When Heroes Are Buried, Excuses Should Be Buried Too

On 2 January 2026, at the burial of Brigadier General (Retired) Mathias Tizirai Ngarava at the National Heroes Acre, Acting President Constantino Chiwenga took the podium in the full voice of the State. The occasion was mourning, yes, but it was also a public audit, of sacrifice, of governance, of what the living have done with what the dead paid for.

Chiwenga’s speeches in such moments usually carry the expected elements, salutes to the departed, an account of service, the invocation of the liberation story as a national adhesive. He did all of that. He traced Ngarava’s passage from schoolboy to combatant, crossing into Mozambique in 1976, training in Syria, operating in Gaza Province until Independence, later serving in regional peace missions, and rising through the ranks over decades.

But the speech was not merely biography. It was instruction, with an edge.

The line that mattered, and why it travelled

Midway through, Chiwenga framed liberation not as a trophy but as a debt. Ngarava’s generation, he said, did not choose war for ambition, they were compelled by the obligation to restore dignity, and that independence was purchased at a huge cost. That is familiar territory in official rhetoric. What was less routine was the pivot from honouring sacrifice to interrogating what that sacrifice has been turned into.

He asked, in effect, what kind of legacy we are now building, one rooted in sacrifice and purpose, or one rooted in plunder.

That single contrast, sacrifice versus plunder, is why the speech did not remain trapped inside the granite walls of Heroes Acre. It travelled because it named the national wound without dressing it up in euphemism. Zimbabweans do not need another sermon about values in the abstract, they need senior leaders to acknowledge, in plain language, the moral rot that has eaten away at public trust.

Even more striking was that Chiwenga linked that moral question to national planning and economic outcomes, insisting that the route to accelerated growth and the Upper Middle-Income Society target depends on ethical leadership, defeating corruption, and a whole-of-government approach.

This was not just a “be good” appeal. It was a claim of causality, that ethics is not an NGO slogan, it is economic infrastructure.

A subtle report of what he said, stripped of the obvious
If one reduces Chiwenga’s address to its spine, it carried four messages.

First, Ngarava’s life is presented as a template of discipline, training, duty, and institutional loyalty. In a country where public office is too often treated like a private harvest, “duty” is being reasserted as the standard.

Second, the liberation generation is framed not as a political brand but as a moral reference point, a cohort that confronted dispossession and exclusion, and accepted suffering as the price of restoring dignity.

Third, Chiwenga explicitly tied today’s economic agenda to integrity. He spoke about industrialization, value addition, inclusive growth, job creation, and livelihoods, but anchored the entire programme in the rejection of “selfish enrichment practices.”

Fourth, he ended with the harshest metric of all, that the real measure of respect for fallen comrades is not the beauty of today’s ceremony, it is “the quality of the Zimbabwe we will leave behind.”

This is why the speech landed. It did not only praise the dead, it indicted the living.

The “principled man” argument, and the test that comes with it

Now, let us be honest. Zimbabwe has suffered from an epidemic of fine speeches with weak consequences. The public is not short on promises, it is short on enforcement. So if you want the world to see Chiwenga as consistent and principled, the argument cannot rest on adjectives. It must rest on pattern and risk.

The pattern is clear in this address. He chose to talk about corruption and plunder in a setting that could easily have been kept safely “apolitical,” and he framed ethics as the hinge of economic delivery, not a side issue. That is not the language of a man merely trying to survive a news cycle, it is the language of someone trying to establish a moral frame for power.

The risk is also clear. In any political system, the closer you get to naming “plunder,” the closer you get to naming the networks that benefit from it. If that line was not simply rhetorical flourish, then it implicitly commits the speaker to a harder road, the road where anti-corruption is not selectively applied, not outsourced to slogans, not postponed until after the next internal party contest.

That is the real opportunity in this moment. Chiwenga’s rare public performance as Acting President becomes more than theatre if it signals an internal shift, a willingness to turn the liberation narrative from a shield into a standard.

The world should read this speech as a signal, not a eulogy

International observers often misunderstand Zimbabwean politics by treating official speeches as propaganda, full stop. Sometimes that is correct. But sometimes a speech is also a contest over the future direction of the State, fought in code, through emphasis, through what is finally said aloud.
In this case, the emphasis was unmistakable. Ethical leadership was not an ornament, it was the precondition for growth. The liberation legacy was not invoked to demand silence, it was invoked to demand higher standards.

And the most important move was the repositioning of “legacy.” Not legacy as medals, titles, and state funerals, but legacy as outcomes, jobs, livelihoods, institutions that work, and a country whose sovereignty is not mocked by poverty amid abundance.

If this is where Chiwenga wants to pitch his leadership story, then the world should take note. Not because one speech fixes a nation, it does not. But because in a system where ambiguity is often safer than clarity, clarity itself becomes a political act.

The only remaining question is whether the clarity will be followed by the one thing Zimbabweans have been denied for too long, consequences.

Because once you ask, publicly, whether we are building a legacy of sacrifice or plunder, you have already told the nation what the measure is.