By Fanuel James
In Harare, ZANU-PF is reviving an old doctrine: party supremacy over government.
On paper, Zimbabwe is a devolved constitutional democracy.
Chapter 14 of its 2013 constitution creates provincial councils and development committees to bring government closer to the people, away from the centre.
However, on practice, a meeting in Harare this week suggests a different chapter is being written.
On 6 October, two bodies sat jointly in Harare Metropolitan Province.
One was the Provincial Development Committee (PDC), chaired by the Minister of State for Provincial Affairs and Devolution, Senator Charles Tawengwa.
By statute it is a technocratic forum: heads of ministries, departments and agencies, local authorities, civil society and residents’ associations, convened to coordinate service delivery.
The other was the Provincial Coordinating Committee (PCC) of ZANU-PF, the ruling party, chaired by Godwills Masimirembwa.
It is not a state body at all.
That they sat together, as equals, to receive submissions from the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructural Development and from provincial officials on the state of Harare’s collapsing services, is telling.
That the plenary that followed required civil servants and council officials, many of whom work for an opposition-controlled City Council, to answer to party officials, is more telling still.
Bringing The Old As New
For those with long memories, the phrase is familiar.
In the 1980s, ZANU-PF doctrine held that the party was supreme over government.
However, that doctrine had faded, at least in form, after the 2013 constitution.
It appears to be back, now dressed in the language of devolution.
The manoeuvre is clever.
Harare has been an opposition stronghold since 2000 and central government has struggled to control its council.
By merging the PDC and the PCC into a joint command centre for service delivery, ZANU-PF achieves through administrative fiat what it has failed to achieve at the ballot box: oversight of Harare’s local authorities.
In one simple stroke, the accountability chain is inverted.
Rather than ministries accounting to Parliament and councils accounting to residents, both are made to account to the party’s provincial leadership.
Service delivery, water, roads, refuse, is no longer a purely municipal issue but a party issue.
The government would call this “whole-of-society” coordination.
The Harare Residents Trust, which flagged the meeting, calls it the assertion of party supremacy.
However, the risk for ZANU-PF is that it also makes the party explicitly responsible.
If, after this joint sitting, rubbish remains uncollected and taps remain dry in Kamfinsa and Budiriro, residents will know precisely whom to blame.
The party wanted control but now it will also own the failure.
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