We Need National Food Security Heroes Too
He did not carry a gun. He never commanded a regiment or led men across a battlefield. His war was quieter, longer, and perhaps more consequential than most people will ever know. Dr. Robbie Matongo Mupawose fought for something that does not come easily to any nation that has been deliberately excluded from it: the right to feed itself.
He passed away on Sunday, 21 June 2026, aged 90, and still — by every account of those who knew him — utterly absorbed by the question of how Zimbabwe could grow enough food for its people. He had been seized with that question his entire adult life. It is a question that the country has not yet fully answered. That, perhaps, is the most honest tribute we can offer him: his work is not finished, even now.
Zimbabwe has heroes. We honour them, and rightly so. The graves of liberation fighters carry the weight of national memory. We name streets and airports after them. We hold vigils. We teach their stories in schools. This is as it should be. But a nation does not live by political freedom alone. A nation must eat. And the men and women who gave their lives to the quiet, technically demanding, unglamorous work of feeding a country — they too deserve their monuments. Dr. Mupawose was one of them. One of the finest.
“Zimbabwe has lost one of its finest sons — a man of extraordinary intellect, humble spirit, and incorruptible character.” — Joe Mtizwa
The Education Of A Pioneer
Born in June 1935, Robbie Matongo Mupawose came of age in colonial Rhodesia — a country designed, in almost every structural sense, to keep people like him out of rooms like the ones he would eventually come to lead. That he did not merely enter those rooms but reshaped what happened inside them is the central story of his life.
He pursued his education with the kind of determination that comes when a person understands, viscerally, that knowledge is the one currency they cannot be denied. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree, then a Master of Science in Agronomy, and ultimately a doctorate — academic credentials that would underpin six decades of professional contribution. But credentials alone never interested him. What mattered was what they made possible for farmers and for the country.
In the final years of Rhodesia, long before independence changed the language of possibility, he became the first Black lecturer at Gwebi Agricultural College. The first. In a country whose entire agricultural establishment had been built to serve and sustain white commercial farmers, a young Mupawose stood at the front of a classroom and began, quietly, the long work of transformation. He was not making a political statement. He was teaching agronomy. And in doing so, he was proving something that the system around him insisted was untrue.
He served as Group Agriculturalist with TILCOR — the Tribal Trust Land Development Corporation — working in rural areas that the colonial economy had deliberately starved of investment. At one point he was one of only two Africans among a thirty-seven-member board. Two out of thirty-seven. He did not leave. He did not rage publicly. He worked.
He helped bring the Gowe Irrigation Scheme into being and wrote what would become a foundational text, Irrigation in Zimbabwe, followed by a broader study, Exploding Cities and Agricultural Productivity. These were not academic exercises. They were maps for a future he intended to help build — a future in which smallholders in places like Gokwe, Mutoko, and Chiredzi could rely on water, not just rain, to feed their families.
FFA Explainer:
Irrigation schemes are organised systems that bring water to fields through canals, pipes, pumps, or dams so farmers are not dependent only on rainfall. For countries like Zimbabwe facing erratic rains and droughts linked to climate change, irrigation is a cornerstone of any serious food security strategy.
Architect Of A New Agriculture
When Zimbabwe gained independence in 1980, there was an enormous amount of work to do and very few people equipped to do it. Dr. Mupawose was one of them. He was appointed Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture — a position he held from 1980 to 1987 — and then Secretary for Lands, Resettlement and Rural Development.
These were not just administrative titles. They placed him at the centre of the most consequential and contested question in Zimbabwean public life: the land question.
Land in Zimbabwe was never simply an economic matter. It was the wound left by colonialism, the grievance that had fuelled the liberation struggle, the promise on which independence stood or fell. To work on land policy in the 1980s was to work with history under your hands, under constant pressure from every direction — political, economic, social. Dr. Mupawose did not flinch from it.
He was co-architect of the first substantive land reform blueprint this country had. Those who knew his work said he “remained seized with this matter right up to his last days in Government.” That word — seized — tells you everything about the man. He was not merely processing policy. He was trying to solve a problem that mattered to him personally and nationally: how to return land while maintaining production and protecting the right of every Zimbabwean to food.
In 1986, Zimbabwe sent him to represent the country at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. That same year, he was awarded the Zimbabwe Farming Oscar — his country’s recognition that, in the field of agriculture, there was no one who had given more.
