Zim News Blog -NEWS NETWORK

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This trajectory demands an urgent and uncompromising counter-narrative.

Recently, ZANU-PF youth leaders proposed that Munhumutapa Day be recognized as an official national public holiday—an event already deliberately anchored around the birthday of President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

These calls are being framed under the pretext of celebrating historical legacy, heritage, and national pride, while simultaneously honoring the President as a modern-day leader whose policies supposedly reflect the vision of the ancient empire.

Party loyalists insist the day is meant to promote youth empowerment and economic advancement, yet this patriotic rhetoric merely disguises a transparent exercise in political sycophancy.

Elevating it to an official state holiday is not merely an exercise in political patronage; it is a profound insult to our collective heritage.

Celebrating our pre-colonial legacy is undoubtedly a noble pursuit.

Yet, institutionalizing a national holiday bound to the birthday of a sitting president weaponizes the memory of a great civilization.

Ultimately, it bends centuries of sovereign history simply to flatter an incumbent leader’s ego.

If Zimbabwe were ever to officially recognize a national day dedicated to the Munhumutapa Empire, that day must belong to the history of the empire itself.

Not to the natal day of a ruling party politician who possesses no verified ancestral or historical link to the Mutapa dynasty.

Conflating the birthday of President Mnangagwa with the legacy of Nyatsimba Mutota, the founder of the Mutapa Kingdom, is a cheapening of memory.

It reduces a vast epoch of indigenous statehood, sophisticated diplomacy, and regional trade to a glorified partisan birthday bash.

Genuine commemoration requires historical integrity.

If a day were ever set aside to commemorate the Mutapa Empire, the date must have proven relevance to the actual history of the empire itself.

An authentic national holiday would be anchored in significant historical milestones of indigenous statecraft and resistance.

For example, a legitimate commemoration could mark March 16, honoring the 1561 stance taken by Mwenemutapa Negomo Chirisamhuru to protect the sovereignty of his court against foreign religious and political subversion.

Alternatively, the nation could commemorate November, marking the 1693 joint military campaign when Mwenemutapa Nyakunembire allied with Changamire Dombo to expel foreign forces from the plateau and restore indigenous control.

The date could even honor the final anti-colonial stand led by Mwenemutapa Chioko Dambamupute in 1902, whose death ended centuries of royal resistance against foreign occupation.

Tethering the empire’s legacy to September 15, simply because a sitting president was born on that day, completely ignores these genuine historical milestones.

It is nothing short of a transparent attempt at self-serving opportunism.

Moreover, the ruling party’s narrative relies on a convenient and deeply flawed historical distortion: the idea that the ancient Mutapa Empire encompasses the entire geographical and cultural reality of modern-day Zimbabwe.

Historically, the Mutapa state never covered the whole of our contemporary nation.

At its height, its domain was concentrated primarily in the northern and eastern regions—stretching across areas like Dande, Mazowe, and Mt. Darwin, and reaching eastwards into parts of modern-day Mozambique.

It was a formidable kingdom, but it was not, and never was, the sole architect of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo.

To suggest that the Mutapa Empire alone represents the lineage of modern Zimbabwe is to deliberately erase the distinct, powerful polities that shaped our history before the arrival of European colonialism.

The Mutapa state was ultimately eclipsed and dismantled by the Rozvi Kingdom, founded by the military genius Changamire Dombo, whose warriors decisively expelled Portuguese influence from the interior and established dominance over the central and southern plateaus.

Decades later, the Rozvi hegemony gave way to the Ndebele Kingdom established by King Mzilikazi, a sovereign state that dominated the southwestern territories until its eventual conquest by British colonial forces.

If we are to be sincere and authentic about honoring Zimbabwe’s pre-colonial heritage, national recognition cannot be a selective exercise tailored for state propaganda.

True national unity requires that we also establish a Changamire Dombo or Rozvi Day, and a King Mzilikazi or Ndebele Day—each anchored on historically verified dates that honor the foundational contributions of those respective kingdoms.

By selectively exalting one regional empire while ignoring others, and then tethering that chosen empire to a sitting president, the state risks deepening historical fractures rather than healing them.

Distorting history to glorify a sitting leader is a dangerous path, setting a precedent where national identity is rewritten with every change of administration.

What makes this current maneuver even more egregious is that even the late ousted ruler Robert Mugabe, despite his 37-year authoritarian grip on the nation, refrained from such outright historical desecration.

Throughout his decades in power, Mugabe’s birthday on February 21 was celebrated by his party as the 21st February Movement and framed around youth affairs.

It was only after his removal from power in 2017 that the date was formalized as the Robert Gabriel Mugabe National Youth Day.

Love him or hate him, Mugabe never attempted to hijack the sacrosanct pre-colonial legacy of the nation by declaring his birthday to be “Sekuru Kaguvi Day” or “Mbuya Nehanda Day.”

He maintained a clear line between his personal persona and the foundational ancestral figures of our resistance.

The current administration’s attempt to claim the title of Munhumutapa for political aggrandizement is a dangerous precedent.

One is forced to ask: why is the party afraid of celebrating its leader’s birthday on its own merits?

Is he not honorable and respectable enough?

History belongs to the nation, to the ancestors who lived it, and to the generations who inherit it—it is not the personal real estate of any political party or individual.

