Zimbabwe does not behave like a country that expects tomorrow to arrive normally.
Other nations plan for alternation.
We plan for prevention.
On 16 February 2026, the Constitution of Zimbabwe Amendment Bill (No. 3) was published in a Gazette Extraordinary, formally placing before Parliament proposals that would significantly reshape the country’s constitutional architecture.
Among its most consequential provisions are extending the presidential term of office from five to seven years and changing the method of electing the President from direct popular vote to election by Members of Parliament sitting in a joint session.
The Bill has already triggered familiar debates — about legality, procedure, elections, clauses and subsections.
But those arguments assume something Zimbabwean politics has never fully trusted: that power can change hands without changing the country itself.
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Our politics is not built on trust.
It is built on memory.
One of the earliest governing lessons emerged in 1987. The Unity Accord did more than end conflict; it resolved political competition by incorporating it into a single authority. Stability did not follow alternation, but consolidation.
Whether one views it as reconciliation or absorption, it left behind a governing intuition: order becomes safer as centres of power become fewer.
A second lesson came two decades later in the Government of National Unity in Zimbabwe.
For five years, authority existed but control was shared. Decisions required negotiation. Policy could stall. Power was present but not decisive. The state did not collapse, but it also did not feel fully in command of events.
From the outside, the GNU looked like compromise. From the inside, it looked like conditional authority.
It taught a lesson that rarely appears in constitutions but often shapes them: uncertainty is not only the possibility of losing power — it is the possibility of having to share it.
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