Minister Shamu, emulate Jonathan Moyo and shake up NetOne

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Minister Shamu in party regalia at a NetOne official event. On the left is NetOne MD, Reward Kangai.

Minister Shamu in party regalia at a NetOne official event. On the left is NetOne MD, Reward Kangai.Today I came across an interesting article published in the Herald entitled “Tolerating incompetence can be costly for Zanu-PF”, by Amai Jukwa. It’s not every day that you come across anything criticising Zanu-PF from the Herald or Amai Jukwa. This was one of the few cases and even that too failed to address the crux of the issue.The infamous Amia Jukwa was rightly challenging the ruling party to get rid of perennial failures in our parastatals. Jonathan Moyo has been first to make the bold move by removing the entire ZBC board and putting senior management on forced leave and although this is commendable, we should not expect heads to roll at other under-performing state enterprises, especially NetOne.

Just recently at the re-launch of NetOne’s OneWallet, Minister of ICT, Webster Shamu more or less assured NetOne’s MD Reward Kangai that his job was safe and he was not going anywhere, whether he performs or not. In fact this follows years of quite dismal performance by the mobile operator.

The event, which could have easily been mistaken for a Zanu PF rally (Minister Shamu was wearing party regalia by the way), was a clear indication of how the patronage system had crept into our parastatals. “You are safe”, the minister proclaimed amid cheers and applause from invited guests.

How can such blatant and shameful patronage be tolerated? Is there truly any form of accountability at NetOne? Is it the right thing to praise repeated failure and to guarantee a safe and secure job to the leaders who oversee it? How can a person who sat on a $14.4 million dollar loss in 2010 be safe? How can a person with a string of corruption and mismanagement allegations stretching back to 2004 remain on the job, with guaranteed safety?

This lack of professionalism means only a handful government owned companies make profit and the single most uttered excuse for failure is sanctions – an overplayed song. Underperformers should simply walk or be forced to and ministers like Webster Shamu should know better than to guarantee job safety to underperformers. In any case, the failures at NetOne reflect the failure of the parent ministry and maybe we should be looking at responsible ministries before the we look at the MDs.

11 comments

  1. Chikwama

    This is exactly how we got ‘HERE’ in there first place. This is not something new, its been happening since the late eighties.

  2. Liberty Dandira

    I think its an unfair recommendation, considering Econet can indulge in other extra-curricular operations as a way to push their business.That cannot be tolerated in a company like Netone. They just have to wait for approval from the Minister always for any new thing. Offcourse it happened that Prof Moyo had to do that to ZBC,but that was for himself to make news out of that. Noone was fired at ZBC after all

    1. Godobori

      Besides, we cannot celebrate what happened at ZBC before we know how the underperformers are being replaced. They could still bring other underperformers in their place. The rule in this country is that if one holds a party card, that is all they need. Nothing more. Each Minister gets his people in and wala they are in the honey!

  3. purple

    Netone is a serious underperformer…….. At one time it was the network with the widest coverage, and their lines were selling for at the highest price on the black market. But econet and telecel have closed the network coverage gap considerably. Even telecel is ahead of netone in terms of subscriber base. Obviously Reward cannot go anywhere else cause all his life he has been with netone and PTC before that. How can you expect the guy to comprehend a smart phone when he game into the game when it was just voice and SMS were not yet around.

  4. bimp

    where do people get the idea that NetOne is making losses? They may not be making 100 million + profits but NetOne did not make any loss in 2011, 2012 even half year 2013. Do your research first

    1. purple

      http://www.theindependent.co.zw/2012/06/22/netone-struggles-on/ Please read the article. Anyway if they were doing so well they wld not have been cut off by Econet. Everybody owes econet by they were failing to paying anything to econet. Obviously vanorarama to an extend because the benefit from routing calls to econet. on their own they would shut down

      1. bimp

        those were 2010 financials. Of course they are far behind their competititors they r not as robust but NetOne has not been making losses from 2011 financial year to date, Even the smaller sister company(by subscription & revenues) Powertel managed to rake in revenues of 22.2 million in 2012. Telecoms has been a cash cow since end of 2010. Out of all the parastatal service providers NetOne has been performing way better that its counterparts ZESA, ZBC etc, ZBC and NetOne cannot even be compared.

        1. ZESA

          Speak of facts bimp, isn’t Powertel under ZESA holdings? When did it become a sister company to NetOne?

          1. bimp

            OF COURSE they are sister companies they have the same shareholder! Powertel is a subsidiary of ZESA hence Zesa is the parent company. So yes if u did not understand zesa is a sister company to powertel and all other gvt owned service providers. good thing u asked

        2. Chiki

          Hauzivi zvauri kutaura mfesi enda unovhiya mbudzi varume vasare vachizeya nyaya iyi

          1. spencer

            iwe ndiwe wakatotsva iwewe unongadaira zvausingazive pasina kana fact. Bimp is correct and sounds even more intellectual than you. Zvembudzi zvapinda papi pacho

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