Zimbabwe Is Creating Jobs. Just Not the Ones That Build Anything.

Zimbabwe has been creating jobs. You just have not noticed because you were probably looking in the wrong places. You were looking in factories, laboratories, technology companies, farms, industrial parks, research institutes, universities, hospitals and construction sites, which was a rookie mistake of almost heroic innocence.

If you want to see Zimbabwe’s finest employment creation strategy, you must look somewhere more durable. Somewhere more protected from market forces. Somewhere where productivity is not always easy to measure, failure is not always fatal, and the job description often survives longer than the economic justification for its existence. You must look at politics.

Zimbabwe has created a remarkable number of well-protected, well-positioned, status-rich jobs since 1980. These jobs come with titles, offices, committees, allowances, vehicles, foreign trips, security, staff, influence and the institutional resilience of a cockroach wearing body armour. Even artificial intelligence cannot touch them.

While software developers worry about automation, accountants worry about machine learning, writers worry about ChatGPT, and designers worry about image generators eating their lunch with a fork made of stolen pixels, Zimbabwe has quietly developed the ultimate AI-proof career path: political office. No algorithm is being appointed Deputy Minister of Anything anytime soon. ChatGPT can write the speech, summarise the report, draft the policy, generate the slogan, create the manifesto, and probably produce a more coherent press statement before breakfast. But it cannot sit in Parliament, vote on a Bill, arrive late to a meeting, wave from a convoy, appear on national television, or be reassigned after failure with the serene confidence of a man who knows the chair may change, but the room will remain.

This may be Zimbabwe’s most successful job protection programme. Unfortunately, the entry requirements are not the ones your teacher mentioned. You do not necessarily need to be an engineer, scientist, mathematician, researcher, builder, administrator, programmer, manufacturer or agricultural innovator. You need proximity to power, factional intelligence, a slogan, a tolerance for meetings that could have been a WhatsApp message, and the ability to clap at the correct moment without accidentally revealing that your soul has left the building.

This is not an argument against politicians existing. Every country has politicians. Any civilisation more advanced than a nomadic tribe requires administration, representation, lawmaking, public finance, institutions and people who can sit in rooms arguing over regulations with the stamina of marathon runners trapped in bad suits. The problem is not that Zimbabwe has politicians. The problem is what the system appears to reward most reliably.

A country reveals its priorities through its payroll

A country does not need to announce its values. It reveals them through rewards. It reveals them through what gets funded, protected, expanded, defended and excused. It reveals them through the professions that receive dignity and the professions that receive speeches. It reveals them through the work that attracts serious investment and the work that receives ceremonial applause before being left outside in the rain like a dog that chewed the sofa.

Zimbabwe says it wants innovation. Zimbabwe says it wants industrialisation. Zimbabwe says it wants science, technology, entrepreneurship, research, productivity, manufacturing, value addition and all the other development words that look magnificent in policy documents. Wonderful. But people do not respond to speeches. They respond to incentives.

If the safest route to income, status, travel, vehicles, allowances, visibility and institutional protection is political proximity, ambitious people will notice. People are not stupid. They may pretend not to see the machinery, but they can smell opportunity quicker than a goat finding an unattended vegetable garden.

This is the uncomfortable question at the heart of this article: what happens to a country when political participation is rewarded more reliably than technical contribution?

What happens when the scientist has to beg for equipment, the engineer has to leave the country to build anything meaningful, the researcher has to survive on scraps, the software developer has to serve foreign clients, the teacher becomes financially humiliated, and the competent administrator is treated as a nuisance because competence has a terrible habit of exposing nonsense? Meanwhile, political office keeps multiplying.

This is not merely a governance issue. It is a national instruction manual. The system is telling young people where the protected path lives. Do not build the bridge. Become the person who announces the bridge.

The sequel nobody asked for, but the system clearly ordered

In Zimbabwe Does Not Lack Talent. It Wastes It., I argued that talent does not become national progress by magic. Talent has to pass through a system. That system must recognise it, test it, fund it, challenge it, protect it and deploy it.

This article asks the less polite follow-up question: what if Zimbabwe absorbs political operators far better than it absorbs builders?

Because that is where the issue becomes more interesting than the usual complaint about unemployment. Zimbabwe’s problem is not simply that it has failed to create enough formal jobs. It is that some of the most protected jobs it has created sit around power rather than production.

