Tendai Ruben Mbofana
The attempt by ZANU-PF legislator Perseverance Zhou to defend Constitutional Amendment (No. 3) Bill is a masterclass in this political absurdity.
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Zhou claims that stripping citizens of their right to directly elect the president will magically promote peace and end electoral violence.
To bolster this claim, she points to neighboring countries that utilize parliamentary systems, framing the move as a progressive developmental step.
This argument lacks credibility and ignores global realities.
Moving the presidential vote to a legislature does not magically sanitize a highly polarized political environment.
In consolidated democracies and stable nations like Spain and Italy, the parliamentary selection of a prime minister is frequently a source of bitter political warfare, backroom horse-trading, and deep societal division.
In Spain, the parliamentary investiture of the prime minister has triggered mass public protests and accusations of political bartering that split the nation down the middle.
This unfolded clearly when Pedro Sánchez traded a controversial amnesty law to Catalan separatists. He did this solely to buy their legislative votes to secure office.
In Thailand, the parliamentary selection process has repeatedly caused immense toxicity, resulting in massive street protests and the regular collapse of governments.
The system itself is not an antidote to division.
The recurring tragedy of Zimbabwe’s disputed and divisive elections has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the president is elected directly by the people.
The source of public disgruntlement and polarization is the systematically compromised conduct of the institutions mandated to oversee the process.
If we examine past elections that have caused the most profound national trauma, the focus of condemnation has never been the democratic act of citizens casting their ballots.
Instead, the blame lies squarely with the questionable conduct of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), the partisan interference of the security sector, the intolerance of the ruling ZANU-PF party, and the glaring bias of the state media.
This institutional rot was clearly indicted by the SADC Election Observer Mission during the 2023 harmonized elections.
The regional body explicitly called out these state institutions for flouting Zimbabwe’s own domestic laws, as well as SADC’s principles and guidelines governing democratic elections.
Blame was never laid upon citizens exercising their right to vote for a president.
The crisis in Zimbabwe is born from state institutions taking political sides instead of maintaining the professionalism and impartiality required of them by the Constitution.
Attempting to resolve this crisis by shifting the presidential vote to parliament is merely sweeping the rot under the rug.
Changing the venue of the election does not fix the partisan bias embedded within the electoral commission, the security apparatus, the judiciary, or the state broadcaster.
If these entities remain captured, the toxic, divisive, and disputed nature of Zimbabwean politics will simply manifest with full force during parliamentary elections.
Citizens will still face intimidation, the figures will still be questioned, and the legislative polls themselves will become the new flashpoint for national conflict.
Furthermore, the claim that parliament is a safer, more stable arena for selecting a head of state is completely demolished by recent history.
Arguably one of the greatest political scandals to bedevil Zimbabwe and ferment massive divisions occurred entirely within the walls of parliament itself.
This happened when both the speaker of the House of Assembly, the president of the Senate, and the judiciary recognized a self-appointed opposition official, Sengezo Tshabangu, and permitted him to recall over 42 elected opposition legislators.
This egregious manipulation handed the ruling party a two-thirds majority that it completely failed to garner from the electorate during the 2023 harmonized elections.
It is the very same artificially manufactured two-thirds majority that ZANU-PF is now weaponizing to amend the supreme law of the land.
What can be a bigger scandal than a legislature that actively subverts the expressed will of the voters?
This monumental travesty was not a result of Zimbabweans voting for their president; it was the direct result of parliamentary vulnerability to political manipulation.
Given what Zimbabwe has already experienced with the Tshabangu recalls, leaving the election of the president to parliament risks causing far more toxicity and instability than a direct popular vote.
Parliament can be easily distorted and rigged through the questionable recalling of legislators considered opposed to a preferred presidential candidate.
Under such a system, it is entirely predictable that soon after parliamentary elections, a ruling faction could systematically purge elected lawmakers viewed as unlikely to vote for their chosen presidential contender.
This would inevitably result in a deeply fraudulent parliamentary vote, producing a leader completely divorced from the public will, and plunging the nation into an even deeper state of polarization.
Zhou’s attempt to inject religious symbolism into this constitutional regression by describing the number seven as a biblical blessing for a proposed seven-year presidential term is a disingenuous distraction from the erosion of democratic rights.
Zimbabweans do not need theological justifications for the dilution of their franchise.
The fix for Zimbabwe’s political crisis is not to shield the executive from the judgment of the voting public, but to enforce the constitutional obligations of professionalism, neutrality, and independence on state bodies.
True peace and stability cannot be engineered by locking citizens out of the presidential selection process.
It can only be achieved when state institutions stop acting as political contestants and begin serving the nation with the impartiality the law demands.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. To directly receive his articles please join his WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08
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