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Walter Mswazie Masvingo Correspondent
Traditional leaders are the vanguard of devolution and the decentralisation of power cannot happen without their involvement, Zimbabwe’s Chiefs Council president Chief Fortune Charumbira has said. Addressing stakeholders during the inaugural Masvingo devolution conference here last week, Chief Charumbira said devolution and traditional leaders were inseparable. He said chiefs were the custodians of culture.

Chief Charumbira said the country’s erstwhile colonisers tried to sideline traditional leaders in the development matrix, but failed dismally.

“We believe this is a great moment as we move to develop this country through a new paradigm called provincial council,” said Chief Charumbira said.

“We need to spend a lot of time minister (of State for Masvingo provincial affairs Ezra Chadzamira) telling our people what it (devolution) is all about.

“There is no devolution which can happen without the involvement of chiefs as they are the vanguard of the programme,” said Chief Charumbira.

He said devolution was not a unique developmental concept to Zimbabwe as it was also being used in other African countries.

“Fortunately when the issue of devolution was discussed during the constitution-making exercise I was there. We want to isolate what we call development prerequisites and know how traditional leaders can fit into this devolution matrix. We want to deal with traditional leaders’ conundrum.”

“In 2000, when I was the Deputy Minister of Local Government, we went to Uganda on a familiarisation visit on devolution which means the programme is not new,” he said.

Chief Charumbira said devolution and not donor handouts was the panacea to community-level development deficiencies in Africa.

“There is development fatigue in Africa as we are not developing despite huge donations. The World Bank, in 2000 authored a paper titled, “Can Africa claim the 21st century” and that means we had previously failed to reach our destiny.

“As Masvingo, we need distributive and procedural justice which means we should distribute equitably and share transparently. Under this concept (devolution), we will have power as a province and be able to do our own things,” he said

He said in devolution, development was demand-driven and everyone should take part.

“We had devolution mechanisms before, but there was no budget. We had provincial development committees which used to convene departmental heads, but there were no tangible results. As we talk devolution there is now renewed interest in the traditional institution,” he said.

The Second Republic under President Mnangagwa was taking the devolution concept seriously with $310 million being allocated for the programme in the 2019 Budget.