BULAWAYO – President Emmerson Mnangagwa has rolled out a succession of empowerment schemes pitched as economic relief for war veterans, vendors and rural communities, as his loyalists push to amend the constitution and extend his second and final term by two years to keep him in power until 2030.
But mounting evidence suggests the programmes are being implemented with little accountability, creating fertile ground for abuse and large-scale looting, often carried out in the president’s name and increasingly under the political cover of the controversial term-extension campaign.
One such initiative, the War Veterans Mechanisation Programme, was launched with much fanfare, promising to deliver 3,000 tractors to veterans of the 1970s liberation war.
In September last year, the first batch of 100 imported tractors arrived in Harare. Each province was allocated 10 tractors, with assurances that more consignments would follow.
The scheme is being financed through AFC Bank, with government covering half the cost while qualifying war veterans pay the balance following a means assessment.
What followed, however, exposed the dysfunction and opacity that critics say now define Mnangagwa-era “empowerment”.
By early December, the three Matabeleland provinces – Matabeleland North, Matabeleland South and Bulawayo – had still not received their allocated tractors. Eventually, war veterans approached the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ), which agreed to transport the machinery from Harare at no cost.
But when the veterans arrived to collect the tractors, some were missing.
“We were given 100 tractors and we were supposed to receive 10 tractors per province, but unfortunately the three provinces gathered here did not receive those tractors as per President Mnangagwa’s wish,” Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association national chairperson Cephas Ncube told a gathering in Bulawayo days before Christmas.
“Matabeleland North received five tractors, Matabeleland South five tractors and Bulawayo received seven tractors. Of the seven tractors for Bulawayo, something happened, four tractors ended up missing,” he said.
Ncube revealed he was forced to personally intervene to recover the missing tractors.
“I had to chase those four tractors until we recovered them to make seven again, a very sad situation. The president gives us things, but greed takes over. It pains me,” he said.
Ncube stopped short of naming those responsible, but his frustration mirrors a growing national unease: that the proliferation of presidential schemes has opened vast opportunities for self-enrichment, with little evidence of punishment for abuse.
“The president launched the borehole scheme but it was mismanaged. He launched the interest-free loan scheme and it was also mismanaged,” Ncube said.
“We are making this clear to the nation: we don’t support corruption.”
One prominent beneficiary of state contracts under the “presidential” banner is Paul Tungwarara, a special adviser to Mnangagwa.
The Presidential Borehole Scheme, an ambitious plan to drill 25,000 boreholes nationwide, is being implemented by Tungwarara’s Prevail Group of Companies.
Tungwarara has been accused in several communities of drilling boreholes and abandoning them before installing solar systems, tanks or pumps, despite the government paying millions of dollars for completed works.
He is also overseeing the US$1.5 million Presidential War Veterans Fund, an interest-free loan facility which Ncube says has also been mismanaged.
“We will pursue His Excellency to give us better managers to execute these empowerment programmes,” said Ncube. “We will ask him, beg him and say, ‘Your Excellency, give us better and well-organised comrades to manage your projects.’ That would change the lives of our dear comrades.”
Tungwarara recently admitted that funds allocated to a group calling itself Vendors4ED were stolen.
“The money was stolen by the top league,” Tungwarara told a public meeting in Manicaland. “The money was to ensure that each vendor gets US$50 to start from, but the leaders of the group shared the money among themselves.”
No arrests have been announced.
Tungwarara is also running several other initiatives, including the Presidential River Rehabilitation Programme, the Presidential Hospital Refurbishment Programme, the Presidential Youth Empowerment Scheme and the Presidential Constituency Empowerment Programme, among others.
The schemes have placed his companies at the centre of major state contracts awarded without open bidding, earning him a personal fortune. Critics say the programmes have been badly managed, but in the absence of audits or effective oversight, there appear to be no consequences.
The lack of accountability, including public disclosure and independent audits, is no coincidence, critics argue.
Business figures backing the 2030 term-extension push – most of them beneficiaries of state contracts – have poured money into initiatives targeting churches, sports clubs, musicians, online influencers, war veterans and the security services.
Vehicles, cash handouts and other gifts worth millions of dollars have been distributed in what analysts describe as a systematic effort to buy loyalty and silence opposition.
For critics, the pattern is clear: empowerment programmes are launched in Mnangagwa’s name, implemented by politically-connected cronies, weakly supervised and shielded from scrutiny, all while the constitutional order itself is being reshaped.
What is marketed as empowerment, they say, is increasingly functioning as a parallel patronage economy, one in which 2030 is not just a political slogan, but a convenient veil for industrial-scale looting.
“The looting happening in our country is of gigantic proportions. It is obscene, intolerable and outrightly criminal,” said Jealousy Mawarire, a Mnangagwa critic and former journalist.
“That it’s being done with the helping hand of the state apparatus is as disgusting and unfathomable as it is unsustainable if we want to build this country.”
Mawarire charges that Mnangagwa’s administration “isn’t about developing the country, it is about looting, primitive accumulation of wealth using the levers of state power and sustaining the looting through illegalities which include unconstitutional term extensions, capture of the judiciary and demobilisation of opposition politics through open purchase of loyalty, bribery and uncouth political skulduggery which includes, but is not limited to arresting of opponents, assassinations and rigging of elections.”
He added: “We have a section of our government that is preoccupied with devising ways to steal from citizens and investors alike. That’s the work being done by these so-called advisers and businessmen who are now surrounding the state president.
“Their job is to come up with illegal plans to collect money from treasury, citizens and investors, plans which the president gives some semblance of legality by declaring that the criminal activity is a ‘presidential scheme’ or it’s being done under a statutory instrument. This money being stolen through these ‘presidential schemes’ is meant to fund the illegal 2030 project.”
