Before the sun has even breached the horizon, she is awake. She is the Zimbabwean woman, the true, unsung hero of this broken nation. She navigates a world designed by a cruel economic system that seems to charge a tax for breathing. She is the vendor on the street corner, dodging municipal police while selling tomatoes to pay for a child’s school fees. She is the cross-border trader, risking life and limb for a sliver of profit. She is the mother who must choose between buying a loaf of bread and a single sanitary pad for her daughter. She is the backbone of an informal economy that employs over 80% of our people, a testament not to opportunity, but to the complete collapse of formal employment under a regime that has perfected the art of plunder.
This is not poetry; it is a reality painted in the horrifying colours of statistics. This is a nation where one in every three women has been a victim of physical violence. This is a country where over 33% of our girls are forced into child marriage, their futures stolen before they have even begun. This is a society where an estimated 72% of schoolgirls cannot afford the basic dignity of menstrual products, forcing them to miss up to 50 days of school a year. While our leaders boast of progress, the number of newborn babies dying has tragically increased since 2015. Every single one of these numbers is a daughter, a sister, a mother, whose suffering is a direct indictment of the current political leadership.
It is against this backdrop of systemic agony that the ZANU-PF Women’s League held its National Assembly. In a spectacle of chilling disconnect from reality, a resolution was announced. Speaking from a pedestal of privilege, far removed from the dirt and desperation of the streets, Senator Monica Mutsvangwa declared: “All chairladies are moving with the resolution made in Bulawayo for the President to stay in office beyond 2028.”
Let us be clear what this resolution is. It is a prescription for more pain. It is a declaration from a pampered elite that the suffering of the ordinary Zimbabwean woman is not only acceptable but must be extended. For the mother struggling to feed her children, they prescribe more years of hyperinflation and economic decay. For the young girl at risk of being married off to escape poverty, they prescribe a continuation of the very conditions that fuel child marriage. For the woman enduring violence in a society where justice is a commodity, they prescribe more of the same impunity. These are not leaders representing the interests of women; they are courtiers, securing their own comfort by pledging allegiance to the source of the nation’s misery.
This endorsement has nothing to do with national development and everything to do with political self-preservation. It is a calculated move to prop up a leader whose continued stay in power guarantees the flow of patronage to a select few. The women who cheer for “2030 and beyond” are not thinking of the vendor in Mbare or the girl in rural Binga; they are thinking of their own access to state resources, their own positions, their own proximity to power. They have looked upon the profound suffering of their sisters and have chosen, with open eyes, to demand that it continues, so long as their own gilded cages remain secure.
The true Women’s League of Zimbabwe is not found in the sterile conference rooms of the party headquarters. It is found in the pre-dawn queues for water, in the hushed conversations of mothers sharing a half-loaf of bread, in the quiet dignity of a grandmother raising her orphaned grandchildren. These are the women who lead from the front every single day, not in party mobilisation, but in a desperate battle for survival. The resolution passed by their supposed representatives is more than an insult; it is a betrayal of their very existence. It is a formal decree that, for the women of Zimbabwe, the suffering must go on.
