The deeming coup: How Ziyambi and his legal team plan to ‘rewrite reality’ to keep Mnangagwa in power: Part 1

Imagine a country where the law can be asked to perform legerdemain: to take a man’s two years in office, wave a clause over them, and declare — by legal fiat — that those years never counted.

Imagine lawmakers drafting a provision that says, in effect, “pretend this is true” and then asking everyone to behave accordingly. That is what the leaked 14-page brief prepared for the Minister of Justice proposes.

It is not reform. It is the art of turning fiction into tenure.

This brief is not a dry academic exercise. It is a blueprint — surgical, technical, and breathtakingly candid — that explains, step by step, how to convert a republic into a ten-year family trust without tanks, by using clauses, definitions and “deeming provisions.” Read closely: it is a legal coup, and the ink is already nearly dry.

The device: the “deeming provision”:

The brief’s central weapon is what lawyers politely call a “deeming provision.” In plain language: a deeming provision tells the law to treat something as true even if it is not.

The brief explains why this device is necessary: “to avoid a vacuum” during the transition from direct to parliamentary election of the President. The argument is disarmingly prosaic — avoid chaos — but the effect is radical.

The proposed clause would, in the brief’s own suggested wording, “deem the President in office as of 22 December 2025 to have been elected by Parliament for a five-year term commencing 22 December 2025.”

That is the trick. Rather than hold an election to choose who will lead under the new system, the law would simply say — legally and retroactively — that the incumbent has been elected.

One moment you have a constitutionally elected President; the next moment the constitution is changed and the law declares: that election is irrelevant; this is the new legal reality. The machine here is not brute force; it is legal theatre.

Why the deeming provision is not a technicality — it is tenure by fiction:

The brief offers a menu of rationales for this device: a ten-year “cooling-off” period to “detoxify” disputed elections; a reduction of “toxic policymaking” between polls; and the prevention of foreign interference that, the authors claim, exploits contested elections.

All of these read as convenience; none of them survive scrutiny. The real motivation is explicit elsewhere in the brief: to align the incumbent’s service with the new indirect electoral regime while avoiding the problem of term limits.

The Constitution currently says a person may be President for two five-year terms and that “three or more years’ service is deemed to be a full term.” The brief relies on that very text to play a numbers game.

Its logic: Mnangagwa’s service since 4 September 2023 amounts to less than three years by 22 December 2025, so it does not constitute a full term and, therefore, it “does not count.”

By “deeming” his new five-year mandate to begin on 22 December 2025, the brief argues he can have “a fresh, second, and final term” (2025–2030) — within the letter of section 91(2) but fatally outside its spirit.

Said another way: the brief proposes to manipulate interruptions and partial terms into a legal loophole large enough to drive a dynasty through.

If a partial period under the previous regime is ignored, you can give yourself a full new term — and with an omnibus amendment that also extends parliamentary terms and suspends elections for two cycles, the Presidency can be effectively stretched far beyond the current constitutional horizon.

The ten-year sabbatical: democracy on ice:

The brief frames the change as an emergency detox: a ten-year “cooling-off” period (2025–2035) that suspends direct presidential elections and extends Parliament’s term for two cycles.

“Detoxify the scourge of disputed elections,” it says. That sounds like technocratic housekeeping. In truth, it means: stop the people from deciding.

Mechanically, the plan does four things at once:

Repeal section 92 (direct election of the President) and replace it with an indirect parliamentary election mechanism.

Use a deeming provision to avoid an immediate election and to “deem” the incumbent as legitimately re-aligned with the new system.

Count Mnangagwa’s prior short service as “not a term” under the three-year rule, enabling him to start a new full term.

Reclassify Parliament’s five-year “time limit” as not being a “term-limit” and thus avoid the referendum requirement that would otherwise be triggered for constitutional changes affecting term limits.

If you stitch these elements together, the result is obvious: elections are suspended, the incumbent is reclassified legally, and the normal democratic brakes (referendum, popular consent) are removed.

