The recent exchange between speaker of Parliament Jacob Mudenda and Information Communication Technology, Postal and Courier Services minister Tatenda Mavetera over technology parks has actually done the country a favour, as it exposed the confusion we have in government when it comes to tech issues.
When Mavetera said the ministry is planning to establish a mini-techno park, Mudenda asked, “You want to start a little ICT park, why? That's defeating the whole idea of one centralised data centre.”
With respect, that mixes two different layers of the digital stack, a techno park and a data centre are two different concepts.
A technology/ICT park is, first and foremost, an innovation and enterprise facility.
Its job is to bring universities, polytechnics, start-ups’, industry, the private sector, and government into one place so that digital products can be conceived, tested, and commercialised.
It is where you run incubators, AI challenges, government technology (govtech) pilots, and even regulatory sandboxes.
A national data centre, by contrast, is a core storage infrastructure where government and national workloads are hosted securely.
One produces applications and traffic, the other hosts and protects those applications and traffic.
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In my own opinion, starting a modest, well-located tech park does not defeat the idea of a national data centre, it actually helps to create the very demand that will later make such a data centre viable.
The danger in confusing the two, as happened in the exchange, is that we will overlook building innovation spaces because we have not yet built “the big thing.”
That said, the speaker raised a legitimate caution that we must not ignore, Zimbabwe does not yet have a fully modern, standard, and reliable national data center for its own sovereign needs. So, how do we then jump to Sad-level ambitions? Regional hosting must sit on national readiness.
We cannot successfully invite hyperscalers or talk of regional/Sadc hosting when our own digital services, our own start-ups and our own AI experiments are not yet generating traffic.
We also have an underutilised High Performance Computing Centre, something that tells us the problem in Zimbabwe is not only infrastructure-based, but it is also based on the slowness in integrating ICT across ministries, creating workloads, and enforcing a central ICT architecture.
We cannot afford to have a national data centre become another underused asset.
What is of concern about what the minister said regarding the technopark is that she plans to have it housed at the Harare Central Post Office?
A techno park is not a political trophy to be placed anywhere, it must be sited where innovation is most likely to happen, close to a university or research corridor, on top of reliable power and connectivity, with access to industry and to government users.
Putting it in the wrong place for optics risks turning it into a real-estate project with Wi-Fi, instead of an engine for digital products (the same problem we have with much touted community information centres).
The following is what needs to happen in Zimbabwe for us to realise the transformative power of technology.
Get the basics right. You can’t have a “digital nation” if the internet is expensive or unreliable, electricity is not reliable, and basic digital literacy is low.
Connectivity, affordability, electricity, literacy, and infrastructure are what make e-government, AI pilots, data centres, and tech parks actually usable.
Fund research, development and infrastructure Innovation does not run on press conferences, it runs on money and skills.
If we want tech parks and dsata centres to be real, we need budget lines for R&D in universities and polytechnics, PPPs that actually close the gap, and a clear financing programme to upgrade the national ICT infrastructure.
Centralise and professionalise government ICT. Right now, almost every ministry has its own little IT department, its own vendors, its own standards and many of them operate almost independently of the ICT ministry. That is how you get duplication, weak cybersecurity, and systems that can’t talk to each other.
Other countries solved this by putting government ICT under one technical arm: • Rwanda has RISA under MINICT, a one place that drives government digital services.
- Singapore has GovTech under the Smart Nation Office, one place that builds and secures core platforms.
- Estonia uses the Information System Authority to coordinate state IT.
Zimbabwe can do the same, let the ICT ministry (or an agency under it) set architecture, cybersecurity, interoperability and hosting rules for the whole government, while line ministries focus on their content and services.
Stop playing propaganda with ICT.
ICT is objective and practical, either the network is up or it is down, either the data is hosted locally or it is not, either the innovation hub has power, bandwidth and mentors or it is just a building.
Tech moves fast, and when we waste time on political grandstanding, we delay real services to citizens.
In conclusion, Zimbabwe does not have to choose between a technology park and a national data centre, we need both.
First, we must fix the basics of connectivity, electricity, and literacy; second, we must fund R&D and backbone infrastructure; third, we must centralise and professionalise government ICT so that MDAs stop working in silos.
Once these are in place, a tech park will produce real innovation, and a national data centre will have real workloads to host.
*Darlington Chigumbu is the Member of Parliament for Budiriro South. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not represent the official position of the Parliament of Zimbabwe, any ministry, political party or organisation with which the author may be associated. The author can be contacted on +263719204155 or by email at [email protected]
