Is Vincent Hungwe More Powerful Than Martin Rushwaya? – Eduzim News

IS VINCENT HUNGWE NOW MORE POWERFUL THAN Chief Secretary MARTIN RUSHWAYA?

Opinion by Charmaine Ropafadzo

Former Defence Permanent Secretary Martin Rushwaya who is now Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet is the apex civil servant, the CEO of the Republic on paper.

Reality however points at Vincent Hungwe being the boss of government machinery.

Vincent Hungwe chairs the Public Service Commission. He also chairs the Defence Services Commission. He holds oversight across several other bodies whose combined institutional weight, if you stop and actually calculate represents 90% of the entire vertebral column of the Zimbabwean state. Civilian appointments. Military conditions of service. Personnel frameworks from the lowest grade clerk in a rural district office to the officer corps of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces. Rushwaya now runs policy only but the functionaries of government and their actual function are now firmly in the hand of Vincent Hungwe.

Now ask yourself — honestly, not ceremonially — what exactly is left for the Chief Secretary to coordinate that Hungwe has not already touched, shaped, or visited?

The barracks visit was the tell. Hungwe went to military installations. Sat with soldiers. Discussed their welfare. He went because he could. He went because it was, in fact, his business to go but when Martin Rushwaya was Permanent Secretary of Defence we never saw him visit the barracks. Maybe the late Blessed Geza was right about all the things he said about Rushwaya.

Rushwaya had the proximity to visit and check on the welfare of the men and women in uniform. He lacked, apparently, the appetite.

The contrast does not require elaboration. It requires only honesty.

Power in Zimbabwean governance has never been purely a function of title. It is a function of reach who controls what, who can walk where, whose phone calls reorganise institutional behaviour. By every one of those measures, Hungwe has built something formidable. Quietly. Methodically. Without the fanfare that lesser officials mistake for authority.

Rushwaya holds the title of chief executive of government administration. Hungwe holds the machinery. And in any contest between a title and the machinery it purports to command, the machinery wins. The machinery always wins.

The next Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet will need to demonstrate two things: command of the civilian bureaucracy, and credibility with the defence establishment. Zimbabwe does not separate those two things easily, nor should it.

Hungwe has spent the last period of his career quietly demonstrating both.

Whether the formal elevation follows is a matter for those who make such decisions. But the institutional case is already closed. The man has been doing the job. The title is a formality awaiting its paperwork.

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