Zimbabwe’s National Unity Day, marked annually on 22 December, commemorates the signing of the 1987 Unity Accord between Robert Mugabe’s ZANU and Joshua Nkomo’s PF-ZAPU. Official narratives present the agreement as the foundation of national reconciliation, a decisive end to post-independence violence in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands and the birth of a united Zimbabwean polity.
By Chofamba Sithole
But nearly four decades on, the enduring political polarisation in the country invites a more critical assessment. Far from laying the groundwork for inclusive nation-building, the Unity Accord functioned primarily as a political consolidation project, one that prioritised elite cohesion and regime stability over genuine reconciliation and democratic pluralism.
There is no dispute that the Accord brought an end to open hostilities, most notably the Mugabe regime’s Gukurahundi genocidal campaign. Communities traumatised by years of violence experienced relief as the fighting subsided. Yet peace achieved through political absorption rather than negotiated inclusion is a fragile foundation for unity. It was common parlance to describe the Unity Accord in terms of ZANU having swallowed PF-ZAPU, rather than the two former national liberation movements (NLMs) having effectively joined forces on equal terms.
PF-ZAPU did not retain its political autonomy or identity; it was effectively dissolved into ZANU-PF. The merger entrenched a dominant-party system and formalised ZANU-PF’s political supremacy. Crucially, the agreement itself gave real feasibility to Mugabe and ZANU’s long-cherished ambition of a One-Party State, signalling that the objective was not coexistence of political traditions but the elimination of organised pluralism.
In post-conflict societies, unity is not defined simply by the silencing of guns. Comparative experience shows that durable cohesion depends on truth-telling, accountability, equitable power-sharing and recognition of diversity. Zimbabwe pursued none of these systematically. There was no national truth process to confront the violence that preceded the Accord. To this day, successive ZANU-PF governments – from Mugabe to his successor by force, Emmerson Mnangagwa – continue to skirt the challenge of openly confronting their responsibility for Gukurahundi and acknowledging victims and all that is owed to them and the affected regions as a whole. No reparations programme. No institutional reckoning. Instead, the past was buried under a political settlement that demanded silence in exchange for stability through elite co-optation.
This model soon revealed its authoritarian logic. Political dissent did not disappear; it was criminalised. Edgar Tekere’s expulsion from ZANU-PF and the formation of the Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM) exposed the limits of tolerated political mobilisation and organisation. The shooting of ZUM official and veteran nationalist businessman Patrick Kombayi during the 1990 election campaign in Gweru, while challenging then vice-president Simon Muzenda, sent a blunt message about the risks of opposition politics in a system that conflated ruling-party dominance with national unity. The brazen destruction today of the opposition Citizens’ Coalition for Change (CCC) by the Establishment, testifies to the continuation of institutionalised intolerance of political pluralism under ZANU-PF.
The long-term consequences of this approach remain evident. Power has remained highly centralised, reinforcing regional and ethnic grievances rather than resolving them. Economic marginalisation in Matabeleland and other peripheral regions has persisted, feeding a sense that unity was proclaimed but never practised. Cultural and linguistic inclusion, a cornerstone of nation-building in multi-ethnic states, was largely neglected. Zimbabwe never invested seriously in developing shared indigenous languages as national bridges, unlike countries such as Tanzania, where linguistic policy has played a role in fostering cross-ethnic cohesion.
Perhaps the most corrosive legacy of the Unity Accord has been the systematic delegitimisation of political opposition. For decades, ZANU-PF has framed opposition movements not as expressions of domestic political contestation but as foreign-sponsored projects, alien to Zimbabwean identity. This rhetoric persists even when elections, including those under Emmerson Mnangagwa, reveal an electorate split in the middle, even by dodgy official records.
Urban Zimbabweans, who overwhelmingly vote for the opposition, are routinely portrayed as unpatriotic or disconnected from the “real” nation. In this framing, Zimbabweanness becomes conditional, measured not by citizenship but by political allegiance. State institutions, from the police to the security services, are routinely mobilised in defence of this partisan conception of national identity.
This is institutionalised exclusion! The trouble with post-independence ZANU was that it ceased to be a patriotic national liberation movement the minute elections were pronounced at the 1979 Lancaster House negotiations, the harbinger of Zimbabwe’s independence. Playing ethnic maths with possible electoral outcomes, Mugabe and the ZANU elites around him eschewed the Patriotic Front with PF-ZAPU as a united electoral platform, deciding instead to maximise party political power by contesting as ZANU, despite the insistent advice and exhortations of respected voices such as ZANLA commander, General Josiah Tongogara, who favoured unity with PF-ZAPU from the outset.
Since then, ZANU and its post-Unity Accord incarnation, ZANU-PF, became a political machine primarily designed to retain and reproduce power at the helm of the Zimbabwean State. Patriotism to country was replaced with loyalty to party and the so-called “Gwara remusangano” – the party’s way. Mugabe put ZANU-PF and his own personal power ahead of patriotism to Zimbabwe. Where ZANU-PF interests conflicted with the National Interest, it was and remains ZANU-PF’s interests that hold sway.
This is not a patriotic ruling party, itself a damning indictment considering ZANU-PF’s status as the historical party of national liberation! Like Mugabe’s before him, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ZANU-PF is not a patriotic organisation. That is why it remains psychologically and structurally incapable of fostering real national unity.
Rather, it merely demands acquiescence to ZANU-PF’s interests. Cue here this week’s furore against the poor ZiFM radio presenter, Miss Red, who has been summarily crucified by hordes of ZANU-PF apparatchiks for running a listeners’ poll that chose opposition politician, Fadzayi Mahere as “Zimbabwean of the year”. The opprobrium heaped on the poor young woman defied logic, but fits very well into the long entrenched psychology and culture of intolerance and bullying that is synonymous with ZANU-PF!
National Unity Day, as currently observed, functions less as a moment of collective reflection than as a ritual affirmation of ruling-party legitimacy. It celebrates the end of overt conflict without interrogating the absence of reconciliation. It elevates elite agreement over popular consent. It mistakes political dominance for social cohesion.
If Zimbabwe is serious about unity, the work remains unfinished. Genuine national unity would require confronting historical violence openly, accepting political pluralism as legitimate, distributing power and resources more equitably, and affirming that opposition supporters are no less Zimbabwean than ruling-party loyalists.
Until such commitments are made, National Unity Day will remain a symbolic exercise, commemorating not reconciliation, but the closure of political space. And unity built on exclusion is not unity at all.
