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Information, Media and Broadcasting Services permanent secretary Mr George Charamba says public office holders should be in their posts because of merit and not because of who they know.
There should not even be need for anyone to publicly state what should be an obvious and entrenched practice in any civil service anywhere in the world.

Not so in Zimbabwe, it seems.

Lecturing students taking a management course at Manyame Air Force Base on Tuesday, Mr Charamba said, “For me to be a permanent secretary, my vetting relates to political credentials. (It does) not relate to what I know about business.

“The kind of leadership type you will have as a permanent secretary henceforth will have to be a human being who is familiar with the rules of business. We have been surviving on political credentials. The time has now come for Government to review the qualifications for a permanent secretary to say hey, are you business literate?”

A few weeks ago, Mr Charamba was again in the news admitting that senior Government officials had gone to sleep and allowed heads of parastatals and other State-linked enterprises to pay themselves quite handsomely by any measure in the world.

Generally speaking, his take was that all culpable people must be decent enough to admit their failings and resign their posts.

This past week, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Cde Jacob Mudenda, said the same thing, pointing out that people should be honourable enough to step down from public posts when it becomes apparent that they have not done a good job.

Zimbabwe, it seems, has a dearth of honourable men and women.

The plethora of revelations of abuse of office and outright criminality by public officials has not induced a single person to own up, apologise and call it quits — except for Mr Charamba.

Instead, there has been deafening silence, and in some cases, sorry and downrightly despicable attempts to even justify their failings.

At present, several ministers — notably those holding the Energy, Information, Environment and Transport briefs — have dissolved some boards of enterprises falling under their portfolios.

This provides an opportunity for the concerned ministers to put in place boards that will act differently from their predecessors.

Will the ministers appoint public officials on merit or on political grounds? We certainly hope so.

What Zimbabwe needs is a clean break, a break that allows the rise of honourable and capable men and women to head public offices for the sake of our national development.

We always enjoy harping on and on about how we are the best educated and most literate country in Africa. So surely we have many capable people in our midst, people who can take the country forward through service that is not self-centred and puts the ordinary citizen at the centre of all activities.

It is evident that the way we have been doing things is wrong, that it does not work, and that our economy will continue to suffer at this rate.

We have to start doing things differently, we have to start approaching issues differently.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

We have to up our game, become more conscious of who we are and what is expected of us in whatever sphere we operate in and from.

This is something ministers, permanent secretaries and ministry directors must all be aware of as we rid our nation of the corruption that has been such a burden to Zimbabwe.