This also connects to the education and credentialism problem. In The End of the Memorisation Era, I argued that credentials lose value when they are not attached to capability. This matters here because if the system rewards titles, posts, committees and political rank more than demonstrated usefulness, education becomes a sorting costume. People chase the certificate not because it always produces skill, but because it helps them enter the status economy.

In a productive society, education should expand capability. It should help people build, solve, repair, design, diagnose, invent, explain and execute. In a status economy, education often becomes decorative armour. It helps people look legitimate while the real rewards are distributed through networks, proximity and institutional positioning.

That is how a country ends up with graduates who can quote theory, professionals who cannot find serious work, engineers who migrate, researchers who disappear into survival mode, and political offices that seem to possess regenerative properties. Like a lizard growing back its tail, except the tail has a fuel allocation.

The numbers are not imaginary

Let us avoid pretending this is just a feeling. Zimbabwe’s political architecture has changed significantly since 1980. Some of that change can be defended by population growth, constitutional reform and the ordinary needs of representation. A country of over sixteen million people cannot be governed exactly like a country of seven million people. That would be a stupid argument, and stupidity already has enough unpaid interns.

The question is not whether every new seat, office or title is automatically useless. The question is whether political office has expanded in ways that produced better governance, stronger accountability, better service delivery and improved national outcomes, or whether the expansion has often served as a pressure-release valve for political accommodation.

These figures are best read as conservative headline counts, not a full census of every public appointment. They count top executive offices, ministers, deputy ministers and national Parliament seats. They exclude councillors, ambassadors, commissioners, parastatal boards, party posts, special advisors, local government structures and most senior civil service posts. Cabinet and deputy-minister counts also shift after reshuffles, while some periods are difficult to compare perfectly because Zimbabwe’s constitutional structure changed over time. The point is not perfect equivalence between every role. The point is the visible direction of travel: the headline political machine became much larger.

A table like this does not prove that every office is unnecessary. It proves something more useful: whenever Zimbabwe has faced political pressure, conflict, representation demands or institutional redesign, one recurring answer has been more offices, more titles, more seats and more chairs around the table.

This is where the satire starts doing push-ups. Political expansion can always be explained in the language of inclusion, unity, stability, devolution, representation or reform. Some of those explanations may be valid in specific contexts. But explanations are not outcomes. A title is not service delivery. A committee is not a factory. A ministerial appointment is not a power station. A parliamentary seat is not a functioning water system.

At some point, a country must ask whether its political architecture is producing public value or merely reproducing itself with the quiet confidence of mould in a damp cupboard.

This is not a one-party disease

It would be convenient to turn this into a simple party-political accusation. Convenient, but incomplete. ZANU PF carries the largest burden because it has held power since independence and presided over most of the country’s decline. There is no serious way to discuss Zimbabwe’s post-independence political economy while pretending the ruling party has merely been sitting politely in the corner doing needlework.

But Zimbabwe’s political obesity has not been a one-party diet. ZAPU participated in the settlement that helped normalise the two Vice-President arrangement. MDC formations participated in the Global Political Agreement and the Government of National Unity, where the executive became larger, not smaller. MDC formations and other political actors also participated in the constitution-making process that produced the post-2013 parliamentary structure.

At some point, the pattern becomes bigger than one party. Zimbabwe’s political class, across factions and moments of crisis, has repeatedly chosen accommodation through more offices, more titles and more seats. When conflict appears, the solution is often not to shrink power, discipline power, or make power more accountable. The solution is to create more chairs around the table.

This is how political systems get fat. Not always through one dramatic act of greed, but through repeated compromises where everyone agrees that the solution to political pressure is another office. One party benefits here, another faction is appeased there, a coalition partner receives a post, a province gets a minister, a constitutional arrangement creates more seats, and eventually the system waddles forward with the confidence of a man who has mistaken weight gain for muscle.

The uncomfortable truth is that Zimbabweans as a political culture have tolerated this. We may complain about government being too expensive, too slow, too layered and too unproductive, but when political structures expand in the name of inclusion, unity, reform or representation, the outrage often arrives late, tired and badly dressed. We have become accustomed to the state getting fatter while the builder is told to be patient.

That is the real disease. Not merely ZANU PF. Not merely ZAPU. Not merely MDC formations. Not merely this faction or that faction. The deeper problem is a national political instinct that treats office creation as a solution to conflict, status anxiety and power distribution.

A country that repeatedly solves political tension by creating more political jobs should not be surprised when politics becomes one of its most attractive industries.

