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Legal action can challenge the amendment. It cannot, by itself, dismantle the political project that created it.
By Reason Wafawarova
While the legal challenges against CAA3 continue, we must retain at least some hope — even if that hope is accompanied by disputable confidence — that our courts will continue to place the law above the convenience of political incumbency.
The courts must be allowed to do their work. But we must also understand the limitations of the legal battle.
A constitutional challenge targets the law. It examines the wording, procedure, constitutionality and legal effect of CAA3.
But there is another question which the courts, constrained by their constitutional role, may not necessarily answer:
What was the political mischief that CAA3 was designed to achieve, and who designed it?
That is a different battle. And it is one that Zimbabweans cannot afford to outsource to the courts.
We must fight CAA3 in court. But we must also fight the mischief behind CAA3 in the political, civic, regional and international arena. We must act effectively and decisively on this. The African Union, SADC, the UN and international trading partners must be made to support legality and legitimacy hand in hand with the majority of the people of Zimbabwe – targeting individuals behind the mischief of CAA3.
Because laws do not write themselves.
Constitutional amendments do not wake up one morning and decide to extend political terms, remove presidential elections, alter the architecture of succession and create new centres of patronage.
People design these things. People promote them. People finance them. People mobilise political institutions behind them. And, ultimately, people benefit from them.
So let us identify them.
Not everybody celebrating CAA3 belongs in the same category.
There are opportunists who will benefit from whatever political arrangement emerges.
There are patronage beneficiaries who will support whoever appears to control the distribution of political and economic rewards.
There are party loyalists who will defend the amendment because that is what party loyalists do.
And there are ordinary citizens who genuinely support CAA3. They have a constitutional right to be wrong in public.
We should not confuse them with the people who conceived, engineered, financed, promoted and materially benefit from the project.
Those are the people we need to scrutinise.
Start with the man who gave the project its name:
President Emmerson Mnangagwa cannot reasonably present himself as a detached observer of the 2030 project.
He announced it himself. In 2024, he famously declared:
“2030 I will still be President.”
And, in Shona:
“2030 ndinenge ndichipo.”
The political machinery subsequently turned this into the compulsory slogan:
“2030 Baba Mnangagwa vanenge vachipo!”
So when CAA3 eventually arrives with an architecture that eliminates the 2028 presidential election and creates a mechanism for keeping the incumbent in office beyond his constitutionally expected electoral cycle, Zimbabweans are entitled to ask a very simple question:
Is this coincidence, or is this the political project finally acquiring legislative form?
That question deserves answers. And those answers should not be sought only in court papers.
They should be demanded politically, publicly and persistently.
The allegations surrounding the mobilisation of financial and political resources behind the constitutional amendment must also be subjected to serious scrutiny. If public money, state resources, patronage networks or private financing were used to manufacture political consent for CAA3, then Zimbabweans deserve to know who financed what, who received what, and in return for what.
That is not persecution. That is accountability.
Then come the political engineers:
There are also individuals who cannot credibly hide behind the fiction that CAA3 simply appeared through some organic parliamentary process.
Take Ziyambi Ziyambi, the one who has never won any election in his political career. He is not merely the Minister of Justice. He is also the ZANU-PF Secretary for Legal Affairs.
That distinction matters. He therefore occupies a particularly important position between the machinery of government and the machinery of the ruling party.
And he assumed the party legal affairs portfolio after Patrick Chinamasa — the original holder of that position — became an inconvenient voice on the 2030 question.
Then there is the Speaker of Parliament, also unelected, and arguably unelectable, who simultaneously occupies the position of ZANU-PF Secretary-General.
That duality matters too.
The institution that is supposed to embody parliamentary independence is headed by someone who also occupies one of the most senior positions in the ruling party.
The circumstances surrounding the removal of Obert Mpofu from the position of Secretary-General, including the controversy over the proposed elevation of Kuda Tagwirei into the ZANU-PF Central Committee, also deserve public scrutiny.
These are not irrelevant details.
They form part of the political ecosystem in which CAA3 was produced.
Then there is Attorney-General Virginia Mabhiza.
