For 40 days, the biblical giant Goliath relentlessly provoked and taunted God’s people, the Israelites.
A feared Philistine warrior, he was heavily armed from head to toe with the finest armour of his time. Morning and evening, he stepped forward to challenge Israel, striking fear into the hearts of its trusted soldiers.
Then came David - a young shepherd with neither military experience nor impressive weaponry.
To many, he appeared hopelessly outmatched. Yet despite overwhelming odds, David refused to be intimidated.
Armed only with faith, courage, a sling, and five smooth stones, he confronted the giant. With one precise strike, Goliath tumbled down, bringing an end to Israel’s pounding humiliation and ushering in a moment of great celebration and deliverance.
For many Zimbabweans, the David and Goliath narrative has become a powerful metaphor for their own political journey since attaining independence from British rule in 1980.
For over four decades, Zimbabwe has endured Zanu PF’s seemingly invincible political dominance. However, many critics have also persistently rang alarm bells over what they have labelled as Harare’s relentless taunting and provocation of its populace.
Soon after independence in 1980, hopes for a democratic future were overshadowed by political violence.
The Gukurahundi military campaign of the 1980s left deep national scars, with thousands of civilians killed in Matabeleland and parts of the Midlands. The Unity Accord of 1987 effectively liquidated PF Zapu as the main opposition political party, leaving Zanu PF in a commanding political position and elated at the prospects of attaining a de facto one-party state.
However, Zanu PF’s celebration over the liquidation of PF Zapu and the ostensible establishment of a one-party state was short-lived. Other political parties, including some Zanu PF offshoots, still emerged, such as ZUM, Zanu-Ndonga, the MDC, and eventually the CCC. With more threats posed to Zanu PF's stranglehold on power, its rule has continued to be plagued by swelling allegations of heavy-handed tactics against its political opponents, including arbitrary arrests, torture, forced disappearances, arbitrary prosecutions, and so forth.
However, to many observers, the turn of the millennium in 2000 exposed, without any shred of doubt, and at levels never seen or imagined before, Zanu PF’s brazenness in pursuing any tactics, no matter how dirty, to maintain its tentacles in power. It is now widely believed that the ruling regime has effectively captured all state institutions and weaponized them to decimate any form of political opposition.
In 2008, Zimbabweans overwhelmingly voted, but the electoral body withheld the electoral results for more than a month. When the results were ultimately announced, the MDC’s Morgan Tsvangirai had beaten Zanu PF’s Robert Mugabe for the presidency.
However, a presidential runoff was dubiously declared as neither candidate had garnered the 50% plus one votes required by law to form a government. In the resultant runoff, many perceived MDC supporters suffered suspected state-sponsored violence, including the slaughter of hundreds of them.
Tsvangirai, himself arbitrarily arrested on several occasions, was forced to pull out of that race and fled to Botswana, protesting the violence perpetrated against his followers.
The 2008 political stalemate paved the way for the formation of a government of national unity involving the MDC formations and Zanu PF from 2009 through 2013.
In fact, to this date, many observers remain unflinchingly convinced that Tsvangirai had outrightly won the 2008 elections, but Zanu-PF retained its stranglehold on power through its reliance on captured state institutions, including the electoral body and the state security apparatus.
Indeed, the military generals had, on several occasions in 2008 and before, expressed that they would not permit Tsvangirai, with no armed struggle credentials, to rule Zimbabwe.
That coalition government brought a period of relative economic and political stabilization. The runaway inflation, unemployment, and poverty that had driven millions of Zimbabweans to foreign lands in search of livelihoods were fairly tamed. Millions of Zimbabweans, many of whom had been reduced to laughing stocks across the globe, returned home to better lives and employment opportunities in their own back yards.
However, that optimism proved short-lived. Following the 2013 elections, controversially won by Zanu PF, Zimbabwe’s economic decline resumed.
Rising unemployment, inflation, and deteriorating public services drove millions more Zimbabweans to seek opportunities abroad, particularly in South Africa. There, many have faced recurring waves of xenophobic violence, adding another layer of hardship to lives already shaped by displacement.
The political landscape shifted again in 2017 when Emmerson Mnangagwa, who had ousted Robert Mugabe through a military coup in 2017, ascended to power. He promised a “brighter tomorrow” for Zimbabwe and constitutional democracy.
