ZIMBABWEANS, who have endured decades of systematic decay, worsening living conditions, and the shrinking of opportunities to mere survival on society’s margins, are now staring down yet another problem.
The very constitution they collectively wrote in 2013, their blueprint for dignity and hope, is being pulverised, dismantled not by chance, but by a carefully-selected few whose ultimate gain is all too obvious.
The 2013 constitution was forged through painstaking consultations, with the 25-member Constitution Parliamentary Select Committee (Copac) crisscrossing the nation, listening to citizens, gathering their ideas.
It was a document that ordinary Zimbabweans could claim as their own, a rare symbol of national ownership in a landscape otherwise defined by exclusion and neglect.
Fast forward to today: the current team has tossed aside people’s voices, yet still insists these amendments are “for the good of Zimbabweans”.
Time, energy and scarce resources have been diverted to a project whose true aim is transparently self-serving — extending presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years, ensuring incumbents only step aside in 2030.
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Reform, we are told, but for whom? Certainly not for the ordinary man, who continues to shoulder the weight of perennial hardships that have stuck like stubborn shadows for decades.
On the ground, Zimbabweans contend with unemployment and grinding poverty. Children are kept out of school, families struggle to put food on the table and daily life is defined by deprivation.
The national terrain tells a starkly different story from government proclamations — potholed roads, collapsing healthcare and education systems, endemic corruption and shattered aspirations.
Yet somewhere in official circles, “upper middle-income economy by 2030!” is being touted as if it were a promise rather than a punch-line.
Urban residential areas reek of festering, uncollected garbage, free-flowing sewage and water shortages — the everyday mirror of a national catastrophe.
Meanwhile, the drug and dangerous substance menace grows unchecked, supplied by politically-connected individuals who skirt the law behind their wealthy patrons.
Amid all this, those in power have been busy, not with solutions for the nation, but with the art of power retention. They burn midnight oil to perfect a system nurtured since Independence, first honed by the late former president Robert Mugabe, now perfected by President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
History warns us that these manoeuvres are likely to succeed. But the current contestations have sparked a critical national conversation about democracy and the future of governance in Zimbabwe.
And the faces of the weary, watching from the sidelines, seem to plead — how long must this country stumble in the dark while the promises of its own people are trampled, decade after decade?