By Obert Masaraure
Zimbabwe’s current constitutional crisis, compounded by Constitutional Amendment No. 3 (CAB3), cannot be debated at face value or in isolation from the political economy, which is a by-product of the colonial legacy.
The dramatic push and portrayal of (CAB3) by state media, paid content creators, and social media influencers as a national project being driven by ZANU PF, the ruling party endorsed by popular will, is pure deception that has not escaped scrutiny.
In essence, developments of the CAB3, tracing its inception as a ZANU PF resolution, chaotic public hearings marred by violence, and its inevitable debate in Parliament in the coming weeks, resemble a colonial model of power.
Our liberation struggle was waged in the name of majority rule, constitutionalism, and the equitable distribution of national resources.
Ironically, more than four decades after independence, the current push for (CAB3) raises a troubling question: has the post-colonial state drifted so far from its founding ideals that it now mirrors the very system it was meant to dismantle?
CAB3 is entrenched and anchored by a faction of ZANU PF, which, in essence, is a narrow class of politically connected oligarchs whose interests are shaping the trajectory of the state in brazen fashion with impunity.
Hence, to dismantle the CAB3 rhetoric, we have to trace the colonial legacy of the British South Africa Company (BSAC), which funded our country’s imperial capture.
Chartered in 1889 under Cecil John Rhodes, the BSAC functioned as a private commercial entity exercising state power to facilitate the extraction of land, minerals, and labour for the benefit of the white settler minority.
Governance structures were designed not to serve the populace, but to secure accumulation.
Today, our beloved nation, Zimbabwe, particularly after the 2017 military-assisted transition, risks reproducing a similar “company-state” logic—this time not under foreign control, but through a domestic comprador elite embedded within the political system.
The actors are no longer the historical foreign settlers but a network of politically connected business elites often referred to as the Zvigananda, including Kudakwashe Tagwirei, Wicknell Chivayo, Paul Tungwarara, and Scott Sakupwanya, whose accumulation is deeply intertwined with state power.
Tragically, our government and state have morphed into an instrument for elite accumulation for the Zvigananda rather than a vehicle for public good.
The consolidation of this elite influence can be traced to the mid-2010s, particularly around the introduction of Command Agriculture in 2016.
Command Agriculture was initially introduced as a programme founded to establish food security, financed through Treasury Bills issued by the government and intermediated by private actors linked to politically exposed networks.
In reality, while Command Agriculture contributed to short-term production gains, subsequent scrutiny, including findings from oversight institutions, did in fact raise deep-seated concerns about opaque accounting, secrecy, ballooning public liabilities, and, of course, weak accountability mechanisms.
The result was not only fiscal strain but also macroeconomic instability, culminating in the 2017–2019 currency crisis that eroded savings, wages, and pensions, effectively transferring the cost of elite accumulation onto ordinary Zimbabweans.
Beloved citizens, this is not the socialist ideology our fallen and surviving heroes and heroines fought for in the liberation struggle.
This neo-colonial and capitalist model of state-backed private accumulation has since extended into other strategic sectors, particularly mining and energy.
Tragically, the controversial restructuring of mining assets under opaque entities such as Kuvimba Mining House and later the Mutapa Investment Fund has no doubt blurred the boundary between public ownership and private benefit.
There is limited transparency around valuations, shareholding structures, and revenue flows, which, under our Constitution, Parliament has an obligation to oversee.
In the same vein, controversial but lucrative government tenders such as the Gwanda solar project, associated with Wicknell Chivayo, have in reality come to symbolise procurement irregularities, where significant public funds were disbursed with minimal delivery over extended periods.
It is within this ecosystem that figures like Kudakwashe Tagwirei thrive and have been central in financial engineering through state instruments, making millions at the expense of taxpayers.
Other oligarchs such as Scott Sakupwanya and Paul Tungwarara have also emerged, operating within mining, trading, and political financing circuits that intersect with state institutions, collectively forming a network whose influence derives from proximity to power rather than market competition.
With these realities unpacked, it is within this broader political economy that CAB3 must be dissected and situated.
In every epoch, constitutional amendments are not inherently problematic; however, the intent, context, and beneficiaries of the proposed amendments are the scales that measure the gravity of the matter concerning national interest.
Proponents currently pushing for CAB3 have enveloped their narrative in claims that elections are retrogressive ahead of the 2028 succession dynamics, with deceptive efforts to reshape or extend executive authority under President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
In essence, CAB3 is fundamentally less about governance reform, as cosmetically flaunted by the Agenda 2030 loyalists, sympathisers, and apologists.
CAB3 is more about preserving a political-economic arrangement that secures elite interests, ensuring continuity of these lucrative contracts, access to state resources, and insulation from accountability.
The parallel with the BSAC becomes sharper here, where political structures are adjusted not to deepen democracy, but to secure extraction.
The comparison to colonialism is therefore structural rather than racial.
Where the BSAC advanced the interests of a settler white minority under the guise of administration, contemporary Zimbabwe risks a form of internalised neo-colonialism in which a domestic elite reproduces similar extractive patterns.
Our Pan-African father and first leader of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, argued in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism that formal sovereignty can coexist with economic domination when control is concentrated in unaccountable hands aligned with political authority.
Zimbabwe’s trajectory, if CAB3 is pursued, is increasingly reflecting this contradiction, where the outward symbols of independence mask a deeper concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a few elite oligarchs.
Consequences of this system, which are downplayed by state-sponsored propaganda, are, however, visible in rising public debt, underdeveloped infrastructure, persistent inequality, and the perpetual erosion of public trust in institutions.
Curated, touted, and publicised philanthropic acts by the elite Zvigananda, such as those by Chivayo, ranging from luxury vehicles to cash handouts, in this context appear less as genuine generosity and more as reputational laundering, where wealth derived from opaque state-linked processes is recycled back to citizens in symbolic form.
These dynamics have eroded societal values and reinforced a culture of dependency among ordinary citizens while deflecting scrutiny from the underlying structures of accumulation.
Our 2013 Constitution was designed as a supreme and ultimate safeguard against precisely this kind of concentration of power.
By embedding checks and balances intended to prevent executive overreach and protect public resources.
Sinister attempts to weaken our Constitution through CAB3 risk dismantling the supreme last institutional barrier to unchecked authority by these oligarchs.
Zimbabwe, our beloved nation, now stands at a critical juncture, where make-or-break tough choices have to be made.
It is either that citizens allow an entrenched system that concentrates power and wealth in the hands of a few, or choose to reaffirm constitutionalism as a foundation for accountability and inclusive governance.
History offers a clear warning that when the state becomes indistinguishable from a company, citizens are reduced to subjects of extraction rather than participants in democracy, and CAB3, in this context, emerges not merely as a legal amendment but as a defining test of the country’s political and economic future.
Masaraure writes in his own capacity
