C2C Corporate Literacy – the Air Zimbabwe Case Study – Part 2

Mutumwa Mawere, 24/12/2020

This is the second installment of a literacy initiative powered by the C2C network, a member-based network of human beings who believe that being connected is the first stage of building community power to solve problems.

Connected people often can squander the opportunity by simply choosing to focus on the ghosts of the past rather than listening to the whispers of tomorrow.

Imagine when those who you look up to as sources of inspiration refuse to associate and share knowledge, experiences, ideas and insights, then what would inspire future generations to be the source of change that the problems of the present demand in terms of solutions.

This article is inspired by a creeping logic that the state is a living thing and as such it possess real and enforceable rights.

The idea behind the Reconstruction of State Indebted Insolvent Companies Act (Recon Act) that was authored by Mr. Patrick Chinamasa speaks to the existence and operation of an omnibus-type character called the state.

It is also premised on the invention of the notion that a company can be divisible into a state-indebted and another presumably not-state indebted.

This warped logic would then create an apartheid-like corporate civilization that confers powers to the Minister of Justice to give life to an absurdity that undermines the legal and constitutional order and morality generally associated with a civilization that speaks to the human spirit.

This law allows the control and management of a company to be divested and deprived without following the prescripts of the law.

It has been in existence since 2004 and survived the government of national unity (GNU).

As such, it is instructive that this law that Professor Jonathan Moyo who was involved in giving birth to it and operation in relation to the affairs of SMM Holdings Private Limited (SMM), called barbaric and satanic, has been adopted and enforced in the second dispensation.

It is true and fact that the Cabinet recently agreed to extend the reconstruction of Air Zimbabwe (AirZim) to June 30 next year to allow “payment of creditors as well as return the airline to profitability”.

This extension follows the Judge Mangota’s 14 February 2020 ruling refusing to grant a confirmation of a reconstruction order issued by Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi in relation to AirZim.

Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi has since applied for leave to appeal the judgment leaving an Administrator appointed extra judicially in control of the company.

It is instructive that although the word state is the basis on which this law was purportedly created, the state is not defined in the act.

What is fact is that in using the word state, the intention was to capture all companies with a debtor to creditor relationship with any government controlled companies like ZESA etc.

This means that if your company has any commercial relationship with a government controlled company, then the company falls within the ambit of this act notwithstanding that no company can exist outside the provisions of the law.

With respect to AirZim, it is important to highlight that this is not the first time the government, in reality taxpayers, have assumed AirZim’s debt without the public in whose name this mortgage now exists applying their minds on the reality of the abuse of public power.

As background, in March 2012, AirZim Holdings as it was known then, was unbundled into two entities — Air Zimbabwe Pvt (Ltd) and the National Handling Services — underpinned by a promise that the company would be restructured.

This experiment failed dismally to allow lessons to be drawn that any construction based on the government being a doctor or a sick patient being a company is misplaced.

The debt that was transferred to the national fiscus was about US$150 million but evidently there was nothing to show for it leading to the second round of madness in the name of reconstruction based on a fatally defective legal idea.

Against the backdrop, what would you do as citizen if your eyes are wide open and this absurdity continues unabated?

Silence is the greatest betrayal because it makes citizens who are sleeping on the wheel complicit in the lunacy that informs the idea that the state exists and as such enjoys real and enforceable rights.

Imagine the judiciary has not only played a constructive role in giving legitimacy to this reality yet expect to inspire public confidence as a guarantor of the rule of law and not rule of man.