The AI-proof career guide

For anyone worried about the future of work, Zimbabwe may already have the answer. Forget coding bootcamps, artificial intelligence, robotics, data science, renewable energy, biotechnology, precision agriculture, advanced manufacturing and all those exhausting fields where actual skill is required and reality insists on marking your homework. Have you considered politics?

Politics is the perfect AI-proof career. An AI can draft a speech, but it cannot enjoy the motorcade. It can summarise a policy document, but it cannot sit on a committee that produces another committee to review the recommendations of the previous committee. It can detect inconsistencies in a budget, but it cannot look directly into a camera and say everything is going according to plan while citizens are busy buying candles with the emotional exhaustion of medieval villagers.

Most importantly, an AI cannot be appointed to a post whose function is never fully explained. That last one requires a human touch.

A country that fails to protect productive work will eventually train its ambitious people to seek protected status instead. This is not because people are evil. It is because people respond to incentives. If competence is expensive, uncertain, underfunded and socially unrewarded, while political proximity offers protection, the rational career calculation becomes painfully obvious.

Why spend twenty years becoming an excellent engineer if the person cutting the ribbon receives more respect than the person who designed the bridge? Why become a researcher if your laboratory is treated like a dusty storeroom with ambitions? Why become a mathematician if the country cannot find a serious use for your mind beyond examination papers and motivational speeches about STEM? Why become a software developer for the local economy if your best clients, best pay and best opportunities exist outside the country?

Why build the thing when you can become the person who says, “This project demonstrates our commitment to development,” while standing in front of the thing someone else built?

The system is not silent. It is speaking clearly.

When competence becomes an inconvenience

This also connects to The Cost of Competence. Competence is not cheap. Becoming good at anything requires embarrassment, repetition, boredom, failure, correction, humility, discipline and the willingness to be wrong in public before you become useful in private.

That is already difficult. A society can make it worse by failing to reward competence once it appears.

When that happens, the cost of competence starts to feel irrational. Why would a young person endure the long humiliation of becoming truly capable if the economy does not know what to do with capability? Why become excellent if excellence simply gives you the ability to see problems more clearly, suffer more deeply, and eventually buy a one-way ticket to somewhere that takes your skill seriously?

This is how talent gets wasted. Not always through dramatic oppression. Sometimes through quieter mechanisms: underfunding, indifference, delayed payments, weak institutions, promotions based on loyalty, procurement systems that punish honest builders, bureaucracies that treat competence like an allergic reaction, and committees that turn simple problems into ceremonial fog.

A competent person inside an incompetent system becomes a problem. They ask why things are late. They ask where the money went. They ask why the project failed. They ask why the numbers do not match. They ask why the same people keep being rewarded after producing the same disappointing outcomes with the consistency of a broken photocopier.

This is dangerous behaviour. The incompetent system prefers enthusiasm, loyalty, silence and decorative expertise. It likes people who can orbit authority politely, nod at the correct frequency, and translate failure into language soft enough to sleep on. Competence is sharper. It cuts. Many systems do not enjoy being cut.

Political jobs versus productive jobs

A political job is not automatically useless. Good politics matters. Good lawmaking matters. Good public administration matters. Good institutional design matters. Good public finance matters. A serious country needs serious political leadership.

The problem begins when political jobs become more attractive, more protected, more prestigious and more rewarding than productive jobs. That is when the signal becomes poisonous because young people are always watching. They watch who gets promoted, who gets paid, who gets protected, who gets humiliated, who leaves, who comes back with money, who speaks, who builds, who receives applause and who receives invoices.

If the engineer is underpaid, the scientist is ignored, the teacher is exhausted, the nurse is struggling, the researcher is unfunded, the builder is blocked, the programmer works for foreign clients, and the politician is chauffeured to explain development, the lesson is not hidden. It is written across the system in fluorescent paint.

The country may say, “We value skills.” The reward structure says, “We value access.” The country may say, “We need innovation.” The reward structure says, “We need loyalty.” The country may say, “Young people must build.” The reward structure says, “Young people must position themselves.”

Actions express priorities, and national actions express national priorities.

This is where Zimbabwe’s development conversation often becomes performative. We love speaking about scientists, engineers, mathematicians, doctors, technologists and innovators. They appear in speeches as though the country has prepared a throne for them. We invoke them whenever we discuss industrialisation, modernisation, productivity and Vision Something-Something.

But what does the system actually do with them? Does it fund them seriously? Does it protect them from bureaucracy? Does it give them meaningful institutions? Does it reward execution? Does it pay them competitively? Does it create markets for their work? Does it allow them to fail, iterate, improve and eventually build something useful? Does it place them near decision-making power, or does it invite them after the decision has already been made so they can decorate the process with technical legitimacy?

