AT the material time of writing this opinion piece a gamut of contractors in Zimbabwe who have been involved in numerous capital projects like construction are complaining bitterly about the government of Zimbabwe having failed to pay them for the work that they have done.
The contractors are having challenges with respect to meeting the employment costs for their workers and cannot at the same time have money for their statutory obligations because of government’s inability to pay them.
It is the intention of this opinion piece to go down the rabbit’s hole regarding national projects in Zimbabwe. A project is an ephemeral intervention that is timeous. Timeous in that it has a start date and end date.
A project in another speak, is explained in terms of boundaries and these boundaries speak to geography (location), budget and scope. Scope, time and budget are critical traits of a project that should feed into one another underpinned by the objectives of the project.
Any misalignment among scope, time and budget will compromise quality. Scope, time and budget put together constitute the compass of a project manager. Over and above having the iron triangle (scope, time and budget), a project manager should also approach a project as both an art and a science. It is an art because it involves working with diverse teams with different skill-sets and epistemic values and a science in that it involves processes and procedures that need to be adhered to in order to meet the success goals of the project.
A construction project for instance is overwhelmed with risks from design to completion, hence its initiation, planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation cannot be successfully done without taking into account different project management knowledge areas like a project integrated management plan (boundary spanning), project quality management plan and project procurement management plan.
It cannot be done without taking cognisance of project scope management plan, project stakeholder management plan, project time management plan, project communication management plan, project human resources management plan, project finance management plan and project risk management plan, among other project knowledge areas.
These project management knowledge areas are conspicuous by their absence in the way projects are undertaken in Zimbabwe. For example, we are made to understand that the Trababalas Interchange (formerly Mbudzi) missed its completion time-frame which was the first quarter of 2024 because of court cases involving people who were going to be affected by the disruptive nature of the project.
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These people wanted the correct value of their properties for compensation purposes. A tooth-pick analysis of this argument shows that from the initiation and planning stages of the project there was no stakeholder engagement. Pursuant to the above argumentation, if the primary stakeholders, those who were going to be affected by the project had been engaged as informed by the stakeholder theory in project management, there was surely going be no delays because of protestations from affected stakeholders.
Project management requires transparency, communication and accountability between and among all stakeholders. In project management, accountability should not be optional.
In Zimbabwe accountability is unfortunately optional. For example, while procurement procedures are a sine qua non when undertaking national projects as dictated by the Procurement Authority of Zimbabwe (Praz), the construction, mining and health sectors are exempted from the scrutiny of Praz. The project procurement management area in this case is selectively applied in Zimbabwe and in the process the citizens of Zimbabwe are bamboozled and left wondering as to who the risk owners for project outcomes are.
Any project that is undertaken either at micro or macro level should come with a risk register that considers risk identification, analysis, risk responses, monitoring and control, risk owners, categories of risks, risk values, likelihood (probability) and severity of risks.
A risk analysis and management plan ought to be integral to any project implementation and this risk analysis and management plan should anticipate both internal and external risks and deal with primary and secondary risks. In the case of Zimbabwe, internal risks may be associated with tenderpreneurship, lack of beneficiary (stakeholder) contact monitoring, bureaucratic webs that eat into time-lines of the project, having square pegs for round holes (employing people without the right skills-set for the project), regulatory shifts and external risks may be defined according to external factors like political, economic, social, technological, ecological, legal and globalisation (PESTELG) underpinning the project.
Zimbabwe is not an island unto itself; it is bound to be affected by geoeconomics and geopolitics. For example, trumponomics has affected the humanitarian and health projects in Zimbabwe through the withdrawal of USAid from the international scene and the Russo-Ukraine war has had a tectonic shift in the focus of development finance as more and more physical, material, financial and human resources are being channelled towards this war-effort.
The essence of a project financial management plan in Zimbabwe given PESTELG cannot be ignored, hence the need for any national project to work with historical and inflation adjusted figures as a way of cushioning projects from both national and global shocks. When projects fail to meet their end-dates, they cease to be projects, they graduate into routines which may become cash cows for some shadowy figures behind those projects. The Zimbabwean government should build into its strategic plans, project planning and management as a pillar for staff development.
Every government employee at a national level who engages in any project should be conversant with the life cycle of the project and project stakeholder management. Projects may be timeous or ephemeral, but they leave permanent footprints in the locations in which they are undertaken. Square pegs for square holes and round pegs for round holes for project success.
- Nicholas Aribino is a student of Project Planning and Management at the Zimbabwe National Defence University. He writes in his personal capacity.
