RICHARD Runyararo Mahomva’s lecture delivered at NUST on the eve of Zimbabwe’s 46th independence anniversary was an impressive performance. It invoked Mamdani. It invoked Fanon. It spoke of ontological dispossession, colonial subjecthood, and The Wretched of the Earth.
For any reader familiar with the scholarship, this opening movement is designed to do one thing: establish that whoever opposes the Constitutional Amendment (No. 3) Bill is, at best, constitutionally naive and, at worst, a collaborator with colonial epistemology. It is a clever gambit. It is not an argument.
Mahomva opens with Mamdani’s Citizens and Subjects to frame the colonial legal architecture that vetoed Africans’ voting rights. This is irreproachable history. The problem is what he does with it next: he bootstraps from colonial denial of suffrage to the hypothesis that prolonging a sitting president’s term by two years, via parliamentary vote rather than direct election, advances that same liberation struggle. This is a category error of the most fundamental kind.
Mamdani’s primary concern was the antithesis of what Mahomva suggests: making power answerable to the people, not consolidating it within a political class that dispenses patronage and calls it democratisation. Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which Mahomva also enlists, contains its most searing chapter—“The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”—as an admonition against precisely this manoeuvre: a nationalist party substituting itself for the people, treating its own continuance as synonymous with liberation, and invoking anti-colonial rhetoric to shield itself from the accountability it once demanded of the colonial state.
Mahomva has not read Fanon negligently. He has read him calculatedly—and stopped three chapters too early.
The lecture is, at its core, a defence of Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3. One might therefore expect it to engage directly with the constitutional clauses CAB3 amends or contravenes. It does not.
It does not address Section 328(7), which unequivocally bars an amendment to a presidential term-limit provision from applying to a sitting or former president. The amendment Mahomva applauds would apply to President Emmerson Mnangagwa. The constitution he professes to uphold proscribes precisely this. Mahomva neither acknowledges nor contests the provision.
Nor does he engage Section 67(1)(a), which guarantees every Zimbabwean citizen the right to free, fair, and regular elections for any elective public office. Scrapping direct presidential suffrage—substituting the popular vote with a parliamentary election—is not a technical adjustment. It is the removal of a foundational constitutional right. Mahomva calls it democratic consolidation. He offers no constitutional reasoning to sustain that claim.
He further overlooks the Constitutional Court challenge lodged by Professor Lovemore Madhuku, which tests whether a parliamentary route to electing a president meets the standard of a “free and fair election” in which every citizen has the right to vote. This is not an abstract concern; it is the governing legal standard in a constitutional democracy.
An intellectual enlisted to lend academic credibility to a controversial constitutional alteration has a duty to engage its strongest counterarguments. Mahomva engages none. He substitutes economic nationalism and anti-colonial theory for constitutional analysis—and presents the substitution as erudition.
Perhaps the most striking move in the lecture is the claim that CAB3 is, in fact, beneficial to the opposition. The reasoning runs thus: the opposition is paralysed, impecunious, structurally deficient, and compromised; a longer electoral cycle allows for regeneration; therefore, CAB3 offers it a reprieve.
This is a non sequitur—both in form and substance. The enfeeblement of the opposition is not a natural condition for which time provides remedy. It is, in significant part, the product of deliberate political engineering: control of the Registrar-General’s office, command over ZEC, constituency delimitation, use of state resources in campaigns, and the systematic defunding and harassment of independent civil society. These are precisely the kinds of institutional dynamics that CAB3 entrenches.
Lengthening the race for an institution that controls the track is not benevolence. It is structured advantage extended.
More fundamentally, the opposition’s Achilles heel is not time; it is the proposed removal of the direct presidential vote. If the president is elected by parliament—and parliament is shaped by constituency boundaries and political controls already tilted toward Zanu PF—then no amount of internal reform or fundraising alters the outcome. The finish line has been moved to a venue only one competitor can access.
