Here we go again. The UK Foreign Office has issued a stern condemnation of Zimbabwe’s latest constitutional farce, as Robert Mugabe’s successor, Emmerson Mnangagwa, rammed through a parliamentary amendment to extend his term until 2030. Critics are wringing their hands about the death of democracy, the betrayal of the Lancaster House legacy, and all the usual pieties. But let us be brutally honest: for a nation that spent centuries perfecting the art of imperial overreach, Britain’s moral outrage is laughable. It is the pot calling the kettle black, and the kettle is boiling over with irony.
Let us examine the historical parallels. The Zimbabwean situation is a textbook case of what the Romans called ‘ambitio’ – the lust for power that leads men to trample constitutions. Emperor Augustus did it, so did Napoleon, and so did Mugabe. Mnangagwa is merely following a script written in blood and ink across the ages. But here is the rub: Britain has no moral high ground to stand on. Our own history is littered with similar power grabs, from the Plantagenet usurpations to the Emergency Powers Act of 1920, which gave the government dictatorial powers during the Irish War of Independence. We are a nation that once suspended habeas corpus, that interned thousands without trial in Northern Ireland, and that still has a hereditary monarchy and an unelected House of Lords. Do we really think we can lecture Zimbabwe on democratic legitimacy?
This is not to defend Mnangagwa. The man is a thug, a product of the same rotten system that Mugabe built. His extension of term limits is a textbook power grab, plain and simple. But the Foreign Office’s condemnation is a piece of performative virtue-signalling designed to distract from our own political decay. While Zimbabwe’s MPs voted to extend their master’s reign, our own Parliament has been embroiled in scandal after scandal: Partygate, the Greensill affair, the cash-for-access sleaze. We are a nation that has lost faith in its institutions, where voter turnout is in decline, and where the government can push through legislation with barely a whimper of opposition. Is that democracy? Or is it just our own, more genteel form of decay?
The real issue here is not Zimbabwe but the West’s inability to offer a coherent alternative. We preach democracy while arming Saudi Arabia, while propping up autocrats in Central Asia, while turning a blind eye to the erosion of civil liberties at home. The language of ‘democracy promotion’ has become a hollow slogan, a rhetorical shield for geostrategic interests. And Zimbabweans know this. They see our condemnations for what they are: hypocritical gestures from a former coloniser that has never fully accepted the consequences of its own history.
We should stop pretending that we can fix Zimbabwe with angry statements and targeted sanctions. We cannot. The country’s problems are structural, rooted in a colonial legacy of extraction and racial division, compounded by decades of misrule. The only way forward is for Zimbabweans themselves to reclaim their institutions, and that will take time, courage, and a reckoning with the past. In the meantime, perhaps the Foreign Office should focus on cleaning up its own backyard: fixing the House of Lords, addressing the democratic deficit in our own Parliament, and ending the scandal of unaccountable corporate power. Then, perhaps, we can speak with a clearer voice on the world stage. Until then, our condemnations will ring hollow, as barren as the Zimbabwean countryside after another failed harvest.
