On Saturday, two groups of Zimbabweans marched through the same streets of central London, within hours of each other, to mark the same Independence Day and arrived at completely opposite conclusions about what that independence means.
By Gift Kugara – Mawire
The first march, organised by the Citizens Protest Movement, gathered outside Zimbabwe House on The Strand at noon to oppose the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment (No. 3) Bill, which would allow Parliament rather than the electorate to choose the President, effectively extending Emmerson Mnangagwa’s tenure to 2030 without a popular vote. The protesters argued that the freedoms won forty-six years ago are being surrendered to executive overreach and that any change to the constitution must be put to a national referendum.
The second march, organised by ZANU PF UK and the Zimbabwe Diaspora Community Network, began two hours earlier at the steps of Lancaster House. This is the very building where the 1979 independence agreement was signed and proceeded to the Zimbabwean High Commission. Ambassador Christian Katsande led the walk, which its organisers framed as a celebration of sovereignty and the country’s right to amend its own constitution. The message was clear: Zimbabwe is free, Zimbabwe is sovereign, and no one, certainly not voices from the former colonial metropole, has the standing to dictate how it governs itself.
Both sides invoked the Constitution. Both sides claimed to be defending it. And both sides were, in their own way, right, which is precisely why the spectacle should trouble every Zimbabwean, wherever they live.
The protesters were right that a constitution is only as strong as the process that protects it. The 2013 Constitution, approved by referendum with over 94 per cent support, was the product of years of negotiation and represented a genuine national consensus. Its provisions on presidential term limits were not accidental; they were a direct response to decades of unlimited executive power. Changing those provisions through a parliamentary vote in a parliament from which dozens of opposition MPs have been removed as a result of the Tshabangu affair is constitutionally permissible but democratically questionable. The letter of the law may be satisfied; the spirit of the law is not.
The marchers from Lancaster House were right that sovereignty matters. Zimbabwe’s constitution belongs to Zimbabweans, not to foreign governments or diaspora commentators. The right to amend it is an expression of the self-determination for which the liberation struggle was fought. Those who dismiss this argument forget that the Lancaster House Constitution itself was a negotiated compromise that entrenched white land ownership for ten years and reserved twenty parliamentary seats for a racial minority. Constitutions evolve. The question is not whether they should change but how and for whose benefit.
What neither march addressed and what Independence Day should compel every Zimbabwean to confront is the deeper failure that makes both marches necessary.
Forty-six years after independence, a significant proportion of Zimbabwe’s most educated, most politically engaged, and most economically productive citizens live abroad. The three million Zimbabweans in the diaspora did not leave because they wanted to. They left because the economy collapsed, because the political space closed, because professional opportunities dried up, and because staying meant accepting conditions that no free people should have to accept. That these same people are now marching through London for and against their own government, on their own Independence Day, in the capital of the country that once colonised them is not a sign of democratic vitality. It is a sign of national failure.
The real question is not whether CAB 3 should pass. The real question is why, after forty-six years, Zimbabwe’s political class is still fighting over the rules of the game rather than playing it. Why is the constitution a battlefield rather than a settlement? Why are the most consequential debates about Zimbabwe’s future taking place on The Strand rather than in Harare’s town halls? Why does every generation of Zimbabwean leaders, from Mugabe to Mnangagwa, from Tsvangirai to Chamisa, end up consumed by the same struggle for power that the constitution was supposed to resolve?
The answer, I would argue, is politicisation: the systematic subordination of institutions, rules, and processes to partisan political control. When the constitution becomes an instrument of power rather than a constraint on it, when courts are used to destroy opposition parties, and when amendments are engineered to extend tenure. These are not failures of individual leaders. They are symptoms of a structural condition that has persisted, in different forms, since before independence.
Both marches on Saturday were expressions of that condition. One group marched to defend the Constitution against political manipulation. The other marched to celebrate the sovereign right to change it. Neither march will resolve the underlying problem because the problem is not the constitution itself but the political culture that treats every institution, every rule, and every election as a zero-sum contest for survival.
Independence Day should be a day when Zimbabweans come together. That has become a day when they march in opposite directions in a foreign capital, six thousand miles from home, tells us everything we need to know about where we are. And how far we still have to go.
Gift Kugara Mawire is based at the LSBU Business School, London South Bank University. His book, The Politicisation of Zimbabwe: Power, State and Society, is forthcoming.
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