He served on the World Bank’s advisory networks, on the International Council for Research in Agro Forestry, and on the International Policy Council on Agriculture and Trade. These were not vanity appointments. They were acknowledgements, by the international community, that this Zimbabwean agronomist understood something vital about how food, land, and markets fit together.
“We have lost a hugely talented top public servant, an agric expert par excellence, a development strategist of the highest order and a deeply committed Zimbabwean.” — President E.D. Mnangagwa
From Ministry To Boardroom: The Corporate Years
When Dr. Mupawose stepped away from government, he did not retire. He brought his experience in agriculture and policy into the corporate world, and Zimbabwe’s boardrooms were better for it.
He became Chairman of Delta Corporation — one of the country’s most recognisable consumer companies — in April 1997, succeeding Dr. Silas Mundawarara. He would hold that position for thirteen years, stepping down in July 2010. Thirteen years at the helm through some of the most turbulent decades in Zimbabwe’s economic history. That longevity speaks to something rare: the trust and confidence of shareholders, management, and the public.
Under his chairmanship, Delta underwent structural changes that defined its future rather than just managing its present. The listing of OK Zimbabwe on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange opened access to capital markets and broadened the ownership base of a major retail chain. The spin-offs of Pelhams, and of Zimbabwe Sun into what became African Sun, were strategic corporate decisions that required the kind of long-horizon thinking for which he was known.
Perhaps most tellingly, he oversaw the creation of an employee share trust — a mechanism that gave ordinary workers a stake in the company they built. That was not a legal requirement. It was a reflection of his belief that those who grow and make things should share in the value created.
Simultaneously, from October 2002, he served as Chairman of Barclays Bank Zimbabwe. He took the helm during a period of severe financial pressure, guiding the bank through the ring-fencing crisis that threatened its viability, succeeding David Zamchiya and providing the steady, credible leadership that depositors and regulators needed to see.
He also chaired Agribank — where his agricultural expertise directly supported the institution’s mission of financing farmers — and served as Chairman of Ariston Holdings. Across these roles he modelled what Zimbabwe calls on its best minds to be: present, capable, incorruptible, and willing.
The Robbie Mupawose Hall at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair Exhibition Park in Bulawayo stands as a modest but permanent acknowledgement that he was here, and that what he built matters.
The Citizen
Public life can hollow a person out. The years of meetings, compromise, and bureaucratic attrition leave some people empty. Dr. Mupawose was the opposite. His commitment to Zimbabwe beyond the official corridors of power never wavered.
He served as President of the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society and was recognised as a Life Vice President — an honour that reflects not a single term of leadership but a lifetime of contribution to the farming community. From the livestock pens at Borrowdale to the agro-innovation stands that now showcase drip kits, solar pumps, and smartphone-linked soil tests, the society he served continues to be a mirror of the country’s agricultural ambitions.
He was co-chairperson of the National Economic Consultative Forum alongside Dr. Misheck Sibanda, contributing to national debate about economic direction during some of its most fraught moments. He served on the Utete Committee in 2003, which grappled with the consequences of the fast-track land reform. He was a patron of the National Hunger Concert in 2002, a civic gesture that placed his name alongside the most urgent humanitarian issue of that period.
Beyond the headline roles, he gave time and energy to the Botanic Gardens Fund, the Farmers Development Trust, Partners for Growth, and the Pro Africa Development Trust. These were not trophy positions. They were the commitments of a man who understood that a nation is not only its government, not only its economy, but its people and its land and the living things that grow on it.
The Man Behind The Portfolio
There is a phrase that Joe Mtizwa, the long-serving Delta Corporation chief executive who worked alongside Dr. Mupawose for many of those thirteen years, used to describe him: “utterly selfless.” In public life, that quality is vanishingly rare. It is easy to serve yourself while appearing to serve others. It is easy to accumulate — title, influence, wealth — under the cover of public service.
Those who knew him speak of a man whose ego was absent from his ambition; who was, as Mtizwa described, humble, wise, incorruptible.
President Mnangagwa, in his condolence message, said Zimbabwe had lost “a fund of knowledge and expertise.” The nation does not carry that knowledge in any database or archive. It lived in him — in seventy years of practical experience, scientific rigour, and hard-won wisdom about soil and water and food and markets and people. That knowledge is now gone. We should feel the weight of that.
He is survived by Amai Mupawose and their children. The government has accorded him a State-assisted funeral. It is the right gesture. It is not enough.