For many Zimbabweans, however, those expectations have faded, and they now view Mnangagwa as a far worse dictator than Mugabe.
In August 2018, and in broad daylight, he unleashed the army on unarmed civilians protesting delayed election results. Resultantly, six protesters were cold-bloodedly gunned down by the soldiers.
Many other protests and political gatherings, though peaceful, have been ruthlessly broken up by the police. In fact, the ruling regime has barefacedly expressed to Zimbabweans that they will not be allowed to freely convene political gatherings or protest against their own government, notwithstanding that their freedom of assembly and protest remains enshrined in section 59 of the Zimbabwean constitution.
To that end, even gatherings in private spaces have not been spared.
Under Mugabe, some pockets of protests and court challenges, among other mechanisms, were successfully mounted by the progressive forces to rein in the Zanu PF government.
However, the current ruling regime appears to have adopted an approach that invariably dismisses all protests against the government as tantamount to nothing but a covert attempt to overthrow the government.
In reprimanding would-be protesters, the government has routinely enjoined those who wish to air any grievances against their government’s conduct to either challenge the impugned conduct in the courts or to pursue the same means through which Zanu PF attained power from the settler regime and ousted Mugabe.
The police have been complicit in flouting Zimbabwe’s constitution by routinely proscribing peaceful protests.
Courts, like all state institutions, are also widely perceived as captured by the Zanu PF government. In fact, in a viral 2019 video, Mnangagwa reminded all and sundry that: “…we are the army, the air force, the police, we are everything you can think of…”
Many political analysts have opined that those pronouncements merely underscore the now long-standing perception about Zanu PF, namely that it has effectively grabbed all state institutions.
Therefore, it is a futile exercise for anyone to seek to challenge whatever grievances against the regime through the very state institutions that it squarely controls.
Like many other state institutions, the state media has been conspicuously monopolized by Zanu PF to the total exclusion of all other political players.
On several occasions since Mnangagwa’s rise to power, political observers had hazarded that Mnangagwa was keen on paralysing the main political opposition and thereby paving the way for amending the Zimbabwean constitution to extend his stay in power.
Twice, post the 2018 and 2023 general elections, the ruling regime was fingered in the takeover of the main opposition parties, the MDC Alliance and the CCC, respectively, led by Nelson Chamisa.
On both occasions, Chamisa had garnered over 44% of the total votes cast for the president in the harmonized elections. But crucially, in the 2023 elections, his CCC party had prevented Zanu PF from obtaining an outright two-thirds parliamentary majority that would enable it to amend the constitution.
Hardly had the speaker of Parliament settled in his chair to welcome the new members of parliament, when a commonly suspected political turncoat named Sengezo Tshabangu, masquerading as the CCC’s interim secretary-general, emerged from the woods brandishing recall letters for over 30 CCC legislators.
In the resultant by-elections, the bulk of those seats were lost to Zanu PF, which furtively awarded it the coveted two-thirds parliamentary majority that it had lost in the 2023 general elections.
However, Mnangagwa repeatedly seized both domestic and international platforms to debunk the outcries that he intended to amend the constitution to prolong his stay in power. He dug in his heels, insisting that he is a constitutionalist, a two-term president, and would leave office in 2028 when his second five-year term ended.
The state media ran headlines in which Zanu PF raucously denied that it intended to amend the constitution and had unleashed Tshabangu to trigger by-elections to reverse its loss of the two-thirds parliamentary majority.
Mnangagwa himself sternly instructed his lawyers in July 2024 to demand that the NewsDay newspaper retract and unreservedly apologise for publishing an article headed: ED has no intention of stepping down, in which the paper quoted some political analysts who similarly raised fears that he would overstay in office.
NewsDay complied with the demand and promptly recanted the article. Meanwhile, Mnangagwa did not reprimand his inner circle lieutenants and, later, the general Zanu PF supporters, who began to chorus for the extension of his term in office.
On one occasion, he himself lined up a handful of his government ministers who all chanted for his longer stay in office. At two consecutive Zanu PF’s annual conferences, in 2024 and 2025, it was resolved that Mnangagwa’s term of office be extended beyond 2028.
