Zimbabwe’s proposed Constitution Amendment Bill No 3 extends presidential terms and criminalises communication with foreign entities, threatening the core of the country’s democracy.
Source: Zimbabwe: When the grave digs itself
A pen aimed at the Constitution is a dagger aimed at the people. The country’s Bill No. 3, giving the government extensive powers, tells the unborn that they will be born into a cage
S
Sandas Madziva
There is a moment in a nation’s life when the law stops being a shield and becomes a shroud. Zimbabwe arrived at that hour on 16 February 2026 when the government gazetted the Constitution of Zimbabwe (Amendment) Bill No 3. To call it an amendment is to call a funeral a birthday party. The Bill does not refine; it shackles.
Let me explain this like I would to a friend in a café in Harare. You know that feeling when someone changes the rules of a game halfway through, then tells you they’re doing it for your safety? That is Bill No. 3.
It extends presidential and parliamentary terms from five years to seven, moving the next election from 2028 to 2030.
It abolishes direct presidential elections, replacing the popular vote with selection by a joint sitting of parliament. It allows a sitting president to appoint the chief justice and the head of the anti-corruption commission. And it makes “unauthorised communication” with foreign entities a crime, where the government decides what “unauthorised” means.
This is not a refinement. This is a legislative coup dressed in parliamentary robes.
Separately, in April 2026, cabinet approved a proposal to criminalise “unauthorised communication or negotiation by private citizens with foreign governments”.
Read that slowly. If a Zimbabwean scholar emails a human rights lawyer in London, a journalist in Johannesburg asks for comment or a grandmother in Mbare tells her daughter in London about the smell of tear gas, all that could become suspect.
The Bill is retroactive. It applies to President Emmerson Mnangagwa and parliament — extending his term until 2030. This contradicts Section 328(7) of the 2013 Constitution, which explicitly prohibits term extensions for a sitting president. The ruling party holds the two-thirds parliamentary majority required to pass it.
Former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere once warned: “The state has no right to protect itself against the people; only the people have the right to protect themselves against the state.” Bill No. 3 inverts this. It protects the state from the people. That is not security. That is a ratchet that only turns one way: tighter.
You might wonder what a dead English playwright has to do with Zimbabwe. Everything. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare gives the tyrant these lines: “But I am constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament.”
Bill No. 3 assumes the executive is that northern star — permanent, unchallengeable, above the law. By extending the president’s power to appoint judges and provincial governors without sufficient parliamentary oversight, it writes the assumption into our supreme law.
Shakespeare also gave us the warning in Hamlet: “When sorrows come, they come not as single spies but in battalions.”
Zimbabwe’s sorrows are arriving in battalions. A collapsing health system. A currency that has been redenominated three times. More than two million citizens living abroad as economic exiles.
And now the Bill, the final battalion: the battalion of fear.
The most dishonest argument for Bill No. 3 is the incantation of “national security”. A Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye argued, security without participation is merely a prison with better ventilation.
Proponents offer a different justification. They argue the Bill reduces “election mode toxicity”, aligns with Vision 2030 and gives the government sufficient time to complete long-term projects. The minister of justice has stated that it simply “elongates the electoral cycle” to ensure economic stability and reduce election-related fatigue. But the justifications collapse under scrutiny: if a government cannot deliver in five years, it should face the voters, not erase them.
Look at our neighbours. South Africa’s Constitution, despite its failures protects the right to protest and an independent judiciary. Botswana’s high court recently ruled against the government on a land rights case. Zambia voted out a sitting president in 2021 without a tank on the streets.
What does Zimbabwe do? It rewrites the rules mid-game.
Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote: “Language as communication and culture is a product of the history of a community.”
Bill No. 3 is not a product of Zimbabwe’s history of liberation, a history that produced patriots who argued, debated and wrote manifestos in prison. The Bill is a product of a different history: the history of fear. It uses the language of order to bury the memory of freedom.
This is close to my heart. I am a scholar because in 1978, my grandmother walked 40km to hide a young neighbour from the Rhodesian security forces. She risked everything for one principle: no law should make a person disappear for being inconvenient.
Steve Biko reminded us: “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
The amendment aims to capture the mind. It tells young Zimbabweans that asking why your currency fails is sedition. It tells alumni of programmes like Canon Collins that your critical thinking is a foreign conspiracy.
Opposition is not merely ignored; it is punished. During the public hearings from 30 March to 2 April 2026, reports documented selective microphone access, physical assaults on dissenters and the theft of a lawyer’s phone containing evidence of irregularities. Constitutional lawyer Lovemore Madhuku and former finance minister Tendai Biti have been arrested and assaulted. Human rights lawyer Douglas Coltart was attacked, his phone stolen.
No. I refuse to internalise that lie.
What happens if this passes unchallenged? Look to Eswatini, Africa’s last absolute monarchy, where King Mswati III has ruled by decree for decades. Bill No. 3 would give its government a blueprint: extend terms, criminalise foreign communication, detain without charge. Or consider Mozambique, where post-election violence in 2024 left dozens dead. An incumbent fearing defeat could cite Zimbabwe’s example to justify cancelling direct elections. This is not speculation. This is the logic of precedent.
The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, which Zimbabwe ratified in 1986, states in Article 13(1) that every citizen has the right to participate freely in government.
Bill No. 3 eviscerates the participation by criminalising civil society organisations that receive foreign funding for public interest litigation. That means if a women’s rights group in Bulawayo uses a small grant from a German foundation to challenge a discriminatory law, they are criminals. This is not sovereignty. This is sabotage.
Senegalese author Mariama Ba wrote in So Long a Letter: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”
In the same way, a constitution is not born democratic. It becomes tyrannical the moment the people stop defending it. We are at that moment.
I reject Bill No. 3 in its entirety.
I reject it because the 2013 Constitution was born from the blood of the 2008 violence. To amend it without a genuine referendum is to desecrate a grave.
I reject it because no president — no matter how long-serving — is a northern star.
Nelson Mandela said: “I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter. But I have discovered that the real test is not whether we avoid the fall but whether we stay down.”
This government has fallen into the trap of power. It is staying down. We, the scholars and alumni, must lift the pen.
I reject it because Zimbabwe deserves better than a cage called stability. Tsitsi Dangarembgwa wrote in Nervous Conditions: “The things we do not say become the holes in our lives.” I refuse to have holes.
I reject it because Shakespeare was right in The Tempest: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
The devils are not in London or Washington. The devils are in the clauses of the Bill. They wear ties. They speak in parliamentary language. They are devils nonetheless.
Let me end where I began. A constitution is not paper. It is a promise between the dead, the living and the unborn.
Bill No. 3 breaks that promise. It tells the unborn that they will be born into a cage.
But I have hope. Not in this government. In the people.
In the scholar who reads this and decides to write.
In the alumni who shares it despite the risk.
In the Mail & Guardian that dares to publish dissent.
Shakespeare, through Hamlet, gave us the final instruction when facing a rotten state: “The readiness is all.”
I am ready. We are ready. To reject. To critique. To trouble power until power learns to tremble. A grave that digs itself cannot bury anyone else. And Zimbabwe, my Zimbabwe, is not a grave. It is a sky waiting for flight.
Sandas Madziva, from Shurugwi, Zimbabwe is a Canon Collins Scholar and winner of the 2026 Troubling Power Essay Competition. He is also a PhD candidate in law at the University of the North-West with an interest in international trade, investment and business law.
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