Zimbabwe’s parliament has done it again: a bill extending presidential powers, passed with the speed and dignity of a schoolyard coup. Britain, ever the lecturer on democracy, warns of ‘erosion’. One might laugh if the situation weren’t so tragic, so painfully predictable.
This is not just Harare’s folly; it is a symptom of a global malaise. We have seen this before. In the late Roman Empire, the Praetorian Guard made and unmade emperors with scandalous regularity.
Today, it is party loyalists and a pliant judiciary who dress up tyranny in legal robes. The bill, which allows President Emmerson Mnangagwa to prolong his rule without the nuisance of elections, is a masterclass in the politics of eternity. It borrows from the playbook of Robert Mugabe, his mentor, who turned Zimbabwe into a personal fiefdom for forty years.
But Britain’s response is the real irony. London warns of ‘democratic erosion’ while its own prime ministers cycle through Downing Street like seasons, unelected party bosses installed by internal cabals. Where is the outrage for that?
The truth is, Western outrage is selective. We tut-tut over Zimbabwe while embracing Saudi Arabia and Egypt. We decry power grabs in Africa while ignoring the EU’s democratic deficit.
This is not to defend Mnangagwa; he is a tin-pot autocrat in a string of tin-pot autocrats. But let us ask ourselves: what is the alternative to his rule? The opposition is a mess of personalities, not policies.
Civil society is weak, the economy is a zombie kept alive by Chinese loans. Perhaps ‘democracy’ in Zimbabwe was always a fiction, a colonial fantasy imposed on a society that never shared our sacred texts of checks and balances. The bill is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of our own making.
We created the script, and now we watch it performed. The only real surprise is that Britain still has breath to scold.
