Clock is ticking on Zim’s grey dividend

By Gloria Ndoro-mkombachoto | 3h ago

Ndoro-Mkombachoto is a former academic and banker. As a Systems Transformation Strategist, she helps multilateral agencies, like the UN, IFC/World Bank, DANIDA, CIDA, GTZ, etcetera, future-proof their operations in markets where the rules are still being written. She also assists private and public sector companies in volatile emerging markets and constrained ecosystems, solve the complexity of institutional alignment by using frameworks that turn systemic constraints into growth engines. Gloria is the current Chairperson of NetOne Financial Services PLC, a subsidiary of NetOne Telecomms. Follow Gloria on YouTube @HeartfeltwithGloria or contact her on [email protected]

There is a peculiar contradiction at the heart of how Zimbabwean organisations treat their seniors. They do not realise that a significant number from amongst them are the new gold. In fact, they are the grey dividend for the country.

On one hand, companies speak endlessly about talent, institutional knowledge, work ethics and the difficulty of finding capable hands.

On the other, the moment an employee’s hair begins to silver, those same organisations begin the quiet, choreographed ritual of easing them toward the exit, restructured out, if popular, thanked at a dinner and handed a clock and a bicycle if they are lucky.

They are then replaced by someone twenty years younger who will spend the next five years learning what their predecessor already knew, cold. A significant chunk of these younger people do not even want to work. They spend most of their time engaged in productivity theatre, whle hustling elsewhere.

We are living through one of the most significant demographic shifts in human history. Across the globe, people are not simply living longer. They are living better for longer. They are staying mentally sharp, physically capable and professionally engaged well into what previous generations considered the twilight of life.

A person who retires at sixty-five today may have twenty, even twenty-five, viable and energetic years ahead of them. To flush that potential down the drain in the name of convention is not prudent management. It is waste on a staggering scale.

The government of Zimbabwe, to its genuine credit, recognised this. Effective January 1, 2025, civil servants in this country can now work until the age of seventy. The policy was formalised through the Public Service (Amendment) Regulations, 2024 (No. 3), gazetted as Statutory Instrument 197 of 2024, a dry administrative sentence that nonetheless carries enormous practical weight.

The revised framework provides a mandatory retirement ceiling of seventy, while preserving the option of early exit at sixty five for those who choose it.

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The Public Service Commission subsequently bedded down the changes through Circular Number 3 of 2025. Security forces were accommodated within structures appropriate to their operational character.

The decision was not without critics. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions registered opposition, which is understandable.

Trade unions are rightly cautious about policy changes that could, if badly implemented, block promotional pipelines for younger workers or keep senior earners in posts that might otherwise be refreshed. Those are legitimate concerns that deserve thoughtful management. But they are not arguments against the principle itself. They are arguments for careful execution of a correct idea.

And that correct idea is this: with the advent of AI, good old relevant experience is not a liability. It is, in fact, among the scarcest and most undervalued commodities in our economy. This brings me to the private sector. The question that no one seems to be asking loudly enough is we extended working life for civil servants, but the private sector has not taken the hint.

If the government saw sufficient wisdom in this shift to encode it in law, why are privately-held companies, parastatals operating outside the civil service framework and the broader business community, including the NGO community, still operating on retirement assumptions that were forged in an era when sixty-five was considered genuinely old? Why are Human Resources departments still treating the question of older workers as a welfare matter rather than a strategic one?

The honest answer is that institutional inertia is extraordinarily powerful. We build systems, and then the systems build us.

A retirement policy written in 1985 is still shaping succession conversations in boardrooms today, not because anyone consciously endorses its logic, but because no one has been sufficiently inconvenienced to challenge it. Added to this is the bias rarely spoken that older workers are expensive, resistant to change, technologically inept and somehow less than their younger counterparts.

Let us be clear about what is actually being wasted. When a fifty-eight-year-old accountant with three decades of experience in a sector is pressured into early retirement, a company does not simply lose one employee. It loses a map. It loses intellectual property. It loses someone who has navigated currency crises, hyperinflation, regulatory changes, client relationships built across years, internal politics managed with hard-won finesse and failures absorbed and learned in ways that no induction programme could ever replicate.

