Tendai Ruben Mbofana
There is a terrifying arrogance that settles over a political party when it rules for too long.
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It develops a slow and poisoning belief that the sovereign state exists merely as an extension of its headquarters.
We see this arrogance laid bare on the tarmac of Mashonaland West province.
By police decree, the direct flow of heavy haulage transport along the critical Harare-Chirundu highway has been brought to a screeching halt.
According to reports, commercial interlinks, fuel tankers, and vital regional freight are banned from the primary national corridor.
They are forced to abandon the direct 117-kilometer highway entirely.
Instead, they must take an agonizing 204-kilometer detour through the bruised and buckling feeder roads of Chegutu and Norton.
And for what supreme national purpose is this economic paralysis enforced?
Not to avert a natural disaster.
Not to repair collapsing civil infrastructure.
But to ensure that a ruling party conference at the Chinhoyi University of Technology proceeds without a single traffic light blinking in an elite motorcade’s path.
When a political organization requires the outright throttling of a primary international trade artery just to host its delegates in unbothered silence, it has ceased to govern a country.
It has converted the republic into its personal estate, demanding that the entire nation hold its breath so that party cadres can feast in peace.
To look past the sanitised language of police press statements is to confront the raw, predatory math of economic strangulation.
The Harare-Chirundu corridor is not a sleepy provincial lane.
It is the vital northern lung of the North-South Corridor.
The literal umbilical cord funneling industrial raw materials, critical fuel, and manufactured commodities from South Africa through Harare and onward to Zambia, Malawi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Forcing multi-tonne freight carriers onto fragile secondary bypasses adds an extra 87 kilometers to every single journey.
At current ZERA caps of $2.04 per liter for diesel, every diverted heavy truck burns an extra 43.5 liters of fuel.
That bleeds nearly $90 in pure energy costs alone per single leg.
Total operational penalties, including accelerated tire wear, mechanical strain, and lost driver hours, balloon past three hundred dollars per trip.
Multiply that financial hemorrhage across hundreds of heavy commercial vehicles navigating substandard tarmac every single day.
The ban spans just a handful of days from October 13 to 17, 2026, but in the unforgiving world of economics, those few days are a lifetime.
Transport operators do not absorb these staggering losses out of charity.
They pass them down with ruthless, merciless efficiency.
They inflate the landed cost of food, fuel, and basic survival goods for millions of ordinary families who are already drowning under severe economic hardship.
When the state deliberately hobbles national logistics and invites systemic gridlock just to roll out the red carpet for political elites, it is engaging in state-sanctioned economic sabotage.
It sends an unequivocal, devastating signal to regional trade partners, investors, and international logistics firms.
Zimbabwe’s primary trade corridors are held hostage to partisan whims, rendering our economy uncompetitive, unreliable, and structurally fragile.
And yet, this is the same country about to assume the chairmanship of the regional trade body, COMESA.
This is what happens when power becomes entirely detached from moral responsibility and national utility.
A government that seizes control of vital economic corridors, reroutes international trade onto crippled back-roads, and forces commerce to bow to political pageantry has shattered the fundamental social contract.
True leadership protects the baseline stability of the nation, keeps trade moving without interruption, and safeguards the economic machinery that feeds its people.
When a ruling party decides that its internal conference is more important than the financial survival of the republic, it reveals an elite class.
It exposes a group that views the state not as a public trust to be nurtured, but as a conquered territory to be plundered for temporary prestige.
A political organization that actively threatens the economic lifeline of its own country to feed its ego no longer serves the nation.
It consumes it.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com