ON February 10, 2026, Zimbabwe’s Cabinet approved Constitutional Amendment No. 3. The Bill proposes to change how political power is chosen, how long it lasts, and how it is exercised and monitored.
I argue that this Bill marks a clear break from the promise of Zimbabwe’s 2013 Constitution. That settlement largely imagined a future built on limits, competition, and accountability.
This Bill moves in the opposite direction.
It points toward a dominant party constitutional order that values control over contestation. In such systems, the constitution no longer restrains power. It is redesigned to protect it, reproduce it, and keep it in place.
The first revealing sign of this shift appears early in the Bill. It is the extension of political time itself. Through amendments to sections 95, 143, and 158, the five-year electoral cycle is replaced with a seven-year term for the President, Parliament, and elections. This means Zimbabweans will not vote in 2028, but in 2030.
Reader, elite time is thickened. Popular time is thinned.
Even more tellingly, the Bill explicitly sets aside section 328(7) of the Constitution. This safeguard was designed to prevent a sitting president from benefiting from term extensions. Its removal allows Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose legitimacy has been contested since the 2017 coup, to remain in power until 2030.
The government’s defence of this draconian turn is thin. Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi argues that longer terms will reduce election mode toxicity, bring stability, and allow development programmes to run to completion.
But this reverses the logic of democracy. Elections matter not because they are convenient, but because they make power vulnerable. They force leaders to return regularly to the people for judgment. Stability, in this framing, is not earned through performance. It is manufactured through insulation.
Nick Mangwana, the government spokesperson, extends the same logic by calling elections a tax on development. This only deepens the error. Elections do not block planning. They discipline it. History shows that what derails development is unchecked power, not voters returning regularly to judge those who govern. No hashtag can substitute for that judgment.
Reader, this is a conscious constitutional amendment decision to stretch the distance between moments when citizens can reward or punish those who rule. Time becomes a tool of power. Longer terms lower electoral risk, delay accountability, exhaust opposition cycles, and raise the cost of dissent. In Zimbabwe’s dominant party system, extended terms protect incumbency rather than discipline developmental performance.
Only after this temporal insulation is secured does the Bill move to abolish the direct popular election of the President. Section 92 is repealed and replaced with a parliamentary method of presidential selection. This is conducted at a joint sitting of the Senate and the National Assembly, overseen by the Chief Justice or a designated judge.
Authority is no longer constituted at the moment of popular choice. It is negotiated through party arithmetic, coalition discipline, and elite accommodation. What is lost is not procedure, but authorship.
When 2030 arrives, we will no longer choose the President ourselves. We will vote for a Member of Parliament, and that MP will choose the President for us. This is not a small change.
It removes the most important decision from the hands that struggle, the hearts that carry pain and hope, and the minds that remember. It relocates that decision to closed elite rooms, far from the lives it will govern.
Government defenders have worked hard to normalise this shift. They point to countries like South Africa or Botswana, where presidents are elected by Parliament. But the comparison collapses on inspection.
In South Africa, Members of Parliament are elected through proportional representation. This limits boundary manipulation and keeps parliamentary power close to the national vote.
In Zimbabwe, constituency-based MPs are combined with parliamentary presidential selection and re centralised election control. The system draws advantage from both models at once. Votes are used where they help and bypassed where they do not. Reader, is this not having the cake and eating it too? This is not reform. It is institutional manipulation.
The deeper context is also missing. In those systems, parliamentary selection operates alongside competitive party alternation, independent electoral bodies, and regular elite turnover. In Zimbabwe, the same mechanism is introduced together with longer terms, re-centralised elections, and weakened oversight.
A democratising device elsewhere becomes an incumbency-preserving instrument at home.
These two reforms do not operate independently. Term extension and mediated presidential selection work together. They reconfigure both when power is judged and by whom.
This restructuring is reinforced by an expansion of presidential appointment powers within Parliament itself. Clause 6 amends section 120 to allow the President to appoint ten additional Senators, raising the Senate from 80 to 90 members.
These appointments are justified in the language of technical expertise. In reality, they perform political work. Because the Senate is elected by proportional representation, which has repeatedly denied Zanu PF a two-thirds majority, adding ten presidential appointees dilutes an electoral constraint without changing a single vote.
