On February 10, 2026, Zimbabwe’s Cabinet approved the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill, 2026 a sweeping set of changes that, if enacted, will fundamentally transform the nation’s democratic architecture. Presidential terms will be extended from five to seven years. The President will no longer be elected by millions of Zimbabwean voters, but by 350 Members of Parliament sitting jointly in Harare. The Zimbabwe Gender Commission and the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission will be abolished. Voter registration will be transferred from the independent electoral commission to the Registrar-General, a political appointee. Judicial appointments will be stripped of public interviews.
All of this is being done without a national referendum. All of it is being done without the people’s mandate.
Opposition figures have a name for what is unfolding. They call it a “constitutional coup”. It is difficult to argue otherwise.
The 2013 Constitution: A Covenant Broken
To understand what is being lost, one must recall what the 2013 Constitution represented. It was not a document imposed by politicians or civil servants behind closed doors. It was the product of years of negotiation, public consultation, and critically a national referendum in which Zimbabweans voted overwhelmingly to adopt a new supreme law designed explicitly to prevent the abuses of the past.
That Constitution was Zimbabwe’s covenant with itself. It embedded term limits precisely because the nation had endured nearly four decades of over-centralised power under Robert Mugabe, whose tenure was marked by an unrelenting drive toward a life presidency. The two-term limit was not a technicality. It was a guardrail, deliberately installed to ensure that no leader would ever again mistake the State for their personal estate.
That guardrail is now being dismantled. And it is being dismantled by the very leader who swore to uphold it.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa has repeatedly assured Zimbabweans and the international community that he is a constitutionalist. In 2018, he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he would serve only two five-year terms and leave office in 2028. His administration now proposes not only to extend those terms retroactively, but to abolish direct presidential elections altogether.
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The hypocrisy is staggering. But more than hypocrisy, it is a breach of faith.
The Removal of Popular Sovereignty
At the heart of Amendment Bill No. 3 lies a proposition so antithetical to democracy that it deserves to be stated plainly: the Government of Zimbabwe seeks to remove the people’s right to choose their President.
Section 92 of the current Constitution provides for the direct election of the President by registered voters. It is, in essence, the single most important expression of popular sovereignty in the entire constitutional order. The Bill repeals this section entirely. In its place, the President will be elected by Members of Parliament sitting jointly.
The government’s justification that this will reduce “election-related disruptions” and enhance “policy continuity” is a confession rather than a defence. It admits, implicitly, that the ruling party finds elections inconvenient. That the voice of 15 million Zimbabweans is an obstacle to be managed rather than a mandate to be honoured.
This is not governance. It is enclosure the privatisation of public power.
The ruling ZANU-PF party currently holds a two-thirds majority in Parliament, a fact that makes the Bill’s passage almost certain should it proceed to a vote. But that majority was secured in elections widely disputed by opposition candidates and international observers. And even if the 2023 elections had been beyond reproach, a two-thirds parliamentary majority does not confer the right to unilaterally replace the Constitution.
As constitutional lawyer Advocate Thabani Moyo has observed, “A constitution is enacted by the people, not by a single political party or faction. Parliament’s law-making power is confined to legislating for the peace, order, and good governance of the country. Replacing the constitution exceeds that mandate”.
The Evasion of a Referendum
This is why the question of a referendum is not merely procedural—it is existential.
The government has indicated that the Bill will undergo the standard 90-day period of public consultation following gazetting. But public consultations, however conducted, are not a referendum. They are not binding. They do not constitute the direct, sovereign consent of the people to fundamental changes in the basic law of the land.
The 2013 Constitution itself was adopted by referendum. That is the threshold Zimbabweans established for legitimate constitutional change. Anything less is a violation of the covenant.
Yet the government insists that no referendum is required. Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi, the Bill’s principal architect, has offered no constitutional justification for this position—only the brute fact of parliamentary arithmetic. It is an argument from power, not principle.
Jameson Timba, convenor of the Defend the Constitution Platform, has put the matter with precision: “Cabinet lacks constituent authority to substitute the will of the people on issues of democratic succession”.
Beyond Term Extension: The Architecture of Control
While international attention has focused understandably on President Mnangagwa’s term extension, the Bill’s other provisions reveal a more comprehensive project of democratic retrenchment.
