Tendai Ruben Mbofana
The Zimbabwean government’s repeated assertion that frequent elections breed toxicity and polarization is both disingenuous and disturbing.
If you value my social justice advocacy and writing, please consider a financial contribution to keep it going. Contact me on WhatsApp: +263 715 667 700 or Email: mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com
This foundational pretext, weaponized from the very moment these constitutional amendments were proposed to stretch presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years, rests on a spectacularly insulting premise.
It is a diagnosis so fundamentally flawed that it borders on absurd.
To suggest that the calendar is the source of Zimbabwe’s deep-seated political strife is to willfully ignore the rot at the foundation of our democratic architecture.
Merely delaying elections without electoral reforms and strengthening compromised institutions doesn’t cure toxicity; it merely protracts the trauma of a broken system while insulating power from accountability.
The core of Zimbabwe’s perpetual polarization does not lie in how often citizens go to the ballot box, but in what happens when they get there.
The toxicity is bred by disputed elections, deeply compromised institutions acting in a flagrantly partisan manner, and a political culture of intolerance that routinely weaponizes intimidation and violence.
When citizens realize that their democratic expression is treated as a cyclical formality rather than a genuine exercise in self-determination, disgruntlement and division naturally follow.
We do not have to guess at the root causes of our national friction.
The Southern African Development Community election observer mission report on the highly disputed 2023 harmonized elections laid them bare with unprecedented clarity.
The regional body explicitly noted that the electoral processes fell short of Zimbabwe’s own constitutional requirements as well as regional principles and guidelines governing democratic elections.
The report detailed structural deficiencies, the biased enforcement of law, and a lack of transparency that severely undermined the credibility of the vote.
Crucially, the regional observers never identified the frequency of elections as the problem.
They identified the failure to hold clean, fair, and credible elections as the crisis.
To now claim that shifting the goalposts from five to seven years is an antidote to polarization is a direct evasion of the regional body’s findings and a refusal to look in the mirror.
As long as the political and electoral environment remains fundamentally toxic, no amount of delaying elections—or even banning them altogether—will mend a fractured society.
A simple domestic analogy exposes the absurdity of the government’s logic: if a husband and wife cannot stand each other and are trapped in a cycle of constant fighting, the solution is never to simply mandate that they spend a week or two without speaking.
Such artificial silence will never heal the underlying hatred.
The moment they break that silence, the arguments and violence will inevitably resume because the root cause of their dysfunction was ignored.
Even if they stop communicating permanently, the resentment remains.
The same psychological truth applies to a nation.
You cannot legislate national unity by depoliticizing the calendar while leaving the machinery of oppression and administrative bias fully intact.
What exposes the insincerity of this push for constitutional elongation is the glaring silence on what is supposed to happen during these two extra years.
In all the official justifications for delaying elections, there is absolutely no concrete roadmap detailing how the state intends to use that time to dismantle institutional bias, reform the electoral commission, or foster political tolerance.
If the establishment were genuinely sincere about treating polarization as a national emergency, the remedy would look entirely different.
A sincere leadership would have proposed a temporary, transitional pause—openly negotiated and agreed upon by the citizens through a national referendum—for a strict, legally bound period.
During those specific years, the state would focus exclusively on rebuilding compromised institutions, depoliticizing the civil service, and cleaning up the electoral environment, with a strict constitutional guarantee to revert to the standard five-year cycle afterward.
Yet, the fact that no such democratic mechanism or reform agenda is being offered proves that these proposed amendments have nothing to do with national healing.
Instead, they have everything to do with regime survival, power retention, and a profound unwillingness to face the electorate.
By attempting to permanently alter term limits through parliamentary maneuvers rather than testing these radical changes through a popular referendum, the architects of this move betray their true motivations.
These amendments are deeply self-serving, designed to protect incumbents from the judgment of the people while offering nothing to the ordinary Zimbabwean who bears the brunt of economic stagnation and political stagnation.
True national healing cannot be achieved by locking citizens out of the democratic process for longer periods.
It can only begin when the institutions meant to serve them are finally stripped of their partisan armor.
- 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