She became one of the most prominent public advocates for CAB3, effectively taking on the role of explaining, defending and campaigning for the amendment.
That makes her role worthy of scrutiny too.
Not because public officials should be intimidated for doing their jobs.
But because public advocacy for a constitutional amendment is itself a legitimate subject of public accountability.
The question is simple:
What exactly was the legal and political rationale being advanced?
Whose interests did the proposed constitutional architecture serve?
And what advice was given to the government about the constitutional and democratic consequences?
And then there is Kuda Tagwirei:
If CAA3 is ultimately about restructuring political power, then the people who emerge from that restructuring with tangible political rewards deserve particularly intense scrutiny.
Kuda Tagwirei is an obvious case.
He has been identified as a major financial supporter of the political campaign surrounding the amendment, while also emerging as one of its most direct beneficiaries through his appointment among the ten additional senators created by CAA3.
That coincidence deserves examination.
If someone financially supports a political project and subsequently receives an institutional political position created by that same project, the public is entitled to ask questions.
That does not automatically prove a corrupt transaction.
But it creates a legitimate public-interest question.
And that question should not be silenced by calling it political persecution.
Quite the opposite.
The more consequential the political transaction, the greater the need for transparency.
We therefore need two battles, not one:
This is where the opposition and civic movement must rethink the strategy.
The constitutional litigation must continue.
Every constitutional argument must be tested.
Every procedural irregularity must be examined.
Every legal protection available to citizens must be used.
But that is only one front. The other front is political.
We need to identify the architects of the 2030 project and subject their roles to sustained public scrutiny.
We need to document their statements.
Track their institutional positions.
Follow the money. Examine their political relationships.
Record their public claims.
Compare what they said before CAA3 with what CAA3 eventually became.
Identify who benefits. Identify who financed. Identify who promoted. Identify who legislated.
And identify who received political rewards after the machinery was successfully constructed.
That information should not remain trapped inside Zimbabwe.
It should become part of the regional and international conversation about the erosion of constitutional democracy in Zimbabwe.
This is not a campaign of harassment.
There is an important distinction here.
Targeting the architects of a political project does not mean encouraging mobs to attack them.
It does not mean threats. It does not mean violence. It does not mean inventing allegations. It does not mean punishing people merely for supporting a political position with which we disagree.
It means lawful political accountability.
It means public scrutiny. It means investigative journalism. It means civic education. It means parliamentary questioning. It means documenting conflicts of interest.
It means demanding financial transparency. It means asking regional bodies and international institutions to pay attention. It means ensuring that those who design constitutional changes for personal or factional advantage do not get to operate permanently in the shadows.
Because there is something fundamentally wrong with fighting only the product while ignoring the producer.
CAA3 is a symptom. The political project is the disease.
This is perhaps the most important point.
Even if CAA3 is defeated in court, the political ambition that produced it will not necessarily disappear.
The 2030 project will still exist. The succession calculations will still exist.
The patronage networks will still exist. The political actors who invested in the project will still exist.
And they may simply return with another constitutional amendment, another legislative mechanism, another parliamentary manoeuvre or another political strategy.
We have already seen enough of the architecture to know that the battlefield is changing.
The question is therefore not simply:
Can we defeat CAA3?
It is: Can we defeat the political project that made CAA3 necessary in the first place?
That requires more than lawyers.
It requires citizens. It requires journalists. It requires civil society. It requires opposition parties. It requires churches, academics, professional bodies and the diaspora.
And, most importantly, it requires a sustained public record of who did what, when, why and for whose benefit.
The architects of political projects should never be allowed to hide behind the institutions through which they execute those projects.
If CAA3 is constitutional, the courts will have to say so. If it is unconstitutional, the courts must strike it down.
But regardless of what the courts eventually decide, Zimbabweans have another question to answer:
Who designed this political project, who financed it, who sold it to the country, who legislated it, and who stands to gain from it?
That question belongs to all of us.
And unlike a constitutional amendment, **it cannot be defeated by changing a few words in a Bill.
It can only be answered by relentless public scrutiny.
The law must confront CAA3.
The people must confront the mischief behind it.
And we must know the difference.
Reason Wafawarova
VOICE OF REASON
