By Phillan Zamchiya
On Friday, I argued that Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 (CAB3) could make Zimbabwe’s next parliamentary election, possibly in 2030, its most violent. Why am I looking that far when contemporary debate is on immediate implications of CAB 3?
First, I really have very little new to say on the subject. Much of what I can add to today’s debate I wrote about four years ago. Second, I write in the hope that some of the analysis will inform political praxis ahead of time, before events overtake us again.
Reader, by 23 December 2022, I had already published an opinion article in NewsDay titled “ED’s constitutional coup attempt for a third term will backfire.” This was more than three years before CAB3 was gazetted on 16 February 2026. In that article, I examined the legal and long-term political implications of attempts to amend the Constitution and extend President Mnangagwa’s term of office.
The article partly drew on research that Professor Ibbo Mandaza and I had begun in 2020 into ZANU-PF’s internal politics following the 2018 general election.
I first presented that research at the SAPES Policy Dialogue Series on 4 November 2021 before publishing it in the Journal of Asian and African Studies as “Intra-Party Cohesion in Zimbabwe’s Ruling Party after Robert Mugabe.”
As I documented, on 18 October 2021, Tendai Chirau, then Acting Deputy Secretary of the ZANU-PF Youth League, called for the Constitution to be amended to allow Mnangagwa to serve beyond two terms. Chirau said, “…it’s very important that the current Constitution of the country is amended so that it can allow a leader to have more than two terms.”
I also documented the call by Tsitsi Zhou, Midlands Provincial Chairperson of the ZANU-PF Women’s League, in December 2022 urging Parliament to amend the Constitution to give Mnangagwa another term. Zhou said, “…we will tell those in Parliament to amend the Constitution to give him another term beyond 2023 because the President is a hard worker, and we will hand him another term.”
Youth and Women’s Leagues often nurture and sustain presidential power projects within dominant political parties.
By 2019, my analysis was that Mnangagwa feared another coup and no longer trusted Vice-President Chiwenga. After the 31 July 2020 protests, which he believed had been sponsored by the Chiwenga faction, I concluded that he increasingly embraced extending his tenure.
In my view, Mnangagwa had departed from what he had told even members of his own family, as confirmed by his daughter, Farai Mnangagwa Mlotshwa, on 28 July 2018 that he would serve “just one term”.
Reader, we can only hope that one day some analysis will inform political praxis in Zimbabwe before events overtake us.
That is why I try to write for the past, the present and the future.
