The ruling party’s decision to extend President Mnangagwa’s second term in office is inflaming tensions in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s bid for an unconstitutional third term turned violent this week. A hall in Harare was torched hours before his opponents were to meet there to launch a campaign against his efforts to run again. And in the country’s second largest city Bulawayo, riot police forcefully prevented a similar meeting from taking place.

Opposition politicians intended to plan how to stop the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) from implementing a critical resolution it adopted at its annual conference in Mutare earlier this month.

The resolution noted that at its previous conference on 26 October 2024 in Bulawayo, the party resolved that: ‘In recognition of the extensive developmental milestones and the significant socioeconomic progress achieved under … Mnangagwa … his term of office as President of the Republic of Zimbabwe [should] be extended beyond 2028 to 2030.’

The absurdity of the claim that Zimbabwe needed Mnangagwa to remain in power to continue his putative development agenda was illustrated by Ringisai Chikohomero in a recent Institute for Security Studies report. It showed an economy in persistent crisis, including an extreme poverty rate of over 42%.

ZANU-PF’s 2025 conference resolution added that no notable steps had been taken to implement the Bulawayo resolution. And so the Secretary of Legal Affairs and Minister of Justice was directed to ensure that before the next annual conference in 2026, the resolution was ‘fully implemented.’ The party and government were directed to initiate the required legislative amendments to ‘give full effect’ to the resolution.

Zimbabwe’s 2013 constitution is clear that a president may serve only two terms. Mnangagwa came to power in 2017 after a military coup that toppled the country’s founding president, Robert Mugabe. Mnangagwa was elected for a first term in 2018 and re-elected for a second term in 2023. That term ends in 2028, but now the ruling party has decided to extend it to 2030.

Mnangagwa’s move has been divisive not only in the country, but also inside ZANU-PF. Zimbabwe’s Vice-President Constantino Chiwenga is apparently bitterly opposed, because he would likely succeed Mnangagwa if he stepped down in 2028. He strongly criticised the so-called ED2030 plan at a September meeting of ZANU-PF’s Politburo.

Bulawayo mayor David Coltart, a member of the main opposition Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC), told ISS Today: ‘There is layer upon layer of constitutional safeguards to protect’ term limits. And he should know because he is a lawyer who helped write the constitution.

He says the constitution is clear that the president may serve just two terms of five years each. The safeguards are, first, that any amendment to the constitution requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Second, the decision must be confirmed with a public referendum. Third, no such amendment may benefit an incumbent. If it were, then fourth, that decision would have to be confirmed with a second referendum.

Coltart added that section 328, sub-section 7 of the constitution was worded in such a way that if the effect of any constitutional amendment were to extend a term limit, ‘then you need a referendum. It doesn’t matter how you couch it, what language you use, if the effect of that is to extend a term limit, it needs a referendum.’

Coltart was referring to suggestions from some in ZANU-PF that they might postpone the 2028 elections until 2030, which would implicitly extend Mnangagwa’s term. But clearly he and the other constitutional drafters anticipated that possible ruse.

The trouble for Mnangagwa is that even one, let alone two, referenda on extending his term would be disastrous for him, Coltart said, as opposition ran deep in the country and even in ZANU-PF. Any referendum would effectively be a referendum on Mnangagwa’s rule, which he would not want right now.

Coltart noted there had been only two constitutional referenda in the past 25 years. One in 2000 proposed a new constitution, which would have increased presidential powers and allowed expropriation without compensation. It became a referendum on Mugabe’s rule, which he lost. The other was the 2013 referendum on the current constitution, which 95% of the population supported. Neither outcome was favourable to Mnangagwa.

Coltart saw the attacks by ZANU-PF thugs on the two premises this week as ‘a shot across the bows’ of any attempt to rally opposition against extending Mnangagwa’s term. Early Tuesday, the SAPES Trust premises in Harare were firebombed, gutting the conference room where the activists were to meet. In Bulawayo, police barricaded the Bulawayo Club where an equivalent meeting was planned.

He also said that with the opposition in disarray – partly because ZANU-PF has infiltrated and undermined it – the plans to amend the constitution had become a rallying cry for Mnangagwa’s opponents, inside and outside ZANU-PF.

The fight now seems to be on. Mnangagwa is doing his best to ensure the resolution to extend his tenure is implemented. Coltart says this includes gifting new cars to all 300 members of the ZANU-PF Central Committee before the conference, as well as top-notch Toyota Land Cruisers to all provincial heads. Mnangagwa is also believed to have removed Chiwenga loyalists from key positions.

All this looks like preparations for a mighty battle between the party’s top two. None of it bodes well for stability or prosperity in an already poor and unstable country.

Zimbabwe Council of Churches General Secretary Kenneth Mtata warned in a statement that Mnangagwa’s bid to extend his term would undermine all his efforts to re-engage the world and bring Zimbabwe in from the cold. It would also jeopardise negotiations to restructure Zimbabwe’s international debt, which had been led by the African Development Bank. And it would discourage international investment.

Perhaps so, but that is by no means clear as an increasingly transactional world has lost much of its interest in Zimbabwe as a moral issue.

Written by Peter Fabricius, Consultant, ISS Pretoria