Source: Home demolitions expose how power through barbarity has permeated Zimbabwean society
It is often said that a fish rots from the head.
As I scrolled through social media this morning, a short skit stopped me in my tracks.
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It portrayed a woman confronting her husband, a bulldozer driver employed to demolish illegally constructed homes.
She questioned how he could live with himself, driving a machine that tears down shelter and leaves families out in the cold.
She asked him how their own children would bear the stigma of being raised by a man who made others homeless.
His response was chillingly indifferent: he was just doing his job, following orders, and bringing home a paycheck.
The wife ended the conversation with a firm, moral boundary, refusing to accept a single cent earned from the ruin of other people’s lives.
This scene was designed to shake our collective conscience, made all the more poignant by the wave of house demolitions sweeping through places like Murombedzi, Seke, St. Martins, and Harare South.
Hundreds of families have watched their homes razed to the ground under the pretext that the structures lacked proper permits or sat on land sold unlawfully.
Regardless of the legal technicalities, the situation forces a deeper moral question upon us.
Who, with a clear conscience, climbs into a bulldozer to crush a home, knowing it will leave young children and their parents exposed to the elements?
We all have families to feed, but must there not be lines we refuse to cross when our employment inflicts outright misery?
Those who built these houses are not hardened criminals.
They are not murderers, rapists, or armed robbers.
They are ordinary men and women desperate for a place to call home amidst a chronic national housing crisis.
Crucially, these are not squatters who invaded property overnight.
They bought these stands—often believing everything was above board—and spent their life savings brick by brick.
Should that effort count for nothing?
Where were the authorities when these foundations were being dug?
Construction took years in full view of local officials.
Why wait until families are fully settled before sending in heavy machinery?
Furthermore, our constitution ensures that evictions cannot proceed without a court first evaluating all relevant circumstances, such as the risk of leaving people homeless.
This crisis extends far beyond property lines; it shines a spotlight on the state of our collective soul.
What has happened to us as a people?
Where did our spirit of Ubuntu go?
How does a decision-maker sign off on the destruction of a community, and how does another person willingly operate the machinery to execute it?
It points to a profound sickness within our society.
I ask the same question whenever I watch state security personnel savagely beat or shoot at citizens demanding basic rights.
The faces of those officers often radiate pure rage and hatred.
Yet, those protesting are not demonstrating against the officers themselves; they are pleading for relief from economic struggles that affect the security personnel just as acutely.
Why the rage against those fighting for a better life for everyone?
We see this same malice on the streets, in the rudeness and disdain exhibited by touts (mahwindi) toward the elderly.
A disturbing pattern has taken root.
We have developed a toxic obsession with power and a distorted belief that authority is only real when expressed through cruelty, bullying, and barbarity.
We seem to derive a perverted satisfaction from watching others suffer under our mini-reigns of dominance.
Where did this stem from?
Zimbabweans were historically known as a compassionate, gentle people driven by Ubuntu—ready to host a stranded stranger or share a meager meal with the hungry.
A fish rots from the head down, and so does a society.
This erosion of empathy started at the top.
Our leadership consistently models the idea that power is demonstrated through the infliction of pain.
The order to demolish homes comes from comfortable, air-conditioned offices, issued by individuals who face no consequences for the misery they unleash.
We are saddled with a ruling elite utterly indifferent to the vast majority of Zimbabweans trapped in poverty.
Not a single leader loses sleep while thousands perish needlessly in public hospitals gutted of basic equipment and medication.
Not a single conscience is stirred as families are driven off their ancestral lands to clear the path for mineral exploitation.
When citizens protest, the response is often lethal force.
Over time, this top-down brutality trickles into the national bloodstream, normalizing cruelty as a display of strength.
Yet, this behavior does not signal true strength.
Real power protects the vulnerable, comforts the distressed, and provides shelter to the homeless.
What we are witnessing across our society is not authentic authority, but the tragic acting-out of a deeply broken, insecure population mimicking the tyranny above them.
Genuine power does not need to bulldoze homes, starve public hospitals, or brutalize its own citizens to command respect; true authority rests on legitimacy, justice, and the ability to uplift the nation.
When those in high office resort to unchecked barbarity, it is a glaring admission of their own existential fear and utter failure to govern.
They use cruelty as a crutch because they possess no moral authority, no vision, and no voluntary consent from the people.
To mask their deep-seated inadequacy and illegitimacy, they stage grotesque displays of violence—demolishing livelihoods and unleashing state terror—simply to reassure themselves of their own dominance.
It is the tragic spectacle of weak, terrified rulers who mistake the capacity to inflict pain for the right to rule.
When a ruling class routinely demonstrates that power is only real when it inflicts suffering, that brutal logic inevitably poisons every level of our society.
From the official issuing demolition directives in an air-conditioned office, to the bulldozer driver razing a family’s life savings, down to the hostile officer and the abusive tout on the street.
By surrendering our foundational spirit of Ubuntu to mimic the cruelty of those above us, we have turned our collective trauma inward and become active participants in our own degradation.
A nation that defines strength through the victimization of its own people is not strong at all.
It is simply broken.
We have become a broken people inflicting our own oppression upon one another.
Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +264715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com
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