Urban Zimbabwe is no longer governed by planning. It is governed by power.
What we are witnessing across our cities is not disorder, nor is it mere administrative failure.
It is a deliberate and structured reconfiguration of urban space — one that strips citizens of dignity, livelihoods and ultimately, constitutional rights. The struggle for urban space has become a struggle for survival.
This is precisely why the People’s Resolution — and, in particular, its Declaration on Labour and Livelihoods — is both urgent and necessary.
At its core, this declaration affirms that every Zimbabwean has a constitutional right to work, to trade and to sustain a livelihood free from political coercion. It insists that the economy must serve the people — not subjugate them.
Yet today, Zimbabwe’s cities are sites of accumulation by dispossession.
In an economy where the majority survive outside formal employment, the informal sector is not peripheral — it is the backbone of survival. But instead of protecting it, the State has chosen to weaponise it.
Through selective legality, the law is no longer an instrument of justice, but a tool of control.
- Record breaker Mpofu revisits difficult upbringing
- Tendo Electronics eyes Africa after TelOne deal
- Zanu PF shifts into 2023 election mode
- Panicky Zanu PF in reset mode
Keep Reading
When citizens organise themselves to build vending spaces, markets and trading hubs, they are criminalised.
Their structures are demolished. Their efforts are declared illegal. But when the same spaces are later occupied by politically-aligned actors, they are suddenly reclassified as “development”.
This is not governance. It is capture.
The events at Mabelreign and Divaris shops in Belvedere expose this system with painful clarity. Infrastructure initiated under opposition-led councils is blocked, only to be later appropriated and monetised by ruling party actors. What begins as a public utility is converted to private rent-seeking organisation.
This is a hostile takeover of the urban commons.
Under this system, the worker is no longer an independent economic actor.
They are reduced to a tenant — forced to pay not only rent, but political allegiance. Survival becomes conditional. One must belong or one must disappear.
From a labour perspective, this is economic coercion. It is the systematic destruction of autonomy within the informal proletariat. The means of survival — market stalls, trading spaces, micro-enterprises — are being centralised and redistributed through patronage networks.
This is how dependence is manufactured.
And dependence is the currency of control.
But this crisis is not only about the excesses of the ruling elite. It is also about a failure of strategy.
Opposition-led councils, in many instances, have retreated into bureaucratic neutrality — prioritising an aesthetic of order over the material protection of citizens.
In doing so, they have ceded the most critical terrain of urban politics: the informal economy.
This vacuum has not remained empty. It has been filled.
What we are now witnessing is the transplantation of a rural patronage model into urban Zimbabwe.
Just as land became the instrument through which political loyalty was secured in rural areas, vending spaces are becoming the new currency in cities.
The message is clear: your right to trade depends on your political alignment.
This stands in direct violation of the People’s Resolution Declaration on Labour and Livelihoods, which demands:
lProtection of informal workers as legitimate economic actors
lEqual and non-partisan access to trading spaces
lFreedom from political interference in economic activity
lDignified working conditions anchored in constitutional rights
This is not simply a policy preference. It is a constitutional imperative.
The People’s Resolution offers a pathway out of this crisis.
It calls for the restoration of the Constitution as the organising principle of national life — where rights are not conditional and where the State serves, rather than subjugates, citizens.
In the context of urban Zimbabwe, this means three urgent shifts.
First, the formal recognition and protection of the informal sector as a central pillar of the economy. Informal workers are not illegal — they are citizens exercising their right to livelihood.
Second, the complete depoliticisation of urban space. Access to markets, stalls and trading zones must be governed by transparent, lawful and non-partisan systems.
Third, the reassertion of democratic local authority. Councils must move beyond administrative management and actively defend the economic rights of their residents. Neutrality in the face of capture is not governance — it is surrender.
The city must be reclaimed.
Not through violence. Not through disorder. But through organised, lawful and collective assertion of constitutional rights — precisely as envisioned in the People’s Resolution.
The struggle for urban space is, ultimately, a struggle for dignity.
If we allow the city to be captured, we concede more than land — we concede citizenship itself.
The line must be drawn.
The Constitution is the shield of the people.
And the city belongs to them.
Obert Masaraure is the deputy coordinator — Labour and Livelihoods Desk, Defend the Constitution Platform
