By Dr Phillan Zamchiya| DEAR READER, it was on the 13th of May 2018 that Phineas Tagwirei, “father” to Kudakwashe Tagwirei a Zimbabwean tycoon with an avalanche of ‘’business’’ interests quietly breathed his last at the trauma center in the plushy suburb of Borrowdale in the north of Harare, Zimbabwe. This was after a battle with prostate cancer according to the death certificate. Phineas had breathed every day, every hour and every second for 91 years. Part of his life spent as a driver especially between 1973 and 1979 . This was before this writer and Zimbabwe as an independent state from British colonial rule were born.
On 16 May 2018, Phineas’ remains were finally interred in Mulauzi Village, Shurugwi in the Midlands province under Chief Nhema.
On that very day, for the avoidance of doubt on 16 May 2018, Zimbabwe could have been invaded by even the weakest country in the world and get easily conquered. Why? Reader, Kudakwashe who is called ‘Joseph’ following the Biblical one by his very close family members was so networked within the military that at his father’s funeral, the Who’s Who in the army attended, leaving the barracks with no top single senior commander and manned by very junior officials.
For dear readers, who might not be conversant with the Bible, Joseph is a lovely character who was Dad meaning Jacob’s favorite and endured betrayal and slavery from his brothers but rose to power in Egypt and later forgave his family. In short, faith, love and forgiveness define the original Biblical Joseph. Not sure what is happening in that Tagwirei family to call Kuda a ‘Joseph’. We shall hear, maybe soon but all I surely know for now is he was Phineas’ favorite.
I am writing this in the context of General Anselem Nhamo Sanyatwe, former commander of the presidential guard who played a critical role during the military coup to remove the former and late president Robert Gabriel Mugabe, former Commander of the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) and currently the Minister of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture having recently showered praises on Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’ as a patriot who is loyal to the Zimbabwe military establishment.
Sanyatwe also callously repeated that the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) will rule until donkeys grow horns even if voters think otherwise. Yoooh! This is within the matrix of the ZANU PF)’s own internally unresolved succession question and running out of electable candidates.
How did this relationship climax? The plan to entrench the military in all frontiers of agrarian production structures reached its climax during the 2015–2016 farming season, when then Vice President Dambudzo Mnangagwa initiated a new command agriculture program. According to the government technocrats, this scheme was meant to mobilize financial loans and inputs for farmers and repayment was in the form of produce. Mnangagwa, however, understood it as a way to buy the loyalty of military elites and rural populations in the context of declining economic patronage resources.
Following instructions from the military and political elites, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) and the ministry of finance channeled USD 3 billion to Sakunda Holdings, the head of which was Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’. Alas, no single government official could eventually account for that money. Specifically, the 2018 report of the state’s official auditor general officially confirmed that the USD 3 billion allocated to command agriculture could not be accounted for. In July 2019, under oath, the then permanent secretary in the ministry of lands and agriculture, Ringson Chitsiko, and the finance director, Peter Mudzamiri, told the parliamentary public accounts committee that the USD 3 billion had not been disbursed through the ministry and therefore could not be traced. At the same committee meeting, the permanent secretary in the ministry of information, Nick Mangwana, explained that the money was appropriated through different institutions because command agriculture was a ‘’special project’’.
If anything was special about this money, it is that it was used to buy the loyalty of military elites at a crucial stage in the battle to succeed Mugabe to an extent that even the then commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF) and now Vice President of Zimbabwe, Nyikadzino Chiwenga, received a Luxus LX 570. I remember very well the late Sibusiso Moyo driving a very nice command agriculture car to the Westgate La Rouge Lounge in Harare West. Some citizens called him ‘General Bae’ during the November coup to depose Mugabe. Reader, Sibusiso was the spokesperson of the army during that coup.
This command agriculture scam contributed to funding the military coup which eventually succeeded in November 2017 and partly financed Mnangagwa’s election campaign in 2018. This makes efforts to recover the money futile even up to today. Maybe in a New Zimbabwe which must belong to all who live in it!
Following Mnangagwa’s ascension to power in November 2017, command agriculture intensified despite resistance from technocrats in the ministry of finance and staff from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), not that their ideas matter to take the world forward. Anyway, on 1 August 2019, for example, Mthuli Ncube, the minister for finance, allocated USD 2.8 billion to command agriculture in a supplementary budget. Initially, it was not part of Mthuli’s budgetary plan, as he had already agreed with IMF officials to scrap the program. Mthuli, was, however, instructed by members of the top national security organ in Zimbabwe, the Joint Operations Command (JOC) to include command agriculture in the budget a day before.
