Vice President Constantino Chiwenga’s reported intervention at last week’s stormy politburo meeting — that ZANU-PF secretly holds a 45 per cent stake in Sakunda Holdings and that at least US$3.2 billion was channelled through that arrangement to private ends — is a public event of extraordinary consequence. Multiple independent local outlets have reported the claims, which Chiwenga is said to have tabled in a dossier that stunned the meeting. These remain allegations at present and demand urgent, independent verification.
Whether true or false, the episode lays bare a lethal pattern that corrodes democracies: opacity in party financing, blurred lines between party, state and private business, and procurement systems hijacked to entrench patronage. Let us examine the ills, the legal architecture that is implicated, the political calculation beneath the surface, and what a properly functioning democracy would do instead. In plain language, public money and public contracting are meant to be insulated from private capture.
If a ruling party secretly owns a near-majority stake in a private group that then wins government contracts, and if dividends or payments from that vehicle are diverted to private networks rather than to public or party-membership purposes subject to internal democratic accounting, we move from a legality problem to a constitutional one. The implications range from procurement irregularities under the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act to potential criminal offences if funds were misappropriated. Zimbabwe’s PPDPA and the Procurement Regulatory Authority exist precisely to prevent such capture; their authority must now be tested.
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Political life in ZANU-PF has long been shaped by intra-elite networks and succession rivalries. This disclosure — whether tactical or sincere — lands amid a fraught contest over who will lead the party when the parliamentary and party calendar turns. That it was aired at a politburo meeting is itself instructive: the argument is as much about control of patronage-streams as it is about principle.
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