PM moves into the seat of power

The Herald, 19 March, 1980

AN empty desk, three telephones, a desk lamp and a row of settees and chairs greeted Mr Robert Mugabe when he first set foot in the Prime Minister’s office yesterday.

The richly carpeted and curtained office on the first floor of Milton Buildings, once the official office of the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Mr Ian Smith, and the former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, Bishop Muzorewa, showed signs of disuse.

The walls were stripped of all decorations. There was evidence that a cleaner had been neglecting his duty since Bishop Muzorewa moved out early this month after the defeat of the UANC in the independence election.

But Mr Mugabe did not mind the condition. He posed for the Herald photographer to take the first pictures of his first day in the office from which he will guide the destiny of Zimbabwe.

Officials hurriedly created a busy atmosphere in the office, spreading blotting paper and placing documents, one marked “restricted”, on the large desk.

“I don’t need glasses when reading,” said the Prime Minister as he took off his spectacles to read the restricted document.

The Prime Minister’s office moved to the first-floor room after Mr Smith took office in 1965, explained an official.

Previous Prime Ministers had used a room on the ground floor. Mr Smith moved from that room because of the noise of traffic along Jameson Avenue, added the official.

In the reception room the only relic of the Muzorewa regime was Miss Evelyn Kawonza, once the bishop’s personal secretary at the UANC headquarters and later the social secretary.

She said she had been asked to help in familiarising the incoming staff with the chores they will be expected to perform.

Once that is over, she believes, she will be asked to leave as the rest of Bishop Muzorewa’s personal staff has already done.

Former guerillas, now either bodyguards to ministers or general security men, kept a vigil over the Prime Minister’s office and ministers’ cars.

The Prime Minister, Mr Robert Mugabe, plunged into business with the Secretary to the Cabinet, Mr George Smith, in the Prime Minister’s Office, Milton Buildings, Salisbury, yesterday.

Lessons For Today

◆ Change is always a difficult process and in most cases it does not happen overnight but overtime.

◆ When change happens it is important to ensure that it is smooth and this involves having a proper handover-takeover process.

◆ The occupation of the Prime Minister’s office at Milton Buildings by Mr Mugabe was symbolic as it signified the change of guard from the colonial to majority rule. Delicate though this transitional phase was, it was a process that set off a chain of actions leading up to the country’s official declaration of independence on 18 April, 1980.