The public is politely told to accept the fiction for the sake of stability.

The three-year sleight of hand:

The brief relies on a tiny clause that is now the lynchpin of a large fraud: “three or more years’ service is deemed to be a full term.”

According to the brief’s reading, Mnangagwa’s service from September 2023 to December 2025 is less than three years and therefore does not count as a term. That allows the deeming clause to declare his 2025–2030 tenure the “second and final term.”

This is not textual parsing; it is arithmetic politics. The three-year rule was designed to prevent someone from accumulating multiple partial terms and thereby gaming the two-term limit. The brief’s architects propose to use the very same rule to game the rule itself.

Call it the three-year twist: by arguing certain service does not meet the threshold, they manufacture a blank page that the deeming provision can fill.

It is worth stressing: the constitutional framers included the three-year marker precisely to prevent the kind of time-slicing now proposed. Changing its effect by a deeming provision is not an interpretation; it is a structural override.

Parliament: time limit vs term-limit — the referendum dodge:

One of the cleverest pieces of sleight in the brief is the distinction between a “time-limit” and a “term-limit.” The Constitution states “Parliament is elected for a five-year term,” language which the brief argues is merely an institutional time limit, not a personal term-limit provision that would be protected under the Constitution’s entrenched amendment procedures (and therefore require a referendum).

That distinction, while grammatical, is political dynamite. If the five-year clause is only a time provision, it can be altered by ordinary amendment.

If it were deemed a “term-limit” provision under section 328, changing it would force a referendum — a public check the authors plainly want to avoid. So the brief insists that section 143(1) is a “time-limit provision” and not a “term-limit provision,” thereby giving the legislature — hand in glove with the executive — the power to extend parliamentary life without asking the nation.

This is not constitutional craftsmanship; it is a referendum dodging manual.

Who benefits — and who runs the show?

Legal trickery serves a political purpose. The brief repeatedly sets its logic against a backdrop of “enduring stability” and “detoxification” — nice words to market a power consolidation.

But the actors who stand most to gain are explicit in parallel reporting and in the broader political choreography we have seen for years: the First Family, the Mnangagwa sons, and the business partners who co-finance the new political economy.

Behind the courtroom language sits an economic arrangement: Sakunda, Tagwirei, commanding tenders, access to parastatals through Mutapa, the speculative re-valuation of Kuvimba, the bus-loop scams — all parts of one industrialised kleptocracy.

If elections are suspended, oversight is muted and political risk dissipates. Investors who serve the family (and those investors are not foreign philanthropists but well-known local tenderpreneurs) will receive uninterrupted returns.

Governance becomes administrative convenience for a small cartel; the rest of the country is left to survive.

The brief’s rhetoric about “protecting sovereignty” reads, in practice, as protecting a corporate state — a “Precabe Cabinet” run by the First Family’s chosen operators, with Mnangagwa as the ceremonial anchor and Tagwirei as the invisible chairman.

The constitutional vandalism in plain language:

Let me translate the legalese into blunt prose for the person in the township or the farmer in the resettlement area:

• They will tell you the change is to reduce dispute. In reality, it creates the conditions for disputes to be neutered — no elections means no accountability.
• They will tell you the deeming provision simply prevents a vacuum. In reality, it manufactures a vacuum of popular power that is then filled by legal fiction.
• They will tell you Parliament is only a time-limited institution, not a term-limited one. In reality, that argument is the Trojan horse for avoiding a referendum that would ask you, the people, whether you consent to these changes.

The brief’s own sample clause is illustrative: “Service as President under the repealed section 92 from 4 September 2023 to 22 December 2025, being less than three years, shall not be deemed a term for the purposes of section 91(2).”

That sentence, sober and lawyerly, is an instruction manual for tenure extension.

The moral and political stakes:

This is not a technical fight about punctuation. It is the defense of a basic covenant: that political power derives from the consent of the governed.

The brief’s framers are trying to convert consent into an administrative fiction — to have the people’s authority validated by paperwork rather than ballots.