On “constitutional realism,” Mahomva distinguishes between power holders using constitutions to retain power and aspirational, rights-based constitutionalism—then claims Zanu PF has reconciled both through “economic democratisation.” The idea is conceptually interesting. It is also empirically untenable.
The economic democratisation argument requires accepting that the beneficiaries of land reform and mining allocations represent a broadly empowered citizenry rather than a politically connected patronage network. Yet the documented relationships between the presidential network, Sakunda Holdings, the fuel sector, and mining interests suggest a far more concentrated distribution of gains than Mahomva allows.
At a deeper level, if Zanu PF’s economic record is as compelling as claimed, why the need to amend the constitution to extend tenure beyond agreed term limits? A political movement confident in its popular mandate should welcome a direct presidential contest. The shift to a parliamentary mechanism suggests the opposite.
Mahomva’s invocation of women’s political rights as a virtue of CAB3 also warrants scrutiny—particularly against the composition of the very parliament that would elect the president.
In the August 2023 elections, only 22 women were directly elected to 210 constituency seats—about 11 percent. When quota seats are included, women hold 86 of 280 National Assembly seats and 36 of 80 Senate seats. These figures appear more balanced until their structure is examined.
Of the 86 women in the National Assembly, 60 occupy proportional representation quota seats allocated by party lists. They do not represent constituencies. Their presence in parliament depends on party processes, not direct electoral mandates.
This omission is central—and fatal—to Mahomva’s gender argument.
If the president is to be elected by parliament, the composition of that parliament is the essence of democratic legitimacy. Yet stripped of quota allocations, it remains overwhelmingly male. Only 21 women secured constituency seats in 2023, down from 25 in 2018. The remainder sit by party allocation, not direct voter endorsement.
Translated into plain constitutional logic, Mahomva’s argument becomes this: women will benefit from CAB3 because the president will be chosen by a parliament in which women hold a small fraction of directly elected seats, with most female representation dependent on party structures aligned with the incumbent.
This is not empowerment. It is the instrumentalisation of quota representation to construct a majority while presenting it as gender progress.
There is a further complication Mahomva overlooks. In October 2023, recalls triggered by Sengezo Tshabangu led to the removal of multiple CCC MPs, including women in quota seats, despite internal party disputes. Additional recalls followed in November. Quota MPs—precisely because they lack constituency bases—are especially vulnerable to party mechanisms.
This is the parliament envisaged to elect the president: one in which members most dependent on party structures are also most susceptible to directive voting.
Mahomva’s critique of the phrase “one man, one vote” as linguistically androcentric is fair. The formulation does carry a masculine default worth correcting. But he extends this observation into an accusation that opposition to CAB3 is inherently misogynistic. That is rhetoric, not constitutional argument.
Zimbabwean women stand to lose, not gain, from the removal of direct presidential suffrage. The vote Mahomva claims to centre is the very one CAB3 would remove from determining the head of state. A genuinely inclusive reform would expand suffrage, not contract it.
Mahomva identifies himself as a public relations expert. His lecture, in that light, functions as a public relations exercise for a specific constitutional outcome. It is intellectually fluent; its historical survey from the 1891 Cape Order in Council to the 2013 constitution is competent. But its framework is instrumental throughout—deploying history and theory not to illuminate, but to insulate.
The measure of a constitutional argument is not its philosophical range. It is whether it engages the constitutional text, reflects the intent of its drafters, and protects the rights of the governed. On all three counts, Mahomva’s lecture is silent.
That silence is not incidental. It is the argument.
As Zimbabwe marks 46 years of independence, the intellectual tradition Mahomva invokes—Mamdani, Fanon, and the nationalist legacy—demands that power be held accountable to the constitutional covenant the people made with themselves. The 2013 constitution was not a colonial imposition. It emerged from the most extensive public consultation in the country’s history, with term limits among its most deliberate safeguards.
To invoke liberation in service of their removal is not constitutionalism. It is its negation.
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