It is a feeling that settles deep in the bones of any Zimbabwean who has lived through the last two decades: the unnerving echo of history. Less than a decade since the nation poured onto the streets, brimming with a desperate hope that was ultimately betrayed, we are back. The air is thick again with talk of mass action, of removing a captured leader, of a final push against a predatory state. The names and faces have shifted slightly, but the script feels hauntingly familiar. One has to ask, with a profound sense of weariness: Are we merely turning a page in the same tragic book?
One cannot, and must not, dismiss the pain that fuels this moment. To do so would be an act of profound arrogance. The plight of the ordinary Zimbabwean is not an abstract political concept; it is the daily, grinding reality of a nation hollowed out from the inside. It is the graduate selling airtime on a dusty street corner, the civil servant whose salary evaporates before it hits their bank account, the pensioner watching their life’s savings rendered worthless. This is a soil of pure desperation, and from it, any promise of change, no matter how fraught with risk, can grow. The people who may march are not political pawns in their own minds; they are individuals fighting for the simple dignity of survival. It is this raw, human desperation that the architects of power have always known how to harness.
Yet, we must also confront the perilous calculus of what it means to disrupt the incumbent order, however rotten it may be. The removal of President Mnangagwa, particularly through an extra-constitutional process, is not a simple subtraction problem. It threatens to shatter the fragile veneer of stability that holds the state together. What rushes into the vacuum created by a fallen leader? Is it the democratic dawn we all yearn for, or is it a more ruthless faction from within the security apparatus, unbound by even the pretense of constitutionalism? The stakes are terrifyingly high. A chaotic power transition could unleash forces that make our current suffering seem manageable, plunging the nation into a period of violent uncertainty where the citizen is not a participant, but collateral damage.
This brings us to the crucial question of the outcome. What is the most likely result of this looming confrontation? We can speak of three possibilities: reform, revolt, or revolution.
A true revolution, a fundamental reordering of the state and its economic logic, seems the least probable. Revolutions require a coherent, alternative ideology and a disciplined, independent movement capable of seizing and restructuring power. What we see today is not that; it is a fracture within the existing system, not an assault on the system itself.
A revolt, a chaotic and largely spontaneous uprising fueled by anger, is a distinct possibility. It is an expression of pure rejection. However, revolts, lacking clear leadership and a defined political programme, often burn themselves out or are brutally crushed. Worse, they can be co-opted by opportunistic elements who ride the wave of popular anger to power, only to restore the old order.
This leaves us with reform, or what passes for it in Zimbabwe. This is the most likely, and perhaps most cynical, outcome: another managed transition. A palace coup dressed in the borrowed robes of a popular uprising. The system, in an act of self-preservation, sacrifices its head to save the body. The citizens will have played their part, providing the spectacle of legitimacy, before the gates of power are closed once more. This is the ghost of 2017, and it walks among us today.
And so, the Zimbabwean citizen is trapped in an impossible bind. The choice is between the cost of commission and the cost of omission. To act: to march, to protest – is to risk being used, to risk unleashing chaos, to pay the price for a transition that may not serve you. To omit: to stay home, to let ZANU-PF implode of its own accord is to consent to the slow, agonizing decay of the nation, and to pay the price of that continued suffering.
Either way, a cost will be exacted from the people. We stand on the precipice, caught between a painful past and an uncertain future. In the next five days, we will begin to understand just how much that cost will be.
