Zimbabwe is facing a new wave of political turbulence as plans to eliminate political parties and hold no elections at all begin to circulate in the run-up to President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s succession. Opponents warn that such reforms could open a constitutional door to permanent rule.
According to reports, the ideas are being pushed forward by the faction surrounding Sengezo Tshabangu, the self-declared interim secretary-general of the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC). This push arrives as speculation mounts over yet another round of constitutional amendments.
Supporters of Tshabangu contend that Zimbabwe’s recurring electoral contests have produced nothing meaningful for the everyday lives of ordinary people. They argue the current model should give way to a governance approach centred squarely on economic and social results.
The timing adds fuel to the controversy. Constitutional Amendment Act No. 3 of 2026 (CAA3) became law only weeks earlier, delaying the 2028 poll to 2030 and scrapping the direct election of the president — moves that have already prompted at least seven court challenges.
Opponents say the government is eroding the nation’s constitutional foundations and stripping citizens of their right to vote directly for the head of state.
Now, activity is reportedly intensifying around Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 4 (CAB4), which is said to be designed to bring Zimbabwe’s legal and political structures into line with the shifts introduced by CAA3. And at the heart of the emerging discussion sits Tshabangu’s most radical suggestion: ending elections entirely.
Alarm is growing that Zanu-PF — which commands the presidency and enjoys a majority in Parliament — could join forces with lawmakers loyal to Tshabangu to force through additional constitutional alterations capable of stretching Mnangagwa’s time in office without limit.
Tshabangu asserts that he enjoys the backing of certain opposition members in both the National Assembly and the Senate, meaning Parliament could become the decisive battleground for whatever amendments come next.
Speaking to The Standard, Nqobizitha Mlilo, a spokesperson for Tshabangu’s camp, challenged the very purpose of Zimbabwe’s electoral cycles.
“So, the basic propositional question is this: What is the utility of elections in a country like Zimbabwe?” Mlilo asked.
His position is that the ballot box should be substituted with a structure that guarantees free, quality schooling, healthcare within reach, and universal employment.
“There is no benefit in having elections,” Mlilo declared. “What we need is that the needs of our people must be met.”
The faction around Tshabangu initially floated the idea of cancelling the 2028 vote not long after the 2023 election, helping to shape the political conversation that culminated in CAA3.
The newest suggestion, however, has unsettled a broad range of critics — some of them inside Zanu-PF itself — who worry that scrapping elections would dismantle the main constitutional channel through which voters can swap one government for another.
Within parts of the ruling establishment, such a move would dovetail neatly with a campaign that is gaining ever more prominence: keeping Mnangagwa in office past 2030.
Rank-and-file Zanu-PF supporters are championing the divisive “2030 agenda,” a drive to prolong the president’s grip on power beyond his current constitutional mandate.
Running alongside it is a separate push built on the “Munhumutapa” concept. Young activists linked to Zanu-PF are reportedly planning to use Munhumutapa Day on September 15 as a platform to advocate for Mnangagwa’s continued leadership.
Sceptics read the campaign as a bid to lift the president above ordinary electoral competition and recast him as a unifying figure of the nation whose stewardship ought to go on without end.
Some of the more extreme strands of political chatter have gone so far as to depict Mnangagwa as a possible king — a status that would insulate him from recurring electoral tests.
Tshabangu’s side has firmly dismissed any implication that the president is laying the groundwork for a monarchy.
Mlilo described efforts to paint the president as chasing such an ambition as politically driven and designed to smear initiatives aimed at fostering national cohesion.
“We don’t necessarily think that there is any credence in the suggestion that the President is trying to create it in us,” he stated. “It is factually and politically not true from where we sit.”
Even so, the overlap between the two endeavours — Zanu-PF’s drive to prolong Mnangagwa’s presidency and Tshabangu’s call to end elections — has stoked conjecture that opposition lawmakers aligned with Tshabangu might be enlisted to serve the ruling party’s purposes.
Mlilo cautioned political players against regarding his group as an untrustworthy negotiating partner.
“We simply insist on our colleagues in Zimbabwe that they must be sincere in these discussions,” he said, pointing out that bargains struck in earlier talks on CAA3 had been honoured.
“We simply urge them to continue on that path of sincerity, because that is the only path that can cause that country to remain stable and secure.”
Zanu-PF figures, meanwhile, have brushed aside suggestions that the party wants Mnangagwa as a president for life.
When pressed on whether the party was agitating for Mnangagwa to stay indefinitely, Zanu-PF political commissar Munyaradzi Machacha responded: “It’s not true.”
The party’s legal secretary, Ziyambi Ziyambi, was equally dismissive of reports that a further constitutional amendment was being drawn up to cement the changes CAA3 introduced.
“I am not aware,” Ziyambi said. “So many times people link me to things I have no knowledge of. It happens that a rumour spreads when you are in the dark.”
Mnangagwa himself has previously presented himself as a defender of the constitution and pledged to leave office in 2028.
Opposition figure Job Sikhala, on the other hand, contends that the planned changes have scant connection to national development and exist mainly to shield political control and access to the country’s resources.
Sikhala has charged the Mnangagwa government with overseeing sweeping corruption and the supposed looting of national wealth.
“There has been looting and plundering of our national resources at the scale never witnessed anywhere in the world for the past decade since Mnangagwa took over office,” Sikhala asserted.
He maintained that anyone profiting from the present political arrangement would have every incentive to keep it intact.
Sikhala also tied the proposed reforms to Mnangagwa’s track record in the 2018 and 2023 contests, arguing that the president’s political circle is now chasing a settlement that would “completely outlaw elections” and safeguard what he termed a “perpetual looting regime.”
Government and Zanu-PF representatives have repeatedly denied that the 2030 agenda is a blueprint for a personal or dynastic state, insisting instead that the proposed reforms exist to advance stability, development, and the national interest.
Political analyst Tendai Reuben Mbofana argues the unfolding events cannot be separated from the rising “Munhumutapa” cultural campaign and the nascent talk of a “Mnangagwa dynasty.”
“The deliberate convergence of the ‘Munhumutapa’ cultural campaign with the ‘Mnangagwa dynasty’ narrative represents a naked strategy to sanitise raw power retention through feudal symbolism,” Mbofana observed.
In his view, invoking ancient kingdoms and dynastic inheritance could reshape the very grounds of political legitimacy in Zimbabwe.
“By wrapping executive authority in the cloak of pre-colonial royal tradition, those pushing this project are trying to alter the fundamental source of political legitimacy in Zimbabwe,” he said.
For Mbofana, the core peril lies in substituting democratic legitimacy with hereditary or quasi-hereditary privilege.
“The objective is to replace popular mandate with imperial entitlement—not as a public trust subject to democratic renewal, but as a hereditary birthright anchored in divine right and historic entitlement,” he warned.
The argument, then, reaches well past the matter of whether Zimbabwe votes in 2028 or 2030. What is really on the line is the country’s wider constitutional compact — and whether power will keep flowing from regular elections or drift increasingly toward negotiated, parliamentary, and extra-electoral mechanisms.
For detractors, the blend of constitutional amendments, the 2030 campaign, the Munhumutapa narrative, and the calls to abolish elections amounts to a possible transformation of Zimbabwe’s political order.
Reform advocates, by contrast, insist the country needs a governance model that puts concrete gains in people’s lives ahead of what they see as a futile electoral treadmill.
Whichever side prevails may decide far more than Mnangagwa’s own political destiny — it could settle the fate of electoral democracy itself in Zimbabwe.
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