The transfer of voter registration from the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to the Registrar-General is particularly ominous. The rationale offered administrative efficiency is transparently pretextual. The Registrar-General is appointed by the President and operates under executive direction. Placing the voters’ roll under that office concentrates immense power over the franchise in the hands of the executive. It is difficult to interpret this as anything other than the systematic weakening of electoral integrity ahead of future polls.
Similarly, the abolition of the Zimbabwe Gender Commission and the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission remove independent oversight mechanisms painstakingly established under the 2013 Constitution. These institutions were not luxuries. They were the institutional embodiment of Zimbabwe’s commitment to accountability and inclusion. Their dissolution, without public debate or referendum, is an act of constitutional vandalism.
Even the judiciary has not been spared. The Bill removes public interview requirements for judicial appointments, granting the President unilateral power over the composition of the courts. This follows earlier amendments that extended the retirement age of senior judge’s changes that were themselves challenged in court as a violation of the Constitution. The pattern is unmistakable: every independent check on executive power is to be weakened or eliminated.
A Manufactured Crisis
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this entire affair is its manufactured quality.
There is no national emergency requiring these changes. No groundswell of public demand for seven-year terms or parliamentary appointment of presidents. The 2030 extension project originated not in the expressed will of the Zimbabwean people, but in factional manoeuvring within ZANU-PF. It is a solution in search of a problem a solution that benefits only one man and one party.
Indeed, the project had visibly faltered by late 2025. An attempt to engineer a favourable court ruling collapsed. Plans to introduce an amendment bill in December were abandoned. Internal resistance within ZANU-PF itself, particularly from factions opposed to the 2030 agenda, rendered the move politically untenable.
It was at precisely this moment when constitutional defence had gained traction, and the term extension project had lost momentum that the Bill was resurrected and rushed through Cabinet.
This is not reform. It is rescuing a political project saved from collapse by the very parliamentary majority that was meant to represent the people’s will.
The Regional and International Dimension
Zimbabwe does not exist in a vacuum. The Southern African Development Community, the African Union, and Zimbabwe’s international partners have all invested considerable diplomatic capital in encouraging the country’s democratic recovery since 2017.
That recovery was always fragile. But with this Bill, the Mnangagwa administration has signalled that its commitment to constitutionalism was conditional all along. The language of “re-engagement” and “reform” has been revealed as instrumental useful for securing sanctions relief and diplomatic recognition, but disposable when it conflicts with political survival.
The African Union has been formally requested to intervene by opposition figures. Whether it will do so remains uncertain. But the consequences of inaction are clear: if Zimbabwe is permitted to unilaterally dismantle its constitutional order without referendum, it will establish a precedent that will echo across a continent already struggling with the erosion of term limits and the personalisation of power.
Mr President, Honour Your Word
President Mnangagwa still holds this Bill in his hands. It is his Cabinet that approved it. His signature will be required for it to become law. He alone can stop it.
He has repeatedly stated that he respects the Constitution and will honour his pledge to leave office in 2028. His defenders note that he has not personally endorsed the 2030 project, even as his loyalists advance it. But at a certain point, silence ceases to be neutrality and becomes complicity.
The President’s legacy will be defined by the choice he makes in the coming weeks. He can be the leader who broke with Zimbabwe’s authoritarian past who honoured his word, submitted to the constitutional order, and proved that in Zimbabwe, power is held in trust, not owned. Or he can be the leader who presided over the systematic demolition of the very Constitution he swore to defend.
A constitution is not a performance bonus. It is not a reward for economic progress or political loyalty. It is the solemn agreement of a people to govern themselves according to rules that bind everyone—especially those in power.
Zimbabweans did not grant their leaders the right to revise that agreement without their consent. No parliamentary majority, no Cabinet resolution, and no judicial ruling can confer legitimacy on a process that excludes the people from the most fundamental decision a democracy can make.
The Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 must be put to a referendum. Anything less is not constitutional reform. It is a coup quiet, legalistic, and dressed in the language of stability and efficiency. But a coup, nonetheless.
History will record which narratives defended constitutional democracy, and which made its erosion easier. It will record whether Zimbabwe’s leaders honoured their word or broke it. And it will record whether the people the true sovereigns of this republic were consulted or silenced.
The pen is in the President’s hand. The question is whether he will use it to defend the Constitution or to bury it.
- Josephine Sipiwe Jenje-Mudimbu is a Zimbabwean based in the Diaspora. She writes in her personal capacity.
