Tendai Ruben Mbofana
The notion that an economy can bypass formal industrial growth by mass-producing “job-creators” from scratch is one of the most pervasive, and damaging, economic illusions of modern Zimbabwe.
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For years, the ZANU-PF administration has championed short-term vocational programs—training youth in detergent-making, basic welding, or carpentry—under the lofty banner of self-reliance.
On paper, it sounds empowering.
In reality, it is a convenient political smoke screen designed to mask a catastrophic failure to govern, shift the burden of employment onto the victims of economic collapse, and hide the structural rot of corruption that has choked out genuine investment.
To ask a fresh graduate with nothing but a certificate from a brief workshop to launch a sustainable enterprise is to fundamentally misunderstand how successful businesses are built.
Can a person become a job-creator without ever being a job-seeker?
Historically and globally, the answer is almost universally negative.
Entrepreneurship is not merely the possession of a technical skill; it is the management of supply chains, cash flows, compliance, and market strategy.
These are life skills rarely mastered in a vacuum.
They are absorbed through exposure, mentorship, and the invaluable experience of working within established corporate structures.
Consider the traditional trajectory of Zimbabwean industry.
In a functioning economy, a young mechanic with ambitions of running their own garage would first seek employment at an established institution like Duly’s Motors.
There, under the supervision of seasoned experts, they would acquire top-class, standardized know-how on modern vehicles.
When that individual eventually transitioned into entrepreneurship, they brought a benchmark of quality into the marketplace.
Even that is not enough.
One can work at Duly’s for 30 years and still fail miserably at running his own company.
Just because someone has been working in the fields on a farm doesn’t necessarily mean they can subsequently successfully operate their own farm.
Running a business takes a completely different set of attributes: risk tolerance, strategic vision, emotional resilience in the face of market volatility, and leadership capacity.
It requires an analytical mindset capable of forecasting industry trends, managing high-stakes pressure, and making tough, uncomfortable decisions when profit margins are squeezed.
Therefore it goes without saying that during those years at an established company, the aspiring entrepreneur should also be learning the critical operational pillars necessary to run a successful business.
They must look beyond their immediate technical tasks to study cash flow management, corporate governance, supply chain logistics, regulatory compliance, and marketing strategy.
They need to absorb how an organization handles customer retention, navigates tax systems, manages labor relations, and reinvests capital for growth.
Technical proficiency under the hood of a car or out in the fields is merely the baseline; understanding the underlying mechanics of commerce itself is what ultimately prevents an enterprise from collapsing.
Today, the current policy framework attempts to short-cut this entire ecosystem.
What standard of service can a vehicle owner realistically expect from someone whose entire professional history consists of five years fixing complex, computerized modern engines under a tree?
What corporate governance skills or critical operational pillars can one possibly master when they jump straight into establishing a business with nothing more than a two-month “empowerment course” under their belt?
Without institutional grounding, these “projects” inevitably suffer from a deficit in quality, keeping local enterprises trapped in an informal, low-value cycle.
By romanticizing the informal sector as the ultimate destination for youth, the state is effectively setting up an entire generation for failure.
These small-scale initiatives are rarely vehicles for wealth creation or economic transformation; they are desperate survival strategies.
They are designed to keep a young person from starving today, but they offer no pathway out of systemic poverty.
A youth spending their days mixing dishwashing liquid in a plastic bucket is not building a manufacturing conglomerate; they are engaged in subsistence labor, denied the capital, technology, and stable market conditions required to scale anything meaningful.
The harsh truth is that there is no shortcut to national development.
An economy cannot be short-circuited by bypassing the foundational necessity of genuine investment.
To create real, sustainable employment, a country requires robust infrastructure, a predictable regulatory environment, property rights, and macroeconomic stability—the very elements destroyed by decades of mismanagement and institutionalized corruption.
When international investors and local industrialists flee, they take with them the vital training grounds where the next generation of business leaders should be learning their craft.
Pretending that a 90 percent unemployment rate can be solved by telling the unemployed to hire each other is a cruel abdication of state responsibility.
It weaponizes the concept of resilience against the citizenry, suggesting that if a young person fails to thrive in a dead economy, it is due to a lack of entrepreneurial spirit rather than a lack of electricity, currency stability, and rule of law.
If Zimbabwe is to break the cycle of poverty, its leaders must stop hiding behind the rhetoric of forced entrepreneurship.
The country does not just need more informal projects; it needs an environment where genuine factories can open, where corporate entities can scale, and where youth can first be proud job-seekers who earn a living, absorb industry standards, and master their trades.
Only then, equipped with genuine experience and institutional exposure, can they transition into the true job-creators capable of lifting an economy out of the doldrums.
Anything less is simply selling false hope to a generation that has already given up too much.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. To directly receive his articles please join his WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08