The Prodigal Pretender: Godfrey Tsenengamu and the business of political recycling

Zimbabwe’s politics has become a circus with a tired script: the ruling party expels someone for alleged “indiscipline,” that someone launches a self-proclaimed revolutionary project, declares themselves a sworn enemy of corruption, and then — after a short but noisy sabbatical of “principled activism” — quietly returns home clutching a begging bowl and a freshly ironed ZANU PF shirt.

The latest star in this endlessly recycled comedy is Godfrey Tsenengamu, a man once convinced he was the vanguard of moral regeneration — until morality proved too expensive to maintain without state-fuelled allowances.

His return to ZANU PF is not a political event. It is a transactional pilgrimage, a re-entry ritual into a system he never truly left, except in rhetoric.

And like all political pilgrims returning home, he comes bearing gifts: a bag of “opposition defectors” — including a Tsvangirai sibling and Gandhi Mudzingwa — all paraded as trophies of a supposed national awakening.

In reality, they are the latest customers purchased in Zimbabwe’s lucrative business of political loyalty.

Tsenengamu’s homecoming is a perfect case study of Zimbabwe’s new political economy: patronage as ideology, survival as conviction, and money as the supreme party constitution.

THE RISE AND FALL (AND RISE) OF A REVOLUTIONARY FOR RENT

When Tsenengamu launched FEEZ, he packaged it as a bold new front for economic emancipation. In retrospect, the project looks less like a revolution and more like a holding pattern — a parking bay for the politically unemployed.

It never became a movement. It became a CV extension, something to say in interviews: “I was running a political organisation.”

But activism without resources is not just exhausting; it is unprofitable. And once the privileges, access, and state-oiled benefits vanished, the revolutionary fire slowly turned into smoke — and finally, into a distress signal.

The return to ZANU PF was no surprise. Only the timing was pending.

POLITICAL FATIGUE AND A TIRED ELECTORATE

Tsenengamu’s frustration with the electorate is understandable. Zimbabweans have perfected the art of political spectatorship — arms folded, brows raised, watching politicians like bulls in the ring, each charging at the other while the crowd debates which bull looks less diseased.

You can’t mobilise such an electorate without money, logistics, or the promise of instant material gratification. And FEEZ had none.

ZANU PF, however, has something FEEZ could only dream about: Tagwirei’s never-ending cheque book, fuelled by an economic order where corruption isn’t a by-product of power — it is the power.

So Tsenengamu has chosen the winning team. Not ideologically. Not morally. But economically.

THE PRICE OF LOYALTY IN HARARE

To understand his return, one must understand Zimbabwe’s ruling ecosystem. Politics here is not a contest of ideas. It is a marketplace. And in this marketplace, Godfrey Tsenengamu is just one of the latest products.

The man has been complaining loudly about needing an SUV — loudly enough for the right ears to hear. Suddenly, he is back in the fold, chanting slogans he denounced only yesterday, smiling beside the very elites he once swore were cartels destroying the nation.

He is now a walking advertisement for the Tagwirei Succession Investment Fund: “Buy one dissident, get a bonus defector free.”

This is not politics. This is procurement.

THE THEATRICS OF “2030”

The 2030 term-extension slogan — once the object of his mockery — is now a hymn in his newly edited political gospel. Power has a way of bending tongues, especially tongues that have tasted the bitterness of political unemployment.

There is nothing more flexible than a politician’s principles when faced with poverty. And there is nothing more rigid than a politician’s spine when faced with a full tank, an SUV key, and a handshake from the State House veranda.

A RETURN WITHOUT PRINCIPLE

Tsenengamu’s newfound affection for ZANU PF exposes a painful truth:

He never left on ideological grounds. He left because he wasn’t eating.

Real revolutionaries don’t flip-flop for fuel coupons. Edgar Tekere — expelled for defending multiparty democracy — never slithered back for comfort. He endured the cold. He lived with his principles. He died with them.

Tsenengamu left the party in dramatic fashion and has returned in an even more dramatic surrender — not to ideology, but to economic gravity.

ENTER TAGWIREI: THE REAL PARTY

The real centre of power in this drama is not the ruling party. It is the ruling cartel. And at the head of that cartel sits Kudakwashe Tagwirei — the man whose generosity to ZANU PF would make even the IMF blush.

Millions in vehicles. Millions in campaign logistics. Millions in political investments.

Tagwirei is not donating; he is acquiring.

Tsenengamu’s return is simply one more acquisition — a public relations stunt to show the tycoon as a unifier, a “bridge-builder,” a man who can summon even his former critics back into the fold.

In reality, Tsenengamu has not returned to ZANU PF.

He has returned to Tagwirei’s ZANU PF — a party whose logo is now printed on receipts instead of ideology.

THE HIJACKED REVOLUTION

What Tsenengamu joins today is not ZANU PF the liberation movement. It is ZANU PF the captured franchise — a political shell animated by elites who have never smelled cordite, never set foot in a pungwe, and never cared about grassroots suffering except as background scenery for campaign photo-ops.

Instead of mingling with the party’s long-abused grassroots structures, he is cavorting with billionaires and buying into the fiction that rejoining ZANU PF is a “return to the people.”

What people?
What ideology?
What liberation?

This is a factional manoeuvre, not a political epiphany.

THE GREAT DEFECTION CIRCUS

And now, to complete the theatre, he arrives with “opposition defectors” — a show-and-tell parade meant to convince Zimbabweans that the opposition is collapsing and ZANU PF is regenerating.

But what we are seeing is not regeneration. It is recruitment by cheque book.

Everyone has a price.

And in today’s Zimbabwe, that price is almost always in US dollars.

CONCLUSION: THE RETURN THAT EXPOSES MORE THAN IT REDEEMS

Godfrey Tsenengamu’s return is not about politics.

It is about economics, opportunism, and survival.

It is the story of a man who discovered that principle is expensive, opposition is exhausting, and poverty is unforgiving — and who thus chose the comfort of captured power over the discomfort of genuine struggle.

His return is a warning:

Zimbabwe’s opposition is not being defeated by ideology.

It is being outbid.

And as long as politics remains a marketplace, our democracy will remain for sale.