By Gabriel Manyati
“Chopper was correct. Indeed, State House has been far.” With those words this week – delivered nearly 27 years after the Movement for Democratic Change was launched at Rufaro Stadium on 11 September 1999 – Nelson Chamisa has reopened an old wound and forced a necessary argument. He recalled confronting the late Simon “Chopper” Chimbetu at The Point Restaurant in Harare, together with the late Learnmore Jongwe, over the song that warned that “kuState House kure”.
At the time the young activists treated the lyric as counter-revolutionary defeatism. They insisted State House was near, almost within reach, a short walk for a people’s movement born from the National Working People’s Convention and the labour movement. Looking back, Chamisa now concedes that the road has proved far longer and far rougher than the confident generation of 1999 imagined.
The admission is significant. Chamisa is not merely reminiscing. He is revisiting the foundational error of the opposition: the decision to convert a broad people’s movement into a conventional political party oriented towards parliamentary seats and local authority contests. In his telling, that narrowing of ambition diluted the original energy.
He now speaks of “retooling” a stronger citizens’ movement, one capable of challenging ZANU PF more effectively. In August remarks he went further, dismissing the Citizens Coalition for Change as “kid’s play” that “was never fully formed or consummated.” The language is sharp. It reveals a leader who understands that organisational fragility, personalised politics and the absence of durable institutions have cost the opposition dearly. Yet it also raises the harder question: is Chamisa genuinely redesigning the architecture of mobilisation, or is he merely searching for a fresher explanation for an old and stubborn problem?
That question cannot be answered honestly if we pretend that State House has remained distant solely because the opposition failed to organise. There is truth in the criticism that the opposition has repeatedly stumbled. Structures have been weak. Internal divisions have been chronic. Leadership has too often revolved around a single charismatic figure.
The collapse of the CCC after Chamisa’s departure exposed the dangers of strategic ambiguity and the failure to build institutions that could survive the departure of their founder. These failures matter. They must be examined without sentimentality. But they do not constitute the whole story, and treating them as the principal cause of Zimbabwe’s democratic crisis is a form of intellectual evasion.
The first important question is therefore not whether the opposition has been competent enough, but whether any opposition can reasonably be expected to take power when the ruling party has a long and consistent record of disputed elections, political violence, institutional capture and an explicit refusal to treat electoral defeat as a legitimate possibility. Opposition incompetence is real. Electoral dishonesty and manipulation are also real.
Political violence is real. The deliberate widening of the distance between winning public support and obtaining actual power is real. These are not identical phenomena, and they must not be collapsed into a single narrative of opposition failure.
The clearest illustration remains the 2008 election. In the March harmonised polls the MDC under Morgan Tsvangirai won more parliamentary seats than ZANU PF. Tsvangirai emerged as the leading presidential candidate. Dubious official results, released only after a prolonged and contentious delay, gave him 47.9 percent against Robert Mugabe’s 43.2 percent. Because neither candidate secured an absolute majority, a run-off was required.
What followed was not a normal campaign. It was a sustained campaign of retributive violence against MDC supporters, activists and ordinary voters in areas that had dared to reject ZANU PF. Human Rights Watch documented at least 163 killings, thousands of cases of torture and beatings, and the displacement of tens of thousands. Base camps operated with near impunity. Villages that had voted for the opposition were targeted for collective punishment. On 22 June Tsvangirai withdrew, declaring the process a violent sham in which supporters risked their lives simply by voting. Mugabe was declared the winner.
The subsequent Global Political Agreement and the Government of National Unity did not erase the central political fact: an opposition that had secured a clear electoral advantage was prevented, through organised violence and institutional obstruction, from translating that advantage into a transfer of power.
That episode is not ancient history. It remains the clearest demonstration of why State House has been far. Mugabe did not simply lose and hand over. The system around him ensured that losing was not an option that would be accepted. The pattern has recurred, with variations of intensity and method, across subsequent elections.
