Tendai Ruben Mbofana
At a recent Young Women 4 ED event in Harare, Ruvheneko Parirenyatwa prompted President Emmerson Mnangagwa to say “clock it.”
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The entire exchange was staged as a seamless display of youth appeal.
The intention was obvious: show a veteran political leader adopting the contemporary language of the younger generation to score quick, viral relevance.
Yet, stripped of the cheering and carefully produced social media clips, the incident exposes a bizarre cultural collision.
The highest office in Zimbabwe—an institution defined for decades by its fierce, uncompromising rejection of homosexuality and Western social values—found itself parroting vocabulary created directly within the gay and transgender underground.
The origins of “clock it” are neither obscure nor ambiguous.
The phrase was not born in African political discourse, nor did it originate in traditional vernacular.
It was forged, refined, and popularized within the Black and Latino LGBTQ+ Ballroom scene of 1980s New York.
In that subculture, to “clock” someone meant to expose a flaw, spot something artificial, or call out a hidden reality.
From those underground roots, the term was broadcast globally through drag reality television, American pop media, and short-form video platforms like TikTok, ultimately becoming standard slang among internet-obsessed youth worldwide.
That this specific terminology landed so effortlessly on the lips of the Zimbabwean president reveals the sheer absurdity of modern political communication.
For decades, the ruling establishment has built its moral platform on the explicit condemnation of homosexuality, framing it as an alien, decadent import antithetical to Zimbabwean culture and Christian values.
State rhetoric has consistently drawn a hard line against non-heteronormative lifestyles, presenting the government as a shield protecting the nation from foreign moral decay.
Yet, in their frantic rush to appear trendy and connected to young voters, the state’s political handlers and media strategists blindly imported internet slang without performing the most basic due diligence on its lineage.
They saw a catchy phrase trending among youth and rushed to put it in the president’s mouth, completely oblivious to the fact that they were orchestrating the endorsement of LGBTQ+ subcultural jargon.
The very establishment that prides itself on guarding the nation’s cultural borders demonstrated that its ideological defenses are entirely porous to a viral TikTok trend.
At the exact same gathering, Youth Minister Tino Machakaire doubled down on state morality by openly condemning men dressing as women, insisting men must dress strictly as men.
The irony is total.
In one breath, the regime aggressively polices attire to project traditional values.
In the next, the president gleefully repeats the vocabulary of the 1980s cross-dressing Ballroom scene.
It proves the regime’s handlers are so clueless they do not even understand the origin of the foreign slang they put into the president’s mouth.
This is the raw reality of the spectacle in Harare: a total breakdown of state narrative control caused by superficial PR tactics.
While the political apparatus preaches anti-homosexual stances from the podium, its public relations machinery casually borrows the dialect of Harlem’s 1980s queer scene just to look fashionable.
It shows a presidium so eager for social media applause that it will blindly recite whatever script its handlers put in front of it, regardless of the historical baggage embedded in the words.
Language carries history, whether the speaker understands it or not.
By uncritically echoing global internet slang, the political establishment did not prove it understands the youth; it proved its own ignorance.
The image of the presidency sitting on stage and cheerily uttering “clock it” stands as an unvarnished testament to political vulnerability.
It shows how easily political posturing collapses when confronted by the uncensored, unpredictable flow of Western cultural exports.
- Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com