Governing a pandemic: biopower and the COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe.

INTRODUCTION: The extraordinary explosion of state power towards the COVID-19 response has attracted scholarly and policy attention in relation to pandemic politics. This paper relies on Foucault's theoretical differentiation of the political management of epidemics to understand how governmental framing of COVID-19 reflects biopolitical powers and how power was mobilised to control the pandemic in Zimbabwe. METHODS: We conducted a scoping review of published literature, cabinet resolutions and statutory instruments related to COVID-19 in Zimbabwe. RESULTS: The COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe was shaped by four discursive frames: ignorance, denialism, securitisation and state sovereignty. A slew of COVID-19-related regulations and decrees were promulgated, including use of special presidential powers, typical of the leprosy model (sovereign power), a protracted and heavily policed lockdown was effected, typical of the plague model (disciplinary power) and throughout the pandemic, there was reference to statistical data to justify the response measures whilst vaccination emerged as a flagship strategy to control the pandemic, typical of the smallpox model (biopower). The securitisation frame had a large influence on the overall pandemic response, leading to an overly punitive application of disciplinary power and cases of infidelity to scientific evidence. On the other hand, a securitised, geopolitically oriented sovereignty model positively shaped a strong, generally well execucted, domestically financed vaccination (biopower) programme. CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe was not just an exercise in biomedical science, rather it invoked wider governmentality aspects shaped by the country's own history, (geo) politics and various mechanisms of power. The study concludes that whilst epidemic securitisation by norm-setting institutions such as WHO is critical to stimulate international political action, the transnational diffusion of such charged frames needs to be viewed in relation to how policy makers filter the policy and political consequences of securitisation through the lenses of their ideological stances and its potential to hamper rather than bolster political action.

Lessons learnt from implementing the Good Governance for Medicines Programme in Zimbabwe.

WHO launched the Good Governance for Medicines (GGM) programme in 2004 with the aim of fighting the problem of corruption in the pharmaceutical sector. Zimbabwe adopted the GGM programme in 2015 and developed its own implementation framework (GGM-IF) in 2017 based on the WHO global guidelines and recommendations. Zimbabwe's GGM-IF emerged from; (1) home-based expertise, (2) extensive local consultations and (3) effective incorporation into existing institutions. The GGM-IF committed to implementing a focused programme over a 5-year period from 2017 to 2022 with the expressed goal of improving transparency and accountability in the pharmaceutical sector as a key enabler to improve access to medicines. Midway through its projected lifespan, some notable achievements materialised attributed to key success drivers, including mutual collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Child Care's existing Global Fund supported Quality Assurance Programme. Key challenges faced include limited funding for the programme, a shifting policy environment driven by a political transition and reorientation of priorities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This manuscript articulates 3-year operationalisation of Zimbabwe's GGM-IF highlighting the success drivers, implementation challenges and lessons learnt.