The twenty-six-year-old hired to backfill that role may be brilliant, in fact, I hope they are. But they are beginning from zero on a terrain the person who just left knew at the cellular level.

This is not an argument against youth. It is an argument for pairing youth with experience in structures designed to make both more effective. The most productive teams are not the most homogeneous. They are the ones where different kinds of knowledge, different generational perspectives and different risk tolerances are in productive friction with one another.

Globally, the evidence is accumulating. Research from institutions, including the OECD and the McKinsey Global Institute has consistently shown that age-diverse organisations outperform those that skew toward narrow generational bands.

Older workers tend to demonstrate greater reliability, lower rates of absenteeism, stronger customer empathy and are significantly adaptable when their organisations invest in them meaningfully.

The assumption that a sixty-eight-year-old cannot learn new systems is, in most cases, not a finding. It is a prejudice that becomes self-fulfilling when organisations stop investing in the development of anyone past fifty.

Zimbabwe’s private sector has an additional reason to pay attention. We operate in a context of significant skills scarcity. The country has experienced sustained emigration of qualified and measured professionals. The pipeline of mid-level talent remains constrained.

Against this backdrop, the deliberate acceleration of experienced workers toward the exit is not just ideologically questionable but economically indefensible. Yes, jobs are scarce.

The formal sector has shrunk significantly. But, every experienced professional eased out before their time represents not just personal loss, but a national productivity deficit.

Zimbabwe’s private sector talks endlessly about talent scarcity. Boards lament skills gaps. HR directors commission expensive recruitment drives. And yet, sitting quietly at home, in the village or at their farms, is a generation of experienced professionals whose knowledge has already been systematically discarded in the name of convention. The government moved. It raised the civil service retirement age to seventy. The private sector has not even started the conversation. This is not acceptable.

To Zimbabwe’s corporate leaders, including universities and parastatals: your most experienced people are not a cost problem waiting to be solved. They are a competitive advantage you are voluntarily surrendering. Audit your retirement frameworks today. Ask honestly whether your succession planning is transferring knowledge or simply replacing bodies.

To the NGO community, you champion inclusion loudly in areas of gender, disability, youth etcetera. Age belongs in that conversation. Ageism is discrimination. It is time to name it as such, measure it and hold organisations accountable for it, with the same rigour applied to every other equity issue.

The Employee Share Trust model that the Innscor Group has built, shows that Zimbabwe’s private sector is capable of genuine, structural commitment to its people. That same imagination and institutional will, should now be directed toward keeping experienced talent contributing longer, on terms that work for both employer and employee.

The undisputed truth is, the grey dividend will not wait indefinitely. Experienced professionals who feel undervalued will find other uses for their remaining years. The question is whether Zimbabwean organisations will be smart enough to make them an offer worth staying for.

Practical steps to claim the grey dividend

There are practical steps the private sector could begin taking today.

First, retirement frameworks should be rebuilt around capability and choice. Where someone remains capable, motivated and adding measurable value, the organisation’s interest is almost always better served by retaining them, whether full time, in a phased capacity or in a formal mentorship structure that transfers knowledge before it walks out of the door completely.

Second, recruitment and promotion pipelines should be audited for age bias. This is uncomfortable, but necessary. If every internal promotion in the last five years has gone to someone under forty-five, the question is not whether bias exists, but why it has been allowed to persist unchallenged.

Third, marketing and customer engagement strategies need to reflect the reality of the customer base. Zimbabweans over fifty are not a niche demographic. They represent a substantial and growing segment of both the workforce and the consumer economy. They make financial decisions, technology purchases, healthcare choices and leisure investments. Brands and institutions that continue to treat them as peripheral or worse, invisible, are leaving money and goodwill on the table.

Fourth, organisations need to have honest conversations about what they are afraid of. The resistance to extending working life often has less to do with genuine concerns about performance and more to do with succession anxiety, cost management assumptions and simple unfamiliarity with a different model. Naming those fears directly is the first step to addressing them rationally rather than allowing them to silently drive policy.