I write this article not as an academic critic of corporate governance, but as a former investment analyst and investment banker, and as a minority shareholder in the majority of Zimbabwe’s listed companies. I have spent years analysing financial statements, attending annual general meetings, reviewing board reports, and observing how governance decisions — often justified as “best practice”—have steadily hollowed out Zimbabwe’s industrial base.
Zimbabwe’s deindustrialisation did not occur overnight, nor was it inevitable. It is the cumulative result of boardroom decisions taken under a governance framework that is formally compliant yet substantively detached from the technical realities of industrial production. The prevailing composition of industrial and parastatal boards — dominated by accountants and lawyers — has been defended as prudent, risk-aware, and aligned with international governance norms. In practice, it has proven structurally incapable of sustaining industrial value.
Governance practitioners typically argue that boards are not meant to “run the business,” and therefore do not require deep technical expertise. Management, they contend, supplies operational knowledge, while the board provides oversight, financial discipline, and compliance assurance. This distinction may hold in asset-light service businesses. It breaks down entirely in capital-intensive industrial enterprises, where strategy, risk, and performance are inseparable from engineering reality.
Industry is not governed through abstraction. Power stations, factories, mines, railways, water treatment plants, and processing facilities are complex engineering systems with finite lifecycles, physical failure modes, and non-negotiable maintenance requirements. Decisions on capital allocation, asset replacement, production targets, and cost containment are, at their core, technical decisions. A board that lacks engineering competence cannot meaningfully interrogate management on these matters, let alone provide effective strategic direction.
Another common defence is that accountants and lawyers are best suited to boards because they protect shareholders by controlling costs, managing risk, and ensuring regulatory compliance. These functions are indeed essential. However, cost control divorced from technical understanding quickly degenerates into value destruction. Risk management that focuses narrowly on legal and financial exposure while ignoring operational degradation merely delays failure rather than preventing it.
In Zimbabwe, this imbalance is empirically observable. A review of Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE)–listed companies show boards of eight to eleven directors typically comprising three to five accountants, one to three lawyers, and zero—or at most one—engineer, even in firms whose core business is manufacturing, mining, power generation, or infrastructure. Accountants and lawyers routinely constitute 50–70% of board membership; engineers frequently represent zero percent.
This pattern is often justified on the grounds that engineers can be “consulted” or engaged at management level. This argument misunderstands governance. Consultants advise; boards decide. When technical expertise is excluded from the boardroom, it is excluded from the locus of power where trade-offs are resolved, priorities set, and long-term trajectories determined. Technical input that is filtered exclusively through management loses independence and strategic weight.
The consequences are visible in board disclosures. Annual reports are dense with audit opinions, compliance statements, and financial ratios, yet strikingly silent on plant condition, maintenance backlogs, system reliability, production efficiency, and technology renewal. Capital expenditure is deferred to protect short-term earnings. Maintenance budgets are cut to meet cash targets. Equipment upgrades are postponed in the name of prudence. These decisions are routinely framed as fiscally responsible, even as productive capacity steadily erodes.
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Corporate governance practitioners may argue that Zimbabwe’s industrial decline is primarily macroeconomic—driven by currency instability, policy inconsistency, and capital constraints—rather than governance-related. These factors are real, but they do not explain why the same economy continues to export engineering talent capable of running complex industrial systems abroad. Nor do they explain why, within the same macroeconomic environment, some firms deteriorate faster than others. Governance does not eliminate macro risk, but it determines whether firms adapt, invest intelligently, and preserve their productive base—or slowly cannibalise it.
In industrial economies, boards recognise that maintenance is not a discretionary cost, but a strategic investment; that reliability drives profitability; and that technological renewal is essential to competitiveness. Engineers sit on boards not as technical ornaments, but as strategic leaders who understand lifecycle costing, system constraints, and the operational consequences of financial decisions. Accountants and lawyers then play their proper role: ensuring that technically sound strategies are financially disciplined and legally compliant.
Zimbabwe’s governance model has inverted this hierarchy. Accountants, by training, are cost controllers. Lawyers, by training, are risk minimisers. Neither discipline is designed to lead decisions on production optimisation, asset integrity, or technological competitiveness. When these perspectives dominate boards in the absence of engineering leadership, the default posture becomes defensive governance: preserve cash, minimise exposure, defer investment. Over time, this amounts to asset stripping by neglect.
Machines fail not because they are obsolete, but because they are not maintained. Plants underperform not because markets are absent, but because systems are mismanaged. Industries collapse quietly while financial statements continue to be signed off as “going concerns.”
From a shareholder’s perspective, this outcome is indefensible. Zimbabwe’s listed companies have lost productive capacity year after year, not because shareholders demanded recklessness, but because boards failed to understand the technical businesses they were entrusted to govern. Value destruction has been consistently rationalised as prudence, and decay as austerity.
If Zimbabwe is serious about reindustrialisation, governance reform must move beyond box-ticking compliance and confront the substantive question of board competence. Industrial boards must be competency-based, not credential-heavy. Engineers and technologists must occupy a central role in governance, shaping strategy, capital allocation, and performance oversight alongside finance and legal professionals.
This is not an attack on accountants or lawyers. Their contribution is indispensable. But in an industrial economy, they are support functions, not the primary drivers of production, innovation, and long-term value creation.
Until Zimbabwe’s corporate governance community acknowledges this structural flaw and restores technical leadership to the boardroom, industrial recovery will remain elusive. From the perspective of an investor, an analyst, and a shareholder, the conclusion is unavoidable: without engineers at the centre of governance, Zimbabwe’s industry will continue to decline, regardless of how compliant its boards appear on paper.