And here is the other danger: law used this way corrodes institutions. If courts are asked to accept deeming provisions that override lived political realities, the judiciary becomes an instrument of the very power it ought to check.

If Parliament is asked to ratify a retroactive “election” and to suspend referenda by semantic distinction, the legislature stops being representative and becomes administrative plumbing for indefinite rule.

Practical consequences: what will life look like if this passes?

Expect subtle but decisive shifts. Tender boards will tilt to those who are politically proximate. Parastatals will be folded into the Mutapa model and run as family assets. Civil servants will be rewarded for obedience rather than competence.

Protest will be criminalised as destabilisation while “national dialogue” is offered as a substitute for political choice. The political marketplace will be trimmed to two forms of activity: serving the patronage economy or being pushed to the margins.

Most perniciously, the plan seeks to normalise a new political grammar: elections are optional when they are inconvenient. That grammar will seep into everyday life — into the courts, the broadcasters, the classrooms. Over time, norms that once protected liberty will rot.

A warning to ZANU-PF delegates, judges, and the public

To the delegates who will be asked to vote on these reforms: constitutional reform is not a business transaction. You are stewards of a national inheritance, not clerks executing a financial instrument.

If you sign away the referendum safeguard or approve deeming language that rewrites reality, you will not be remembered as reformers; history will call you collaborators in a theft.

To judges and lawyers who value legal integrity: the doctrine of deeming has legitimate uses, but its instrumentality here — to rewrite democratic foundations — is an abuse. You may be asked to rubber-stamp a fiction; do not confuse technical possibility with legitimacy.

And to the people of Zimbabwe: do not be seduced by talk of “detoxification” or “stability.” Those are the velvet phrases tyrants use to sell chains. The real question is simple: do you want your destiny to be decided by ballots or by clauses?

If you accept the latter, you will awake in a country where no protest, no petition and no vote can alter the course of those who have rigged the law to their own advantage.

How to resist the Deeming Coup — immediate, pragmatic steps

This is not abstract. There are practical defenses against the legal theatre:

Demand the text. No amendment should be debated without the public seeing the actual bill. Transparency is the first antidote.

Insist on referendum triggers. If any change affects term-limits or the nature of executive election, the people must be asked. Semantic gymnastics should not displace popular consent.

Mobilise legal challenges. Courts must be prepared to construe deeming provisions narrowly; if necessary, litigate on constitutional supremacy and the spirit of term limits.

Organise civic education. Citizens must understand that “deeming” is not a harmless technicality — it is a coup tool.

Pressure internal party protectors. There are still cadres and elders in ZANU-PF who remember the liberation’s ideal. They must be convinced that a dynasty usurps the party’s soul.

Conclusion — the final verdict:

The 14-page brief is not a proposal for cleaner politics. It is a road map for legalised tenure and privatized governance.

The deeming provision is not a technical fix; it is a constitutional forgery by design — a neat legal solution to what is essentially a political problem: the ruling family’s desire to remain unaccountable.

Call it what it is: a de-facto extension of rule by decree, dressed in the clothes of constitutional reform. If this draft becomes law, Zimbabwe will have a new problem beyond corruption: it will have a system that makes corruption permanent and immutable.

They can draft the clause. They can quote section numbers and present interpretive essays to argue plausibility. They can write language as elegant as a sonnet. But in the end, law without legitimacy is tyranny in academic dress.

This is not an invitation to panic; it is a summons to wakefulness. The deeming coup can be stopped — by judges who remember their oaths, by delegates who remember the revolution’s ideals, and by citizens who refuse to exchange the vote for a promise of “stability.”

If we allow the Constitution to be mutilated in the name of detoxification, the revolution will not be saved — it will be buried, and the bill of rights will become a footnote in a family account.

They call it a “deeming provision.” I call it a declaration: Whoever deems themselves sovereign beyond the ballot is not a statesman; they are a claimant to perpetual power. The people must respond: no one deeds us our destiny but ourselves.