That is the difference between respecting technocrats and using technocrats as ornaments. A country that respects technocrats gives them authority, resources, responsibility and consequences. A country that merely likes the idea of technocrats gives them conferences.

There is nothing wrong with conferences, of course. Sometimes people must gather and discuss important matters. But if a country could develop through speeches, Zimbabwe would be Singapore with better sadza. At some point, admiration must become infrastructure. At some point, praise must become procurement. At some point, “we value science” must become laboratories, research grants, industrial partnerships, technical autonomy, maintenance budgets, reliable electricity and institutions that do not treat every competent person like an administrative inconvenience.

Otherwise, the scientist remains a decorative character in the national story while the politician remains the protagonist.

The national operating system

In The Most Dangerous Software You’ll Ever Run, I argued that some of the most dangerous software in our lives runs quietly in our heads. It is made of assumptions, habits, stories and mental models.

Countries have mental models too.

Zimbabwe may be running an old national operating system that says more appointments mean more control, more control means better governance, more governance language means more development, more offices mean more representation, more titles mean more seriousness, and more committees mean more action.

The problem is that an assumption can run for decades without being tested properly. It can become tradition. It can become administrative muscle memory. It can become so normal that nobody notices the absurdity anymore. Then one day you look around and realise the country has become extremely good at creating offices, but not nearly as good at creating outcomes.

That is a bug. Not a small bug either.

This is the kind of bug that survives version updates, cabinet reshuffles, policy launches, slogans, blueprints, visions, strategies, plans and national development documents. It hides in the operating system. It says: appoint someone. Then appoint someone to coordinate the appointed person. Then create a committee to harmonise the coordination. Then hold a workshop. Then launch a framework. Then blame implementation.

By the time everyone is finished, the original problem is still sitting there like a pebble at the bottom of a well.

The comedy is the diagnosis

It is tempting to treat all of this as merely funny. And it is funny.

It is funny that the safest career path in a collapsing formal economy may be proximity to political office. It is funny that while the world panics about artificial intelligence, Zimbabwe has built jobs so human, so ceremonial, so institutionally insulated, that automation cannot even get past reception. It is funny that we can struggle to create jobs for builders while never quite running out of positions for people who announce, supervise, coordinate, harmonise, facilitate and commission the work that builders are supposed to do.

It is funny in the way a leaking roof is funny when someone keeps forming committees to study rainfall.

But comedy is often the cleanest way to handle absurdity without losing your mind. The joke is not separate from the argument. The joke is the diagnosis wearing sunglasses.

What are we protecting from failure?

Here is the question that matters: what does Zimbabwe protect from failure?

Does it protect productive competence? Does it protect industrial builders? Does it protect honest administrators? Does it protect good teachers? Does it protect serious researchers? Does it protect engineers who tell the truth? Does it protect entrepreneurs trying to build real businesses rather than tender-shaped hallucinations? Does it protect people who can turn ideas into systems, products, factories, farms, code, machinery, exports and public services?

Or does it protect political office?

Because a country reveals its priorities by what it protects when things get difficult. If the economy is weak and political offices remain secure, that tells us something. If formal employment is low but political structures remain expansive, that tells us something. If the country struggles to retain engineers but maintains a healthy appetite for appointments, that tells us something. If productive people leave and political roles multiply, that tells us something.

We may not like what it tells us, but reality is not obliged to be polite.

Zimbabwe is creating jobs

So yes, Zimbabwe is creating jobs. It is creating jobs with titles, offices, committees, protocols, allowances, official vehicles, vague authority and remarkable survival instincts. These are jobs that do not become obsolete because they are not exposed to the same brutal test as everyone else: produce value, or disappear.

That is the punchline. It is also the tragedy.

A nation cannot committee its way into prosperity. At some point, someone has to build. Someone has to repair. Someone has to design. Someone has to engineer. Someone has to code. Someone has to test. Someone has to manufacture. Someone has to maintain. Someone has to teach. Someone has to research. Someone has to make the damn thing work.

Political office may coordinate national development. It cannot substitute for it. A country can survive bad speeches. It cannot survive forever on unbuilt things.

Zimbabwe’s problem is not that it has failed to create jobs completely. It has created some of the most secure jobs in the country. The problem is that too many of those jobs sit around power rather than production.

Until that changes, the ambitious will keep learning the same lesson: do not become the person who builds the bridge. Become the person who announces it.