A Zimbabwean vendor has been given until September 9 to get off the streets.

Families occupying land they were never supposed to occupy are watching demolition teams arrive.

Structures built without the necessary approvals are being pulled down.

The message from Government is clear: the law is the law.

And perhaps it should be.

Cities cannot function when every open space becomes a market, every wetland becomes a residential stand, and every piece of public land becomes someone's private development. There must be planning. There must be regulation. There must be consequences for breaking the rules.

But there is a nagging asymmetry that refuses to go away: accountability does not travel upwards as efficiently as enforcement travels downwards.

Government has given vendors operating in undesignated areas until September 9 to vacate their trading spaces before a nationwide clean-up operation begins. The stated objective is to restore order, cleanliness and trafficability in Zimbabwe's urban centres.

Fine.

Consider the vendor who has spent years working from the same spot because nobody bothered to provide a viable alternative. Consider the family that bought a residential stand from people who should never have been selling it. Someone authorised that land. Someone collected the money. Someone looked the other way.

The machinery of the State often becomes most efficient only after ordinary citizens have already invested their livelihoods, savings and hopes.

These are not arguments for lawlessness. They are arguments for consistency.

If a citizen can be punished for occupying land illegally, those who illegally allocate or sell that land should also face consequences.

If a vendor can be removed for breaking municipal regulations, officials who allowed illegal markets to flourish for years should have questions to answer.

If citizens must respect planning regulations, Government itself must demonstrate that it planned before it enforced.

There is, however, another dimension to this conversation. It is the more uncomfortable one.

Zimbabweans have just witnessed the rules of political succession being changed.

Constitutional amendments have extended presidential and parliamentary terms from five to seven years, moving the next general election from 2028 to 2030. The amendments also provide for the President to be elected by Parliament rather than through a direct popular presidential vote. The President has signed the changes into law.

The juxtaposition is difficult to ignore.

The vendor is told: You cannot operate outside the rules.

The homeowner is told: You cannot build outside the rules.

The citizen is told: You must comply with the law.

Yet when the political rules themselves are changed, the ordinary voter has considerably less direct say over who occupies the highest office in the land.

That creates an uncomfortable democratic paradox.

The State has enormous power over the everyday life of the citizen: where you trade, where you build, where you settle, and sometimes whether the structure you built with your life's savings remains standing.

But the citizen's ability to exercise direct political leverage has simultaneously been weakened.

This is why the debate cannot simply be about vendors.

It is about power and accountability.

A functioning democracy cannot merely be a place where citizens are efficiently policed. It must also be a place where those exercising power remain answerable to the people over whom that power is exercised.

Otherwise, we risk creating a rather peculiar version of the rule of law: very strong when directed at the citizen, considerably more flexible when power is dealing with itself.

Zimbabwe certainly needs orderly cities.

It needs properly planned settlements.

It needs people to obey the law.

But it also needs something else: a Government that understands that the citizen is not merely the subject of enforcement, but the source of political legitimacy.

The law must indeed be the law. It should apply downwards to the citizen, sideways to the powerful, and upwards to Government itself.

Right now, it does not.

Simbarashe Namusi is a media expert writing in his personal capacity.

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