Again, Mnangagwa never admonished those who called for his extended term in power. In one media briefing, in February 2025, he assured the nation, “I will persuade the persuaders not to persuade me [to go beyond 2028]”.
Well, if ever Zimbabweans sought a perfect epitome for the expression: ‘he indicates right, but turns left’, Mnangagwa has, to many Zimbabweans, aptly presented himself on the proverbial silver platter.
Enter July 2026, Mnangagwa gleefully appended his signature to enact Zimbabwe’s third constitutional amendment, which inter alia not only extended his term of office to 2030, but also stripped Zimbabweans of their right to elect their president directly; extended the electoral cycle of harmonized elections from five years to seven years; and empowered the president to handpick 10 senators with full voting rights.
All these sweeping amendments were rushed through the glaringly abrasive parliamentary processes, which were marred by violence and arrests, especially meted out to prominent sworn opponents of the amendment, including constitutional law professor Lovemore Madhuku, lawyers Tendai Biti and Douglas Coltart.
However, the kicker of all was the government’s flat refusal to subject these fundamental amendments to a national referendum as widely expected. In his verbatim words, Mnangagwa tellingly declared, “…I felt they (the legislators) had done the correct thing.
I expected them to pass it, and they did. So, I was happy”. In so declaring and assenting to the amendment, Mnangagwa indelibly sealed his political legacy.
Many observers have now firmly argued that nobody may now credibly seek to pass him off as anything else apart from a blatant flip-flopping dictator, singing from the old dictators’ sheet.
They all profess with their mouths an unwillingness to prolong their stay in office, yet their very conduct belies their very profession.
When they eventually amend the constitution to extend their stay, they routinely blame it on the people who succeeded in arm-twisting their will.
Against the foregoing background, it has now dawned on many Zimbabweans that they are indeed caught between a rock and a hard place. The democratic space within which to manoeuvre in confronting ZANU-PF has considerably shrunk under Mnangagwa and continues to do so.
Beyond Zimbabwe’s borders, regional responses have largely disappointed many citizens. The Southern African Development Community (Sadc) and the African Union have faced criticism for what many perceive as muted engagement with Zimbabwe’s governance challenges.
South Africa, Africa’s economic powerhouse and home to millions of Zimbabwe’s refugees, has adopted an apparent paradoxical stance on Zimbabwe’s crisis. Since the Thabo Mbeki administration,
South Africa has fiercely fought in all international fora to keep Zanu PF in power. Bizarrely, has perennially battled to contain the influx of illegal immigration flowing from Zanu PF’s disastrous governance.
Further, the same South Africa is seized with legal proceedings in the International Court of Justice to defend alleged genocide victims in Palestine, well over 7000 kilometres away from South Africa.
Yet South Africa would never even raise the smallest finger to condemn the human rights abuses, let alone defend millions of victims, right at its doorstep. In fact, millions of those Zanu PF victims are presently suffering ripple abuse on account of the xenophobic attacks raging in South Africa, resulting in them being driven into homelessness or back into the tentacles of an unrepentant Zanu PF. Even in the midst of the horrendous attacks in South Africa, Zanu PF dispatched its spokesperson, Christopher Mutsvangwa, who seemed to excel in fanning the raging xenophobic flames in South Africa, as opposed to dousing them, by gloating over Zimbabwe’s imaginary historic economic recovery and sneering at the already incensed South Africans.
Zimbabweans today find themselves at a critical crossroads.
The democratic space has narrowed considerably, and many of the traditional avenues for seeking political change are widely perceived as ineffective or inaccessible.
As institutions lose public confidence and regional responses remain limited, many citizens feel increasingly isolated in their search for accountability and democratic renewal.
The biblical account of David is ultimately not a story about physical strength. It is a story about courage in the face of overwhelming odds. David did not prevail because he possessed greater power than Goliath.
He prevailed because he was willing to confront what others believed could never be defeated and had, instead, resigned to wallowing in their great misery.
The question that now confronts Zimbabwe is not merely who will stand up, but whether someone - or a movement - will rise with the wisdom, integrity, and determination to lead the nation toward a more democratic, peaceful, and prosperous future.
*Khanyisani Silwane Ncube is practicing civil rights attorney in South Africa, with an LLM in Transnational Legal Practice completed in the US (2022)
Email: okasilwane@gmail.com.