Eloquence is not always fact.
Wicknell Chivayo’s lengthy explanation of the stalled 30MW Gairezi Hydro Power Project is a masterclass in how technical language can be deployed not to enlighten the public, but to exhaust it into submission.
To directly receive articles from Tendai Ruben Mbofana, please join his WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08
It is polished, confident, and saturated with project-finance terminology that sounds authoritative—yet when stripped of its rhetorical armour, it tells a far less comforting story about how public infrastructure in Zimbabwe is conceived, awarded, celebrated, and ultimately abandoned without consequence.
At first glance, the statement appears reasonable.
It acknowledges community frustration, invokes employment hopes in Nyanga, and affirms a shared national desire for development.
But this opening empathy quickly gives way to a carefully constructed narrative whose primary purpose is not explanation, but insulation—insulation from responsibility, from scrutiny, and from the uncomfortable question of who must answer when a USD 113 million public project collapses without delivering a single megawatt.
The insistence that the tender was not awarded to “Chivayo personally” but to a consortium led by foreign giants may be technically accurate, yet it is substantively evasive, as Wicknell Chivayo’s Intratrek was the local partner and conduit through which the deal was anchored.
In the political economy of African infrastructure, local partners are not passive passengers riding on international credibility.
They are central actors—brokers of access, facilitators of approvals, and beneficiaries of proximity to power.
One cannot enjoy the advantages of being the indispensable local face when contracts are signed, only to retreat into procedural obscurity when projects fail.
Responsibility in public projects is not dissolved by consortium structures; it is shared.
Chivayo’s core defence rests on the failure to achieve “financial closure.”
This, we are told, is due to an unfavourable business case that could not satisfy lenders’ expectations on returns, cash flows, and bankability.
This explanation is plausible—but it is also deeply troubling.
If the project was structurally unbankable at USD 3.7 million per megawatt, why was it tendered in the first place?
Why was it awarded to the “lowest compliant bidder”?
Why were preparatory works undertaken and communities mobilised with promises of employment and development?
Financial closure is not an afterthought in serious infrastructure planning; it is the gate through which a project must pass before political theatre begins.
When a project collapses at this stage, it exposes either catastrophic incompetence in feasibility assessment, political interference overriding economic logic, or speculative contracting driven by the hope that financing will somehow materialise later.
None of these explanations inspire confidence.
All of them point to a governance culture that treats public projects as experiments conducted with other people’s expectations.
Chivayo’s appeal to sympathy—that contractors incur upfront costs and are “disappointed” when projects stall—rings hollow in a country where ordinary citizens pay upfront for electricity they do not receive, water that does not flow, and services that never arrive.
Risk is not an injustice inflicted upon contractors; it is the price of doing business.
When repeated project failures occur, they cease to be unfortunate accidents and begin to resemble a pattern.
At that point, disappointment is no longer a defence—it is an admission of recklessness.
Equally revealing is the attempt by Chivayo to rationalise the abandonment of Gairezi by pointing to government prioritisation of Hwange Units 7 and 8.
This explanation collapses under minimal scrutiny.
Hwange’s expansion was not a sudden revelation; it was a long-standing national priority known to all serious players in the energy sector.
These projects were not mutually exclusive, nor did one logically necessitate the suspension of the other.
If government strategy could so easily override signed tenders and raised community expectations, then the real problem is not financing—it is the absence of coherent planning and respect for public trust.
Perhaps the most telling moment in the statement is not what is said, but what is carefully avoided.
Chivayo dismisses “speculative comments suggesting that payments were made,” yet offers no categorical denial, no disclosure of payment schedules, no audit references, and no invitation to forensic verification.
In a context where public funds have repeatedly vanished behind walls of silence, this omission is deafening.
Transparency is not achieved by labelling critics as speculative; it is achieved by opening the books.
What makes this episode particularly corrosive is not merely the failure of a single project, but the normalization of failure itself.
Communities are mobilised, expectations raised, photographs taken, speeches delivered—and when nothing materialises, the explanation arrives wrapped in jargon that subtly implies the public is too unsophisticated to understand the realities of project finance.
This is not just condescension; it is a quiet theft of agency.
Citizens are reduced from stakeholders to spectators in processes that profoundly affect their lives.
Zimbabwe’s infrastructure crisis is not only about shortages of capital or technical capacity.
It is about a deficit of accountability.
Projects do not fail in a vacuum; they fail within systems that permit ambition without consequence, optimism without discipline, and proximity to power without responsibility.
Until those who champion, front, and benefit from public contracts are held to the same standard as the citizens who fund them—through taxes, tariffs, and patience—no amount of capitalised jargon will restore trust.
In the end, Chivayo’s statement explains why nothing happened at Gairezi.
What it does not explain is why Zimbabweans should believe that the next project will be any different.
And until that question is answered honestly, convincingly, and transparently, every stalled project will remain what Gairezi has become: not merely an abandoned site, but a monument to a system that confuses explanation with accountability—and hopes the public will do the same.
TENDAI RUBEN MBOFANA - THE UN-OPPRESSED MIND! 