, devolution is a political response to the various ills embedding countries that seem to be fragile and plural societies.
A devolved system of governance is a term that has made a paradigm shift in the thinking of developmental solutions especially in the 21 century.
The debate on devolution has been taking centre stage in various parts of Africa with a seeming log-jam from various developmental experts.
The major challenge associated with the subject of devolution in Zimbabwe is its link with ethnocentric perspectives of the country’s political background (Mhlanga 2012).
As we think of devolution in tandem with the unstoppable motion of the Second-Republic transition, we must think accountability, anti-corruption and re-tooling the administration.
Pamberi neZimbabwe
-Richard Mahomva is a political-scientist with avid interest in classic and modern political theory. He also has a distinct passion for the architecture of governance in Africa. He is by and large a literary aficionado. Feedback: [email protected].
