Tendai Ruben Mbofana
When a yellow bulldozer diesel engine roars to life in the early hours of a Zimbabwean morning, its target is rarely a fortress of power.
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It aimlessly bites into brick foundations, concrete slabs, and the precarious dreams of ordinary citizens who spent years saving every cent to erect a home over their children’s heads.
As walls crumble into dust and belongings are dragged into the rain, a familiar justification echoes from the legislative chambers in Harare.
It speaks of the enforcement of the law, urban planning, order, and the relentless march of municipal regularity.
We have heard this vocabulary before.
Decades ago, Rhodesian native commissioners and municipal police set torch to ancestral homesteads, leveled back-garden rooms in high-density townships, and swept rural populations into guarded enclosures.
In doing so, they used the exact same grammar of state authority.
Destruction was framed as health regulation, legal compliance, and the removal of illegal squatters.
Back then, the young men and women who took up arms against settler minority rule recognized those bulldozers and torches for what they truly were.
They saw them as instruments of structural violence designed to deny indigenous Africans their fundamental dignity and human right to shelter.
The tragic irony of post-independence Zimbabwe is that the very liberators who once organized international outrage against forced evictions now wield the exact same machinery of displacement.
If the current wave of home demolitions had taken place under colonial rule, the response would have been swift and absolute.
Those currently sitting in government would have rightfully labeled them atrocities.
They would have exposed them as state-sponsored terror against the citizenry.
They would have beamed images of crushed suburban homes, shattered asbestos roofs, and weeping mothers to the United Nations, declaring them irrefutable proof of a regime that had lost all moral authority to govern.
Today, however, the rhetoric has shifted from the defense of the dispossessed to the cold arrogance of sovereign power.
When state officials like Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi stand in Parliament and declare that the bulldozer will come regardless of human cost, their intent is absolute.
They refuse to pause even for foreign visitors or humanitarian concerns.
In doing so, they mimic the defiant posture of the colonial state they fought to dismantle.
The law is invoked not as a framework to protect the vulnerable, but as a weapon to punish them.
The state points its finger at corrupt land barons and mischievous council workers.
Yet it directs the steel blade of the excavator straight at the unsuspecting home-seeker.
These citizens are victimized twice: first by the predatory land scheme, and then by the state’s uncompromising wrath.
Irony vanishes where political patronage begins.
Very few of the supposed land barons or corrupt council officials ever see the inside of a jail cell because their operations are tethered to the ruling elite.
Furthermore, no meaningful action has been taken against those fingered in the Justice Tendai Uchena commission report, despite its submission to the president back in December 2019.
It is telling that the report remained buried for years.
It only saw the light of day a few months ago after a High Court order forced its release following a lawsuit by former MP Allan Norman Markham and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights.
A government born out of a liberation struggle centered on land reclamation and human dignity cannot hide behind colonial-era town planning acts to justify mass homelessness.
To claim that unauthorized occupation warrants immediate structural destruction without providing alternative shelter is to prioritize spatial aesthetics over human survival.
It asserts that orderly roads and pristine sewer lines matter more than the living, breathing human beings who require shelter beneath the sky.
When a state inherited from a liberation war behaves with the same spatial hostility as the regime it replaced, it exposes a profound crisis of legitimacy.
The true measure of anti-colonial liberation was never meant to be the mere substitution of black rulers for white ones, while keeping intact the oppressive machinery of spatial control.
It was meant to be the total transformation of state power to serve the dispossessed.
By continuing to roll heavy machinery over the homes of the poor, the ruling elite does not demonstrate law and order.
It merely demonstrates how thoroughly the former freedom fighters have internalized the methods of their former oppressors.
The dust that settles over demolished neighborhoods today carries a bitter historic truth.
The bulldozer does not care who drives it, but those who once fled its path should have known better than to take the wheel.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com