Clever rhetoric is often the most effective form of deception.
When Dr. John Mangudya stood before an audience at the Harare Institute of Technology yesterday, his rhetoric was as polished as a central banker’s ledger.
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Clothed in the language of constitutionalism and corporate governance, the Mutapa Investment Fund CEO sought to dismantle what he termed “myths” regarding the fund’s opacity.
He leaned heavily on Section 119 of the Constitution, painting a picture of a fund that is not only submissive to Parliament but is, in fact, a paragon of transparency.
It was a masterful performance in semantic gymnastics.
However, for a public that has spent the last decade watching their savings evaporate under various fiscal experiments, the “accountability” Mangudya describes feels less like a shield for national assets and more like an autopsy report delivered long after the patient has been bled dry.
The fundamental problem with the Mutapa Investment Fund is not a lack of reporting, but a lack of control; it is a system designed to provide information only after the decisions—and the money—have already vanished.
The “original sin” of the Mutapa Investment Fund lies in its very inception.
True accountability begins with the consent of the governed, yet this fund, which now controls the crown jewels of the Zimbabwean state, was not born of parliamentary debate or public consultation.
It was birthed through the Presidential Powers (Temporary Measures) Act via Statutory Instrument 156 of 2023.
By using an emergency decree to restructure the nation’s sovereign wealth, the government effectively bypassed the democratic process to create a behemoth that swallowed over 30 state-owned enterprises, from ZESA to NetOne.
When Mangudya claims the fund is “accountable to Parliament,” he conveniently ignores that Parliament was treated as an afterthought in the fund’s creation.
A mandate that begins by circumventing the legislature can hardly claim to be its servant.
This is the first great contradiction: a fund that claims to uphold the law while being rooted in a maneuver designed to sidestep the legislative spirit.
This structural opacity is deepened by what has become known as the “Procurement Black Box.”
Under normal circumstances, any entity handling public funds is bound by the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act.
This law is the primary defense against cronyism, ensuring that contracts are awarded through competitive bidding and that the public gets value for money.
Yet, the Mutapa Investment Fund has been granted a sweeping exemption from these rules.
The official justification—that the fund needs to move “at the speed of business”—is a thin veil for a lack of oversight.
In the world of private equity, “speed” is a virtue; in the world of public trust, “speed” without a paper trail is a red flag.
By removing the Fund from procurement laws, the state has created a vacuum where billions of dollars in assets can be moved, sold, or collateralized without the “inconvenience” of public tenders.
This isn’t efficiency; it is the institutionalization of secrecy.
Nowhere is the danger of this secrecy more evident than in the Kuvimba Mining House transaction—the smoking gun that makes a mockery of Mangudya’s claims.
In 2024, the Fund acquired a 35% stake in Kuvimba for a staggering $1.6 billion.
The transaction was funded through Treasury Bills—essentially public debt that every Zimbabwean will eventually have to repay.
The deal valued Kuvimba at roughly $4.6 billion, nearly triple the valuation the government itself had provided just two years prior.
Despite the massive scale of this deal, the “private shareholders” who walked away with $1.6 billion in public wealth remain largely anonymous, hidden behind a web of offshore entities and “missing” registry records.
When Mangudya speaks of accountability, he neglects to mention that the public only learned the full scope of this deal through investigative journalism and international watchdogs like The Sentry, not through a proactive filing in Parliament.
If the fund were truly accountable, the valuation of such a deal would have been debated before the Treasury Bills were issued, not explained away in a lecture series two years later.
This brings us to the crux of the accountability debate: the difference between a report and a veto.
Mangudya’s defense rests on the fact that the Minister of Finance tables annual reports in Parliament.
But a report is merely a historical record; it is a “post-mortem” of decisions already made.
True accountability in a democracy requires that the people’s representatives have the power to stop a bad deal before it happens.
Under the current framework, Parliament has no “say” in the Fund’s investment strategy; it only has “sight” of the results after the ink has dried and the money has moved.
Reporting on a $1.6 billion overpayment for a mining stake after the debt has already been incurred is not accountability; it is an admission of loss.
The Fund’s structure ensures that by the time Parliament sees a problem, the legal and financial damage is irreparable.
Furthermore, we cannot ignore the “messenger” in this equation.
Dr. Mangudya’s tenure at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe was defined by the introduction of the Bond Note—a currency he famously pledged his career on, claiming it would maintain parity with the US dollar.
History recorded a different outcome.
The subsequent introduction of the ZiG and the repeated cycles of currency devaluation have left the Zimbabwean public with a profound “trust deficit.”
When the architect of some of the most disastrous monetary policies in the country’s history now asks the public to trust him with $16 billion in national assets under a “transparent” framework, the skepticism is not a “myth”—it is a rational response to lived experience.
The public does not fear looting because of a lack of imagination; they fear it because they have seen how “legal” frameworks can be used to facilitate the transfer of national wealth into private pockets.
Ultimately, the Mutapa Investment Fund operates as a parallel state.
It holds the power to borrow against national assets, a power recently expanded by the repeal of Section 22 of the Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which previously prohibited using the fund’s assets as collateral.
By allowing these assets to be leveraged for loans in a “black box” environment, the government is essentially gambling with the nation’s future.
If a loan goes south, the collateral—be it the power utility or the national railways—could be seized by creditors.
This is the ultimate failure of accountability: a system where the most critical risks to the nation’s sovereignty are managed by a handful of appointees behind closed doors, with Parliament acting as nothing more than a filing cabinet for their annual reports.
Mangudya’s claims of accountability lie flat because they confuse “compliance” with “transparency.”
One can comply with a weak law while still violating the principle of public trust.
As long as the Fund remains exempt from procurement laws, as long as its deals are funded by opaque public debt, and as long as its reporting is purely retrospective, it will remain a law unto itself.
The Mutapa Investment Fund is not a sovereign wealth fund in the tradition of Norway or Singapore; it is a fortress of opacity, and no amount of public lectures at the Harare Institute of Technology can change the reality that the keys to the fortress are held by the few, while the costs of its failures are borne by the many.
TENDAI RUBEN MBOFANA - THE UN-OPPRESSED MIND! 