By Gabriel Manyati
In the modern lexicon of Zimbabwean statecraft, transparency has long been treated as an inconvenient bourgeois luxury.
Yet, even by the opaque standards of the Second Republic, the events of this month have managed to startle a nation already hardened by decades of governance by ambush.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s sudden, unannounced departure for Minsk, Belarus, was executed with the kind of absolute secrecy usually reserved for wartime deployments or clandestine intelligence operations.
For days, the citizens of Zimbabwe were left entirely in the dark, their head of state having effectively vanished from the domestic radar without the customary formal notice.
Predictably, the vacuum was instantly filled by a maelstrom of anxious speculation. In Harare’s political corridors and across the digital public square, the secrecy fuelled feverish rumours regarding the President’s health, imminent cabinet shuffles, and brewing security crises.
More pointedly, it stoked the ever-smouldering fires of ZANU PF’s internal succession politics, as factions scrambled to interpret what this unheralded exodus meant for the balance of power inside the presidium.
At a time when everyday Zimbabweans are navigating punishing economic pressures, hyperinflationary anxieties, and crumbling public infrastructure, this casual omission of the public’s right to know felt like a profound betrayal.
When the inevitable criticism mounted, forcing the executive to address the uproar, the presidential defence was not an apology, nor was it a bureaucratic explanation. Instead, it was an astonishingly dismissive, laconic decree that exposed the foundational psychology of Zimbabwe’s ruling elite: “A king can always travel.”
When Presidents Begin to Sound Like Monarchs
To dismiss this remark as a mere slip of the tongue or a bit of grandfatherly hubris would be a grave analytical error. In politics, language is the mirror of the soul of power. When a democratically elected leader, bound by a modern, progressive constitution adopted by referendum in 2013, invokes the divine right of kings to justify a lack of institutional transparency, he is telling us exactly how he views his office. He is revealing that he considers himself not a servant of the republic, but its proprietor.
This is the manifestation of a monarchical political culture growing like a tumor within our republican system. In a genuine constitutional democracy, a president does not possess personal sovereignty. Sovereign power resides strictly in the people, who temporarily delegate a portion of it to an administrator through the ballot box.
A president’s movements, his health, and his diplomatic engagements are matters of vital public interest because they are funded by the public purse and affect the national destiny.
To suggest that a president can drift across borders like an unaccountable monarch implies that the state is his personal fiefdom and the citizens are merely his subjects.
The Psychology of Liberation Power
To understand how we arrived at this dangerous juncture, one must dissect the unique and often toxic psychology of post-liberation African presidencies. Liberation movements like ZANU PF did not begin as democratic parties; they began as military-political hierarchies structured around absolute loyalty, secrecy, and command. When these movements transitioned from the bush to the state house in 1980, they brought this vanguard mentality with them.
Over nearly half a century, this ethos has mutated into an ideology of permanent entitlement. The ruling elite view the Zimbabwean state not as a continuous legal entity to be stewarded, but as a historical prize won through the blood of the liberation struggle. Because they delivered the nation from colonial bondage, they believe they possess a quasi-sacred authority that stands permanently above the mundane checks and balances of a constitutional republic.
In this distorted worldview, institutional accountability is viewed with deep suspicion, interpreted either as Western-sponsored subversion or as an insult to historical patriarchs. The liberation credential becomes an eternal blank cheque. When President Mnangagwa aligns his executive privilege with kingship, he is drawing directly from this well of liberation mythology, where the line between the ruling party, the state, and the person of the leader is entirely erased.
A Republic Cannot Be Governed Like a Royal Court
This mindset explains why Harare finds such a comfortable ideological soulmate in Minsk. The growing, highly personalised relationship between President Mnangagwa and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko – underlined by the recently ratified 2026–2030 strategic cooperation roadmap – is deeply symbolic. Belarus has become highly critical to Zimbabwe’s sanctions-era survival, providing vital interventions in agricultural mechanisation, mining partnerships, and opaque security cooperation.
Yet, it is no coincidence that our executive feels most at home with a regime famously dubbed “Europe’s last dictatorship.” By mirroring the hyper-centralised, deeply secretive governance style of Lukashenko, the Zimbabwean presidency signals its preference for a world where executive whim overrides institutional oversight. The trilateral port discussions involving Mozambique and Belarus are negotiated not in the open light of parliamentary debate, but through the closed-door diplomacy of elite networks.
But Zimbabwe is legally and historically a republic. The foundational promise of 1980 was the destruction of minority rule and the birth of a nation rooted in the egalitarian concept of one person, one vote. The language of kingship fundamentally clashes with the very concept of citizenship. A citizen has the right to demand answers; a subject can only beg for graces.
When the state becomes so personalised that routine presidential movements trigger systemic panic regarding military alignments and succession battles, it is a symptom of severe institutional decay. We are no longer observing the operations of a modern constitutional democracy; we are watching the anxious court politics of a royal palace.
The Danger of Personalised Rule
The ultimate tragedy of the post-colonial African state is when it replaces an external oppressor with a domestic royalty. Democratic legitimacy does not come from the battlefields of the 1970s; it must be continuously earned from the citizens in the present. Even the greatest heroes of the liberation struggle remain strictly subject to constitutional restraint. No amount of historical sacrifice can legitimise the erosion of republican accountability.
The greatest threat to Zimbabwe’s future is not merely our well-documented economic hardships or systemic corruption. It is the quiet, insidious normalisation of untouchable power. If we accept the premise that our leaders are monarchs who operate beyond the purview of the public, we surrender the republic itself.
Zimbabweans did not fight a brutal war against colonial minority domination and the quasi-monarchical overreach of the British Crown just to install a domestic dynasty in Harare. Mr. President, you are an elected official, a temporary custodian of a constitutional office, and an accountable public servant.
You are not a king, and it is high time the state you lead begins to remember the difference.
