WHEN the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission arrived in Mbare on Friday last week, led by its chairperson Jessie Majome, it followed protocol.
The delegation’s first stop was the Mbare housing office, where council officials briefed the commission as procedure requires.
But outside, drama was unfolding.
News that the commission was in the area spread quickly through the flats.
By the time Majome and her team stepped out of the housing offices, scores of residents had gathered at the entrance.
They were loud, insistent, determined to be heard. They wanted to take control of the tour.
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They did not trust the route prepared for the commission.
Council officials, led by housing development officer Edgar Dzehonye, attempted to guide the delegation to Block 3.
Residents resisted.
They wanted the commission to see what they live with daily, not what authorities were comfortable displaying.
This was not disorder.
It was desperation born out of prolonged neglect.
At Block 3, the conditions spoke without translation.
Blocked sewer system.
Uncollected garbage.
The stench of raw sewage.
Toilets rendered useless by the absence of water. This was not a sudden breakdown.
It was a result of years of neglect.
Still, officials attempted to move the delegation on, this time towards what they described as a renovated block.
Residents refused again. “You have not seen anything yet,” they said.
Majome chose to listen.
Abandoning the guided path by the officials, she walked with residents into the flats.
She stepped into bathrooms flooded with sewage.
She moved through corridors marked by cracked walls.
Walls that even some officials regarded with unease.
I watched their discomfort and wondered, as they did, how families continue to live in structures that appear unsafe, day after day.
From case to case, Majome and her team listened, often in disbelief, to the stories they encountered.
Two women proudly told Majome how they had dug a makeshift “well” at the foot of the flats to access water.
They spoke, not with shame, but with pride.
For digging the well, they became heroines of the community, rewarded not with compensation, but with a loaf of bread and a packet of biscuits from grateful neighbours.
This, they said, is how survival works here.
Other residents spoke of council officials drilling doors and locking out families who fail to pay rates, despite the absence of basic services.
Some described enduring more than a decade without electricity due to unresolved electrical faults.
Elderly residents questioned why they are expected to pay rates into their 80s while living without water, power or dignity.
Women, in particular, bore the heaviest burden. They spoke of fetching water from makeshift sources and carrying buckets up to the second floor multiple times a day.
It is labour that is invisible in council reports but relentless in real life.
One cannot imagine how children navigate communal toilets clogged with raw sewage, facilities shared by dozens of families and rendered unusable by persistent water shortages.
These are not mere inconveniences.
They are daily violations of dignity, health and safety shouldered by women and children.
Council officials, for their part, justified the conditions as negligence and, at times, down-played the crisis.
One explanation offered was that if residents are hanging laundry to dry, then there must be water supply.
Such reasoning stood in contrast to the residents' testimonies.
By the time the walk-through ended, the crowd had grown.
More residents demanded an audience with Majome.
She agreed. Applause erupted, not because solutions had been promised, but because someone in authority had finally agreed to listen.
Residents openly accused their councillor, Simbarashe "Dama" Chanachimwe, of dumping them.
They spoke in anger, with a loss of faith.
The residents were no longer appealing to their elected representatives.
They were appealing to a human rights body, hoping to be seen, not as a nuisance or a statistic that counts during an election, but as people.
The message from Mbare was simple.
People do not only need services.
They need an ear.
They need to be heard. They need to be understood by those in office, by leaders who grasp how people are actually living, not how reports describe it.
Until listening becomes a governing principle rather than a public relations exercise, the distance between those in power and the people they serve will only continue to widen.
What happened in Mbare was not chaos.
It was a community demanding recognition.
When citizens physically redirect officials to show them how they live, it is proof that leadership has drifted too far from the people.
The residents of Mbare are not asking for sympathy or charity.
They are asking to be seen, to be heard and to be treated as human beings.
Any system that requires such desperation before it listens has already failed its people.