The rich, diverse history of Zimbabwe—from Mutapa to Rozvi, from Ndebele to the modern liberation struggle—deserves solemn, accurate, and inclusive reverence.

Using our history as a political backdrop for partisan birthday celebrations is an act of historical vandalism that every Zimbabwean must reject.

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To listen to Home Affairs Minister Kazembe Kazembe speak at a political gathering in Mashonaland Central is to enter an alternate reality where political theater is masqueraded as high constitutional jurisprudence.

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According to Kazembe, the ruling ZANU-PF party was prepared to drag President Emmerson Mnangagwa to court had he hesitated to assent to Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 (CAB3).

In this narrative, the President’s decision to sign the legislation into law was not an act of executive convenience or party strategy, but a supreme demonstration of his status as a “true constitutionalist” who selflessly bowed to the legal obligations imposed by Parliament.

It is a grand claim, but one that collapses under the slightest intellectual scrutiny.

The assertion that ZANU-PF—a party historically defined by centralized executive authority and strict internal discipline—would haul its own sitting Head of State into a court of law over a legislative signature is politically absurd.

It presents a sanitized, almost romanticized picture of intra-party democracy and constitutional checks that bears no resemblance to the reality of Zimbabwean politics.

Surely, who within ZANU-PF would have dared to take President Mnangagwa to court and lived to tell the tale?

Surely, who within ZANU-PF would have dared take President Mnangagwa to court and politically survive to see another day?

More fundamentally, however, Kazembe’s statements betray a profound and dangerous distortion of what constitutionalism actually means.

Constitutionalism is not merely the procedural act of adhering to formal mechanisms when passing laws, nor is it defined by an executive rubber-stamping bills crafted by a parliamentary majority.

Genuine constitutionalism is a philosophy rooted in the limitation of power, the protection of fundamental human rights, the independence of the judiciary, and the preservation of democratic norms.

It exists precisely to protect the public from executive overreach and the tyranny of a transient majority, not to provide cover for the systematic alteration of the supreme law to suit the political imperatives of the day.

The argument that President Emmerson Mnangagwa was trapped in a legal straightjacket completely ignores the explicit exit ramps provided by the supreme law itself.

Under Section 131(6)(b) of the Constitution, the President possesses the unambiguous authority to withhold assent or veto and refer any bill back to Parliament if he harbors reservations regarding its constitutionality or content.

If the President genuinely disdained political self-service or sought to defend the spirit of the supreme law, he was never powerless.

He could have returned the bill to the legislature, demanding that provisions altering governing terms be stripped away or brought into line with fundamental legal principles.

Furthermore, Kazembe’s narrative deliberately bypasses the core democratic barrier of Section 328, which dictates that any amendment extending an incumbent’s tenure cannot benefit the sitting President unless subjected to a direct national referendum.

By signing a bill that bypasses the electorate entirely, the President did not uphold the Constitution; he actively oversaw its evasion.

To praise a leader as a constitutionalist simply because he signed an amendment passed by his own party’s majority in Parliament is to reduce the Constitution from a sacred social contract to a malleable legislative notepad.

When a ruling party and a compromised opposition uses its dominant parliamentary position to reshape the foundational rules of governance, and the executive promptly signs those changes into law, hailing this sequence as an act of constitutional virtue turns logic on its head.

Compliance with procedural machinery is not synonymous with fidelity to democratic principles, particularly when that machinery is deployed to entrench institutional power.

Kazembe’s declaration that “the country spoke” through Parliament further conflates partisan interest with the genuine, collective will of the nation, while actively ignoring how the public consultation process was systematically undermined.

A Constitution belongs to all citizens across political divides and generations, yet the nationwide hearings on CAB3 were characterized by restriction, state-sponsored coercion, and violent disruptions aimed at suppressing opposing voices.

More crucially, claiming “the country spoke” through a whipped and bribed parliamentary majority completely sidesteps the constitutional imperative of a national referendum under Section 328—the only lawful avenue through which the entire electorate can give or withhold its consent on executive term extensions.

By framing this deeply compromised process as an irresistible popular mandate that forced the President’s hand, Kazembe attempts to insulate executive decision-making from legitimate critique, cleverly transforming a deliberate bypass of the sovereign electorate into an inevitable legal duty.

Furthermore, the threat of taking the President to court functions as a performative spectacle designed to project an illusion of institutional friction where none exists.

It attempts to convince the public that the executive is strictly bound by an unyielding legal framework, even as that framework is continuously re-engineered to suit the ruling elite.

True respect for the Constitution is demonstrated when leaders defend its core spirit—protecting term limits, safeguarding the separation of powers, and honoring democratic accountability—even when doing so runs counter to immediate political expediency.

Zimbabweans deserve a national discourse grounded in constitutional reality rather than political myth-making.

Re-branding executive compliance with party-driven legal amendments as high-minded constitutionalism does a profound disservice to the nation’s democratic aspirations.

As long as constitutionalism is invoked only to justify the expansion or consolidation of authority, assertions like Kazembe’s will remain transparent exercises in propaganda.

True constitutionalism is not proven by signing away the spirit of the supreme law under the guise of procedural duty.

It is proven by having the courage to protect it.

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