Why do Zimbabwe’s house demolitions target desperate home-seekers while land barons go free?

Source: Why do Zimbabwe’s house demolitions target desperate home-seekers while land barons go free?

In this country, there are laws for the poor, and laws for the powerful.

As urban and rural housing demolitions resume across Zimbabwe with relentless force, the roar of state-sanctioned bulldozers has once again become the defining sound of administrative authority.

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From the razed homesteads of peri-urban settlements to the flattened suburban developments of major towns, thousands of citizens are routinely stripped of their life savings in a matter of hours.

The official rhetoric from municipal authorities and central government remains predictably clinical, citing spatial planning, municipal by-laws, and the restoration of order.

Yet behind this bureaucratic terminology lies a deeply disturbing moral and legal asymmetry.

The state continues to unleash its full coercive force upon the desperate home-seeker at the end of the chain, while the politically connected land barons who orchestrated the illegal sales remain largely untouchable.

The government and local authorities routinely insist that these targeted structures were built illegally on unapproved layouts, wetlands, or state land acquired from unauthorized sellers.

If that premise is accepted as absolute, it raises an obvious, uncomfortable question: what concrete measures have authorities taken to stop the supply side of this illegal market?

Does the government truly expect citizens to believe these land barons are invisible?

Why have authorities not questioned the very victims whose homes they flatten to name the people who sold them the stands?

The answer points to something far deeper and more insidious.

While I can never condone illegality, one fundamental fact cannot be ignored: the majority of these homeowners are not criminals.

They did not meet in the dead of night to scheme and steal state land.

Their only “crime” was desperation and gullibility.

Seeking a place to call home, they fell into the trap of devious land barons who presented these stands as fully legitimate.

When these families handed over thousands of hard-earned dollars, they believed in good faith that they were making a lawful purchase.

Why, then, unleash such brutality on the victim?

The real criminals are the land barons who knowingly sold land that was never theirs to sell.

We are treated to periodic public warnings, warnings to traditional leaders, and press statements urging citizens to inspect municipal layout plans before purchasing land.

Yet, these administrative declarations do nothing to dismantle the deeply entrenched informal networks that generate millions of dollars by exploiting a desperate national housing queue.

When it comes to enforcement against the architects of these scams, the imbalance is staggering.

The Zimbabwe Republic Police and the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission frequently parade low-level cooperative chairpersons or middle-tier intermediaries before the press.

However, high-profile arrests that progress to meaningful convictions are virtually non-existent.

The public is left asking: how many notorious land barons and their accomplices have actually been convicted and sentenced to serve custodial terms?

The silence from the judicial pipeline is deafening.

Prominent figures named in land scandals routinely secure lengthy bail periods, interlocutory delays, or benefit from perpetually incomplete dockets.

The ill-gotten wealth harvested from vulnerable families is rarely recovered, and accountability stalls at the courtroom door.

This state of impunity exists despite years of costly official investigations.

We cannot pretend the state lacks the necessary evidence.

The landmark Justice Tendai Uchena Commission of Inquiry into the Sale of State Land in and around Urban Areas revealed a colossal loss of nearly three billion US dollars in state land value.

The commission painstakingly mapped out illegal allocations across the country, implicating hundreds of housing cooperatives, property developers, senior public administrators, and political actors who parcelled out public land without authority or infrastructure.

Over four hundred specific cases were referred to law enforcement agencies for immediate prosecution.

What became of those comprehensive findings?

For years, the report was kept hidden from public view until court orders forced its official release.

The promised legal reckoning evaporated into thin air.

Instead of systematic prosecutions and asset forfeitures, the key players named in those investigations were permitted to retreat into the background or rebrand their operations under new entities.

The inescapable reality is that land barons have long operated under the protective umbrella of political patronage.

Informal settlements were systematically cultivated to create politically dependent voting enclaves on the peripheries of major urban centers.
Prominent actors were allowed to build lucrative financial empires by selling unserviced plots precisely because they served a political purpose.
Now that the political utility of these settlements has lapsed or formal planning directives take precedence, the state steps in to enforce the law.
Not against the syndicates that pocketed millions, but against the citizens who built single-room units and brick homes with their hard-earned money.
There is a cruel, structural pattern at play here.
A house does not appear overnight.
Foundations are dug, bricks are laid, and roofs are raised over months of open, visible construction while local authorities turn a blind eye.
To return years later with heavy machinery to crush these homes—while the “big fish” who forged documents, collected levies, and sold the stolen land walk free—is not an enforcement of justice.
It is the brutalization of the victim.
Until the state demonstrates the courage to arrest, convict, and strip the assets of politically shielded land barons, nothing will change.
Until then, every demolition remains a monument to selective justice.
***Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to contact him on +263715667700 or ***mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com

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