The Heroes We Need
Zimbabwe is a country of extraordinary agricultural potential. It sits on some of the most fertile land on the African continent. It has the water. It has the climate. It has, still, the memory of what it once produced — the granary of Africa, the breadbasket, the country that fed its neighbours. That memory is not nostalgia. It is aspiration. It is a description of what is possible.
Yet potential does not feed anyone. Aspiration does not plant a crop. What Zimbabwe needs — what every food-insecure country on this continent needs — is people. Technically trained, deeply committed, incorruptible, long-serving people who are willing to give their careers to the quiet, difficult, essential work of agricultural development. People like Robbie Mupawose.
Here is the uncomfortable truth that his passing forces us to confront: we are not producing them fast enough. We are not honouring them visibly enough. We are not creating the conditions — in our universities, in our public service, in our corporate boardrooms — that would attract a brilliant young person to dedicate their life to food security the way Dr. Mupawose did.
Why would they? Where are the monuments? Where are the named lectureships, the research chairs, the national days of recognition? Where is the signal to the next generation that this work is heroic?
We name airports after politicians. We hold state funerals for generals. We publish long hagiographies of business tycoons. Yet the woman who develops a drought-tolerant variety of sorghum that allows smallholder farmers in Tsholotsho or Chivi to harvest in a dry year — she often retires quietly and the country does not know her name. The man who spends forty years building irrigation infrastructure in communal lands — he dies, and we print a notice in the paper.
Across Zimbabwe, young agronomists are trying to follow in those footsteps. At Chibero Agricultural College and Lupane State University, students pore over soil science notes and drip kit diagrams, dreaming of turning dry wards into productive irrigation blocks. At the Pfumvudza/Intwasa plots outside Gweru and Hwedza, extension officers walk farmers through planting basins and mulching, line by line. Their work sits exactly where Dr. Mupawose spent his life: between science, policy, and the stubborn reality of the field.
Dr. Mupawose was ninety years old when he died. He had given this country seven decades of his mind, his energy, and his integrity. Zimbabwe honoured him — with a hall in Bulawayo, with a State-assisted funeral, with warm words from the President. We are grateful for those gestures. But we are also asking — we must ask — whether they are proportionate to what he gave. And more importantly, whether they are sufficient to inspire what must come next.
Food security is not an inherited right. It is built, generation by generation, by people who choose to spend their lives on it. We need to make that choice look worthy of a hero.
The continent is in the middle of a food crisis that will not resolve itself. Climate change is rewriting the hydrology of Southern Africa. Population growth is outpacing agricultural productivity. The window to build resilient food systems — systems that can absorb the shocks that are coming — is narrowing.
FFA Explainer:
Food security means that all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to enough safe and nutritious food for an active life. For Zimbabwe and its neighbours, it links directly to national development plans, AU Agenda 2063, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals on zero hunger, poverty, and climate action.
In this context, the Dr. Robbie Mupawoses of the world are not optional. They are essential. And we need hundreds of them, across every country on this continent — scientists in laboratories, extension workers on dusty roads, policy-makers in ministries, and ethical leaders in agribusiness boardrooms.
So let us do more than mourn him. Let us ask what it would take to produce another generation of people with his combination of scientific depth, institutional commitment, and moral clarity. Let us ask whether our agricultural colleges are resourced and respected. Let us ask whether our Ministries of Agriculture are places where talented people want to build careers, or places they pass through on the way to somewhere else. Let us ask whether our governments are investing in the irrigation, the research, the extension services, and the smallholder support systems that would allow the next Mupawose to do even more than he did.
Dr. Robbie Matongo Mupawose lived a long life and a full one. He was not perfect — no human being is — but he was, by the evidence of his career, genuinely good. He cared about his country. He worked for it without ceasing. He left it better than he found it, in the fields and the boardrooms and the policies and the institutions he touched.
Rest well, Dr. Mupawose. Zimbabwe heard you. We just need to make sure we are still listening — and that we find the courage and the vision to act on what you spent a lifetime trying to tell us.
We need food security heroes. We need them urgently. And the first thing we need to do is decide that we deserve them.
Dr. Robbie Matongo Mupawose | June 1935 – 21 June 2026 | Aged 90 | State-Assisted Funeral
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May peace be upon Robbie’s soul – one of the few parsons I know who never cared about the title “Dr.” I will miss his humility and how he used to be open to speak to me as a reporter at THE Daily News…🙏🏿 Rise if possible (RIP).