In executive dominant systems, appointed seats rarely function as neutral skills injections. They are co-optation devices. They reward loyalists, draw influential figures into the regime’s orbit, and quietly expand the executive’s dependable voting bloc within Parliament. As Gandhi and Przeworski show, authoritarian-leaning legislatures often operate as arenas for co-optation, widening support, and lengthening incumbency. Magaloni demonstrates how offices and spoils stabilise elite coalitions.
Expertise is the public language. Political insulation is the institutional effect.
Electoral governance is then fundamentally reordered. Clauses 9 through 12 abolish the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission and replace it with a Zimbabwe Electoral Delimitation Commission limited to boundary drawing. Core electoral functions are transferred to the Registrar General. These include voter registration, custody of the voters’ roll, and maintenance of registers. The Bill frames this as efficiency. In substance, it recentralises control over electoral infrastructure within an office historically compromised and closer to the executive.
The result is not cleaner elections, but managed ones. Certainty replaces competition.
Judicial changes follow the same logic. Clause 14 removes public interviews and competitive selection for judges. It replaces them with unchecked presidential appointments. Courts remain. What changes is posture. The judiciary shifts from an autonomous site of friction to a more predictable institutional partner. Law constrains power only when those who interpret it are insulated from those they are meant to check. When careers depend on executive appointment, incentives realign. Predictability replaces friction. Outcomes become foreseeable for the state and uncertain for challengers.
The security sector is also repositioned. Clause 15 amends section 212 by removing the army’s duty to uphold the Constitution and replacing it with a duty to act in accordance with it. The government presents this as a technical clarification. But the shift matters. Loyalty moves away from an independent legal standard toward interpretation by those in power. Civil-military theory distinguishes obedience to rule-bound institutions from loyalty to political authority.
Coup-proofing literature shows how regimes redesign security roles so constitutional order aligns with incumbency. What appears as depoliticisation by law becomes depoliticisation through loyalty.
Some institutions are not restructured. They are removed. Plural oversight is dismissed as duplication. Clause 17 repeals Part 4 of Chapter 12, abolishing the Zimbabwe Gender Commission and transferring its functions to the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission. The government frames this as efficiency. Gender justice loses its institutional home. Silence is renamed streamlining. Accountability is strengthened by overlapping institutions with distinct mandates. Feminist scholarship shows the same.
When autonomous gender institutions are dissolved, gender justice is not mainstreamed. It is diluted.
The distributional effects are neither accidental nor evenly shared. Senior political elites benefit first. Incumbent executives gain endurance without renewal.
MPs across the political divide acquire new leverage as presidential electors rather than electoral competitors. This creates tension within the opposition. Some Citizens Coalition for Change MPs campaigned on democratic alternation and now face a choice between principle and survival.
Executive-aligned technocrats and business intermediaries gain access to office without electoral exposure. Expanded appointed seats widen patronage pathways upward.
For Zanu PF, facing demographic exhaustion of liberation era leadership and a thinning presidential bench, the Bill buys time. Parliamentary presidential selection, combined with post-delimitation constituency engineering, allows reliance on managed legislative arithmetic rather than risky national elections.
The losses are diffuse but serious. Voters lose the amplifying force of direct presidential choice. Opposition parties lose the momentum of national contestation. Leaders rooted in electoral charm for direct votes find their pathways narrowed.
Women’s movements lose autonomous leverage. Ordinary people, from Checheche to Chachacha, lose electoral moments that have historically translated economic grievance into political pressure.
What emerges is not neutral reform. It is political reengineering. One-party dominance is stabilised. In short, authoritarianism gains and democracy retreats.
Reader, every major amendment moves in the same direction. Longer horizons of rule. Centralised authority. Narrowed oversight. Reduced uncertainty. No new limits on power are added. No reform introduces fresh risk for incumbents. No change makes leaders more answerable to the people.
The logic is unmistakable. Executive-centred rule. Elite-mediated legitimacy. Managed outcomes. The cumulative effect is alignment, not balance.
Yet constitutions do not rule on paper alone. Law can narrow the space, but it cannot erase demand. Authority may be insulated, but legitimacy must still be reproduced. History shows that when constitutions are bent to manage democracy rather than enable it, they generate pressures they cannot fully contain. The future is not closed. It is narrow but contested. That contest remains the terrain on which constitutional meaning is decided.
Reader, let us remember that when all is written and understood, the ultimate answer is action.
Dr Phillan Zamchiya is a political analyst
