WHAT KILLS POLITICS IN ZIMBABWE

By Felistas Muza

Ask what is wrong with Zimbabwean politics and you will get an answer within seconds. ZANU-PF, most will say. The rigging. The soldiers. The men in unmarked cars. All of that is real and documented, and none of it is the whole answer, because a system does not stay this stuck for this long on the strength of one party's misconduct alone. Something more systemic is at work. Politics in Zimbabwe is not simply defeated. It is killed, repeatedly, by a small number of mechanisms that operate whoever happens to be holding the megaphone.

THE CULT OF THE FOUNDER

Zimbabwe's opposition has an extraordinary talent for building movements and almost no record of building institutions. The line runs from the original MDC through the MDC Alliance to the Citizens Coalition for Change, and now to Nelson Chamisa's Agenda 2026 — each iteration born out of the wreckage of the last, each organised around a founder rather than a rulebook.

The August 2026 exchange between Chamisa and the journalist Hopewell Chin'ono put the problem in unusually plain view. Chin'ono argued that Chamisa could not blame infiltrators for the CCC's collapse without accounting for the leadership model that made infiltration easy, and offered US$10,000 if Chamisa could produce the party's legitimate constitution and leadership organogram. Chamisa's answer was that the CCC had been kids' play, never fully formed. He may be right. That is exactly the indictment.

CCC MP SUSAN MATSUNGA STARTED SUPPORTING CAB3 AFTER SHE WAS GIVEN A CAR AND MONEY BY CHIVAYO! 

A party without a published constitution, a transparent organogram, a candidate selection process or a mechanism for resolving internal disputes is not a weaker version of a party. It is a different thing entirely: a following. Followings cannot survive the removal of the person at the centre, and in Zimbabwe that person is always removable — by prison, by exile, by a court order, by a plane ticket. Every time the centre is removed, the whole edifice has to be rebuilt from scratch, and the years spent rebuilding are years not spent governing or holding anyone to account.

THE RECALL MACHINE

The second killer is procedural, and it is genuinely ingenious. You do not need to defeat an opposition at the ballot box if you can dissolve it afterwards through paperwork.

In 2023 Zimbabweans handed the opposition a substantial parliamentary and council mandate. Within months that mandate was being contested in courtrooms, in Parliament and in council chambers. Seats were declared vacant. By-elections followed. The opposition's parliamentary strength was hollowed out without a single vote being overturned. Whether you call this infiltration or institutional weakness depends on your politics, but the outcome is not in dispute: an election result was neutralised administratively.

The recent appointment of Brilliant Dube, once a Chamisa aide, to the Senate by President Mnangagwa has kept that argument alive. Supporters of the opposition read such trajectories as proof of capture. Others read them as proof that a party with no internal rules cannot tell the difference between a loyalist and a passenger until it is too late. Both readings point at the same vulnerability.

CHANGING THE RULES INSTEAD OF WINNING UNDER THEM

The third mechanism is the one that dominated 2026. The Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 3) Act, signed into law on 7 July, replaced the direct popular election of the President with election by a joint sitting of Parliament and extended presidential and parliamentary terms from five years to seven, applied to the incumbent.

The government's case was that these were constructive reforms — measures to reinforce constitutional governance, reduce what it termed election-related toxicity, and provide the policy continuity needed for Vision 2030's target of upper-middle-income status. That case deserves to be stated fairly, because a substantial number of Zimbabweans do want stability more than they want another disputed election, and the Bill passed by 216 votes to 42 in the National Assembly and 75 to 4 in the Senate.

But the effect on political life is not really contestable. Once the presidency is no longer chosen by voters, the incentive to campaign among voters weakens for everyone. Th

e Catholic bishops warned during the debate that the changes could weaken institutional independence and erode democratic accountability. Opposition parties, civil society and independent constitutional analysts made a similar argument about the narrowing of public participation. When the route to power runs through a parliamentary chamber rather than a polling station, ordinary citizens become spectators to a contest they were previously participants in.

FEAR AND ITS INEFFICIENCY

The fourth killer is the oldest. Amnesty International recorded that on 8 February 2026, Job Sikhala and 39 members of the National Democratic Working Group were arrested after police raided their meeting near Mutare and allegedly assaulted them, then released hours later without charge. That pattern — arrest, disruption, release, no charge — is the point. Nobody needs to be convicted. The meeting simply does not happen.

The same year brought an arson attack on the SAPES Trust premises in Harare hours before it was due to host a press conference against the term extension, and a fire at the Highfield home of a Constitutional Defence Forum member. Police disrupted an NDWG press briefing in Bulawayo. Five NDWG members were arrested in July for distributing food in Kuwadzana.

The cost of this is not measured in the people arrested. It is measured in the far larger number who conclude that politics is a hobby for people with lawyers, and stay home.

POVERTY AS A DEPOLITICISER

The fifth is economic, and it is underrated because it looks apolitical. Annual inflation reached 243.8 percent by the old methodology in December 2022. The Zimbabwe dollar was abandoned in April 2024 for the gold-backed ZiG. Most people survive in the informal economy.

Organising politics in that environment is expensive and precarious. Meetings cost money. Transport costs money. More importantly, hustling for a daily income consumes the hours that civic participation requires. A population working sixteen-hour days to feed itself is a population with no capacity to attend a ward meeting, and there is a direct relationship between that powerlessness and voter apathy. Economic collapse does not just impoverish citizens. It disenfranchises them without anyone having to pass a law.

THE EXIT

Add these up and you get the sixth killer, which is withdrawal. Roughly 62 percent of Zimbabwe's population is under 25, and that demographic weight has never converted into electoral weight. Research has found that around 80 percent of young respondents said young people were not fully participating in electoral and governance processes, citing apathy, violence and intimidation, lack of information, and being dismissed on account of age.

The reasoning is not irrational. Young Zimbabweans say the elections happen because the constitution requires them, not because they decide anything. That belief is self-fulfilling. Every citizen who acts on it makes it more true for the next.

IS IT KILLING THE RULING PARTY TOO

One correction is worth making to the usual telling. ZANU-PF is not the beneficiary of all of this; it is also a victim of it. Its own succession question has been fought through proxies, expulsions and war veterans rather than through any internal democratic mechanism. Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga's opposition to the 2030 project and his reported snubbing of a politburo meeting, the expelled war veteran Blessed Geza calling for the President's resignation from outside the structures — these are not the symptoms of a healthy governing party. They are the same disease: a political culture in which nothing is settled by rules and everything is settled by personalities, patronage and force.

WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY HELP

The uncomfortable conclusion is that most of what kills Zimbabwean politics could be survived if the country's political vehicles were built differently. Repression is real, but repression is much more lethal against organisations that have no written constitution, no transparent finances, no succession plan and no way to discipline their own members. Infiltration is real, but infiltration works best where authority is undocumented and can therefore be claimed by whoever moves fastest.

That is not a glamorous programme. Nobody fills a stadium demanding an internal dispute-resolution procedure. But movements that depend entirely on the charisma and physical liberty of one person will keep dying the moment that person is jailed, exiled, discredited or simply grows tired — and Zimbabwe has now watched that happen enough times to stop treating it as bad luck.

 Felistas Muza writes in her capacity as an Independent Political,Social and Economic Analyst!

Permission to publish this Opinion Piece has been fully granted by the Author

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