HOME Affairs minister Kazembe Kazembe pulled an act early Thursday morning that received plaudits from his principal President Emmerson Mnangagwa yesterday.
Kazembe joined a long winding queue disguised as an ordinary passport seeker, ostensibly to get first-hand experience on how touts were coaxing desperate passport seekers for a favourable position in the snaky queue.
His stunt was well received in Zanu PF circles where he was seen as a hands-on minister.
That this move was celebrated is sad as it is disheartening.
Firstly, it is preposterous to be seen to celebrate Kazembe’s move because in the 21st Century, no progressive government should be allowing its citizens to be queuing for passport application processes.
Those things can be simply done online. For a whole minister, especially someone who led the Information Communication Technology ministry not so long ago, to parade his backwardness in a queue full of desperate Zimbabweans is nothing to celebrate.
Secondly, that Kazembe woke up to go for that escapade hours before he was set to appear before a Parliamentary portfolio committee to answer to issues of identity documents smacks of someone representing a government that simply knows how to play to the gallery and nothing more.
It confirms that the government is not in touch with the plight of the ordinary people.
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We can be forgiven to assume that he had nothing to tell the esteemed committee hence the hastily arranged tout fishing expedition.
For someone who has been minister for long, he should have known better about the corruption that obtains at the offices and act without that kind of unnecessary drama.
By effecting an arrest of a tout who he said had demanded bribe from him, Kazembe is showing us all why this government has failed to tackle corruption which has become endemic in its corridors.
Corruption doesn’t start outside the government offices. It is housed in the government offices and as a minister, he should have known better.
His move can also reflect a vote of no confidence on the police force that it took him standing in a queue to expose the “corruption” happening under their noses.
In fact, he should have understood that the desperation for travelling documents by Zimbabweans is a sign of everything going wrong in the country, economically and politically.
Those are the issues that ought to be addressed.
Government must do its part to provide citizens with basics and a travelling document is one such.
By failing to provide that, and decent employment for the thousands of youths roaming the streets, government is responsible for the kind of acts that Kazembe came face to face with on Thursday.
All we saw when we looked at Kazembe in that queue was failure by the government, nothing else.