The 2000 parliamentary contest, the 2002 presidential election, the 2013 landslide that followed the GNU period, the contested 2018 poll and the 2023 election have all been accompanied by serious allegations of state media bias, abuse of state resources, intimidation, irregularities in voter registration and electoral administration, and the heavy presence of security institutions in the political process. Not every election has been identical, and ZANU PF has at times commanded genuine popular support. The recurring problem is the ruling party’s relationship with the possibility of defeat.
That relationship is captured with brutal clarity in the phrase still proudly repeated within ZANU PF circles: “ZANU PF ichatonga kusvika madhongi amera nyanga.” The party will rule until donkeys grow horns. Mnangagwa himself has invoked the late Simon Muzenda’s formulation, presenting it as a statement of revolutionary permanence rather than a mere electoral boast.
Earlier, the same political culture produced the dismissive “Vachingovukura, tichingotonga” – while they bark, we continue to rule. These are not casual slogans. They express a mindset in which continued rule is treated as natural, almost preordained, and in which opposition is reduced to ineffectual noise. When a ruling party speaks of power in the language of biological impossibility, democratic accountability becomes secondary to the maintenance of permanence.
The transition from Mugabe to Mnangagwa has changed some things and left others troublingly intact. The open, industrial-scale violence of 2008 has not been repeated at the same intensity. The language of reform and re-engagement has been deployed. Yet the underlying politics of permanence has adapted rather than disappeared.
Constitutional Amendment No. 3, signed into law in July 2026, extends presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years, effectively pushing Mnangagwa’s current term from 2028 to 2030, and replaces direct popular election of the president with election by a joint sitting of Parliament. The changes do not create a formal life presidency. They do, however, alter the timing and method of succession in a country where the ruling party has repeatedly been accused of resisting alternation. In a political culture that already treats defeat as unacceptable, such amendments inevitably raise the question of whether the constitutional order is being used to facilitate democratic succession or to make it more difficult.
Chamisa’s relative silence while these changes were advanced has drawn sharp criticism. His absence from organised opposition politics after leaving the CCC created a vacuum at a critical moment. That criticism is fair. It does not, however, transfer responsibility for the amendment to him. ZANU PF is responsible for its own constitutional decisions.
The deeper problem is the broader opposition failure: the collapse of the CCC, the absence of a clear successor organisation, the over-reliance on personal popularity, the gap between electoral support and organisational capacity, and the slow pace of serious mobilisation. Chamisa’s talk of retooling must now be tested against these realities. A new citizens’ movement will require more than rhetoric. It will need nationwide structures, local organisers, voter registration and education programmes, trained electoral agents, legal capacity, civil society alliances, internal democracy, and a credible strategy for defending the vote and maintaining pressure between elections. Winning votes is necessary. Defending the process and insisting on a transfer of power is equally necessary.
The central moral and political question remains. Why should Zimbabweans be told that State House has been far primarily because the opposition failed to build a better vehicle, when the country’s modern political history includes a ruling party that has repeatedly been accused of manipulating elections, deploying violence and treating defeat as an existential threat?
Opposition leaders must accept scrutiny for their organisational failures. Tsvangirai made mistakes. Chamisa has made mistakes. Those mistakes do not erase the distinction between political incompetence and the systematic refusal of a ruling party to accept the possibility of losing. Opposition failure is not the same as constitutional responsibility. Losing an election is not the same as refusing to accept defeat.
Chimbetu was right. State House has indeed been far. The road has been lengthened by opposition stumbles, weak institutions and strategic errors. It has also been deliberately kept closed by a ruling-party tradition in which power is regarded as permanent, elections are too often followed by disputes and institutional manoeuvring, and the language of permanence continues to shape political behaviour.
Chamisa’s new movement must be stronger, more institutional and more disciplined than the MDC or the CCC. That is necessary but not sufficient. The democratic challenge is larger than any single opposition leader. The opposition must build a vehicle capable of winning. ZANU PF must accept that it can lose. And Zimbabweans must stop confusing the opposition’s failure to reach State House with proof that the ruling party deserves to remain there forever.
The road has not always been long because the opposition did not know where it was going. Sometimes it has been made longer by a ruling party that refuses to accept that the destination belongs to the voters.
