Zambia is reorganising Government around the Grow Zambia Agenda. That makes sense. But there is a point at which dividing Government into smaller pieces stops making it more efficient — and starts making it harder to govern.
Government has proposed a new structure of 30 ministries, with Parliament expected to consider the proposal today. The changes would split several existing portfolios, including Energy into Electricity and Petroleum; Commerce, Trade and Industry into Trade and Exports, Industry, and Small and Medium Enterprise Development; Education into Education and Skills and Higher Education; and Infrastructure, Housing and Urban Development into Infrastructure and Urban Development and Housing.
On the surface, there is a reasonable argument for the changes.
Government cannot pursue a serious industrialisation and export agenda with an institutional structure that does not give those objectives sufficient policy attention. Zambia wants to produce more, process more, export more, develop skills, attract investment and create jobs. The machinery of Government should therefore reflect those priorities.
The Grow Zambia Agenda is, in that sense, the strongest argument for the restructuring.
But the question Parliament should ask is not whether the new ministries sound sensible individually. It is whether the system works better collectively.
That distinction is important.
There is a concept in Latin logic called reductio ad absurdum: take an argument to its logical extreme and see whether it still makes sense. Applied to Government, the argument for greater specialisation sounds straightforward — if a ministry is too broad, split it so that each part can focus.
But if splitting makes things better, why stop at 30?
Why not have one ministry for electricity generation, another for transmission, another for distribution and another for rural electrification? Why not have separate ministries for copper exports, agricultural exports and manufactured exports? Why not separate large enterprises from medium enterprises and medium enterprises from small enterprises?
At some point, specialisation becomes fragmentation.
And this is where the proposed structure deserves serious scrutiny.
The economy does not operate in ministries. It operates in value chains.
A manufacturer needs electricity. It needs transport. It needs skilled workers. It needs finance. It needs access to markets. If it exports, it needs trade facilitation. If it is an SME, it may need enterprise support. If it processes agricultural products, it sits simultaneously in agriculture, industry and trade.
Government can divide those responsibilities administratively, but the business cannot divide its problem into six ministries.
This means the proposed structure can only work if specialisation inside Government is accompanied by much stronger coordination across Government.
The proposed Energy split is perhaps the clearest example.
There is a sensible case for separating electricity and petroleum policy. Electricity has become a major constraint on economic activity and requires sustained attention to generation, transmission, distribution, tariffs, investment, regional power trading and the reform of ZESCO. Petroleum has a different set of challenges, including fuel imports, storage, strategic reserves, pricing, pipelines and supply security.
Giving each subsector a dedicated political and policy focus is therefore not unreasonable.
But then comes the institutional question.
What happens to the regulator?
Today, the Energy Regulation Board regulates both electricity and petroleum under the Energy Regulation Act of 2019. The ERB is not simply an electricity institution or a petroleum institution. It is the regulator for the wider energy sector.
So Zambia could soon have two policy ministries sitting above one energy regulator.
That is not necessarily a problem.
In fact, there is a strong argument for keeping one regulator. Electricity and petroleum are different markets, but both require specialised technical regulation, licensing, consumer protection and enforcement. Maintaining one regulator can avoid duplicating boards, management structures, legal departments and technical capacity.
But if Government eventually decides that the ministerial split also requires an Electricity Regulatory Board and a Petroleum Regulatory Board, Parliament should ask a very simple question:
What problem does creating two regulators solve?
If the answer is better regulation, Government should demonstrate it.
If the answer is simply that there are now two ministries, that is not enough.
The danger is that Zambia could create two ministries, two regulators, two boards and two bureaucracies to perform functions that previously sat within one institutional framework.
That would be the reductio ad absurdum of administrative reform: creating more institutions in the name of efficiency until the State becomes more expensive and less coordinated.
The same issue appears in the proposed split of Commerce, Trade and Industry.
There is a logic to having separate portfolios for Trade and Exports, Industry, and SMEs. Trade policy is different from industrial policy. Industrial policy is different from enterprise development.
But the boundaries will inevitably overlap.
Take a Zambian company producing processed honey for export. It is an SME. It is an industrial producer. It is an exporter. It may require standards, finance, electricity, transport and access to international markets.
Which ministry owns its problem?
Ideally, the business should not care.
That is what a modern public administration should achieve: specialisation behind the scenes and simplicity in front of the citizen.
If the opposite happens — three ministries, three sets of procedures and three sets of officials for one business — then the reform has increased Government's complexity rather than the country's productive capacity.
There is also a less glamorous question: money.
Every new ministry has the potential to create additional administrative costs. Ministers, permanent secretaries, directors, offices, vehicles, support staff, ICT systems and procurement structures all cost money.
The debate should therefore not be reduced to whether 30 ministries is "too many".
Thirty ministries may be perfectly manageable if the structure largely reallocates existing resources and produces better results.
Conversely, even 20 ministries could be too many if they create expensive bureaucratic silos.
The relevant question is:
What will this restructuring cost, and what will Zambia get in return?
That is the number Parliament should want to see.
There is also a question of performance.
A Ministry of Electricity should not be considered successful because it exists. It should be successful because electricity becomes more reliable, investment increases and businesses face fewer power-related constraints.
A Ministry of Trade and Exports should not be judged by the number of trade missions it organises. It should be judged by whether Zambia exports more products to more markets.
An Industry ministry should be judged by manufacturing and value addition.
An SME ministry should be judged by whether more Zambian businesses survive, grow, formalise and employ people.
A Skills and Higher Education ministry should ultimately be judged by whether the economy gets workers with skills that employers actually need.
The ministry is the input. The outcome is the point.
This is why Parliament's role should not simply be to count ministries.
It should ask Government to show the architecture behind them.
What functions are moving? Which agencies are moving? How much will the transition cost? Where will mandates overlap? How will ministries coordinate? What happens to the ERB? What are the performance indicators? And, crucially, what changes for a citizen or business trying to get something done?
The proposed restructuring can be defended as an attempt to align Government with the Grow Zambia Agenda.
And that agenda itself deserves serious support. Zambia needs to move from an economy that is heavily dependent on extracting and exporting commodities toward one that produces, processes, exports and creates productive employment.
But reorganising Government is not the same thing as reforming Government.
A new ministry does not automatically produce a new factory.
A new portfolio does not automatically create electricity.
A new permanent secretary does not automatically increase exports.
The institutional structure matters because it determines who is accountable for delivering those things. But structure is only useful when it improves execution.
The real test of the 30-ministry proposal should therefore be quite simple.
Will it make Government better at delivering the Grow Zambia Agenda?
If the answer is yes, Parliament should support it.
But support should come with conditions: clear mandates, transparent transition costs, strong coordination, regulatory independence and measurable performance targets.
Zambia does not necessarily need fewer ministries.
It needs less fragmentation, clearer accountability and better execution.
Because the ultimate measure of this reform will not be the number of ministries around the Cabinet table.
It will be whether, five years from now, Zambia has more electricity, more exports, more industry, more productive SMEs, more skilled workers and better public services.
Otherwise, we may simply have succeeded in reorganising the State without reorganising the economy.