The compliance to military demands in the financial sector prompted the IMF to issue a public statement raising serious concerns about command agriculture. The former head of the air force, Air Marshal Elson Moyo, was adamant as he said that ‘we foresee command agriculture going on for 10 years to come’ at a regional African conference in the mighty Victoria Falls on Wednesday 24 October 2018.
Reader, Victoria Falls is one of the seven natural wonders of the world, a breathtaking beautiful art of nature. Sorry for the detour, but the private sector and other commercial banks were later roped in to sanitize the command agriculture program given internal and international resistance.
However, behind the scenes, the military remained in control. By July 2019, 10 lieutenant colonels and 60 majors from ZNA were already deployed to implement and monitor command agriculture across the countryside. Junior army officers were also deployed throughout the country to monitor the ministry of agriculture provincial and district offices. In 2019, for example, almost all ministry of agriculture district offices in Mashonaland East province I visited had a member of the ZNA in their midst. These district offices are where beneficiaries were vetted, selected, registered and contracted. Hence, it was important to deploy the army and ensure an overt oversight of the technical officials from the ministry of lands and agriculture in order to protect the interests of the military.
In addition to getting tenders to supply for the military-run command agriculture program, Sakunda Holdings in partnership with Trafigura, a company based in Singapore, controlled the single existing fuel pipeline to Zimbabwe from Beira in Mozambique to Harare. All fuel importers in Zimbabwe had to bring fuel through the pipeline and pay a levy to Sakunda Holdings. This was in part because Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’ invested money to repair the pipeline. Like in command agriculture, key figures in the militarized state backed ‘Joseph’ in the fuel deal. These were Chiwenga, Sibusiso, Perrance [proper spelling as per his military badge] Shiri (former air force of Zimbabwe commander and minister of agriculture), Elson Moyo (former air force commander) and Sanyatwe.
Beyond controlling the fuel pipeline, Sakunda Holdings is alleged to have been given preferential treatment – including being able to offload government bonds at ‘hugely preferential rates’ from the RBZ.
Despite a façade of unity from ZANU PF, there were internal contradictions within the state. Mnangagwa, apparently Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’ is his nephew, Christopher Mutsvangwa the then chairperson of the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association and now spokesperson of ZANU PF and Joram Gumbo then then minister of energy favored Mining Oil & Gas Services (MOGS) from South Africa to construct a second fuel pipeline. Reader, Gumbo was one of the four Ministers I know did not attend Phineas’ funeral in rural Shurugwi. The other absentees I vividly remember then were Super Mandiwanzira (ICT and cyber security), Patrick Chinamasa (Finance) and off course Ziyambi (Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs) who needed to be in parliament. The MOGS deal would have effectively ended Kudakwashe’s monopoly on fuel supply.
You know what dear reader, despite Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’ being a distant nephew to Mnangagwa, the later also had business interests in the fuel industry through Zuva Petroleum, so the new MOGS deal could have probably worked better for his personal accumulation something Mutsvangwa knew very well. In 2018, a deal with MOGS faced resistance from the military elites and their business networks. Gumbo said that, ‘as government, I have said that we need a second pipeline, which would enable us to become a fuel hub in the region, but we have not yet done a feasibility study on the deal and we are yet to reach a decision on whether we indeed need it or not.’ Breaking the fuel monopoly would then earn Mnangagwa and his empire more financial flows and weaken the financial power of military elites involved.
Chiwenga, then one of Tagwirei’s chief allies, fell sick and was admitted to a hospital in China for a major esophagus surgery in 2019. In the absence of Chiwenga, Mnangagwa flexed his muscles and cleared the RBZ financial intelligence unit to temporarily close the bank accounts of Sakunda Holdings for money laundering and flouting foreign exchange rules in September 2019. This was neither a mere public relations gimmick nor a serious move intended to break the rot monopoly. Reader, it was a message to Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’ that remember ‘I am the Boss’ and ‘ Your Uncle’ and you cannot be ‘Joseph’ without me. Since then, Kudakwashe ‘Joseph’ has seemingly toured the line. Thankfully, his close family members do not call him ‘Moses’. I am out for today.
Dr P. Zamchiya, 16 June 2025.
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