Nelson Chamisa: Our fatal fascination with saviours in Zimbabwe must end

There is a familiar moment in Zimbabwean politics when hope surges not because institutions have changed, but because a voice has returned. A rally is announced. Social media lights up. Old slogans are dusted off. The language of destiny and renewal makes another appearance.

This month, that moment arrived again with Nelson Chamisa’s return to the political stage under the banner of Agenda 2026, framed as a citizens movement rather than a political party.

It was presented as a clean break from the past. In truth, it is another chapter in a long and damaging story.

Zimbabwe’s deepest political problem is not a shortage of vision or courage among its people. It is our enduring attachment to saviours.

We keep mistaking charisma for capacity and moral language for institutional strength. We invest our hopes in individuals and then act surprised when the systems around them collapse.

Chamisa’s re-emergence is less a solution to this problem than a symptom of it.

To be clear, Chamisa is not unique. He is simply the most recent and most eloquent expression of a pattern that has defined Zimbabwean politics since independence.

ZANU PF mastered the art of personality-centred rule under Robert Mugabe and has continued it, with less poetry but equal ruthlessness, under Emmerson Mnangagwa.

The opposition, rather than breaking from this tradition, has often mirrored it. Chamisa’s career illustrates how easily the language of democracy can coexist with deeply personalised power.

When Chamisa took over the Movement for Democratic Change after Morgan Tsvangirai’s death, he inherited a party with flaws but also with a constitution, internal elections and a culture of debate. Over time, those features eroded.

By the time the Citizens Coalition for Change was launched in 2022, the abandonment of formal structures was no longer an accident. It was a philosophy. No constitution, no congress, no elected leadership beyond the figure at the centre.

Supporters were told this was strategic brilliance. Flexibility. A way to outsmart a hostile state.

What it produced instead was fragility. Without rules, authority flowed upward. Without procedures, disputes became personal. When infiltration occurred, there were no institutional safeguards. When disagreements emerged, there was no neutral forum to resolve them.

And when Chamisa eventually walked away in early 2024, the movement disintegrated with startling speed. This was not simply the result of repression, though repression was real. It was the predictable outcome of building politics around a person rather than a system.

Defenders of Chamisa argue that his appeal is precisely his strength. He can mobilise crowds. He inspires young people. He speaks the language of hope in a country exhausted by cynicism. All of this is true, and it is precisely why the danger is so often missed.

Charisma is not inherently harmful. It becomes harmful when it substitutes for structure. When devotion replaces debate. When criticism is dismissed as sabotage. When a movement’s identity collapses the moment its leader exits the room.

Agenda 2026 promises to be different. It speaks of citizens rather than parties, of moral renewal rather than power. Leadership questions are deferred. Structures are promised later. This should make Zimbabweans uneasy. We have heard this before.

Every political project that asks for trust now and accountability later is making a familiar wager. That loyalty will outpace scrutiny. That belief will outrun design.

Zimbabwe’s crisis cannot be reduced to stolen elections or bad leaders, though both matter. It is a systemic failure. Institutions are weak or captured. The economy survives on informality. The security sector operates beyond civilian control.

Civic life is fragmented by fear, poverty and fatigue. In such conditions, the temptation to seek refuge in a compelling individual is understandable. But it is precisely in such conditions that institutional thinking becomes most urgent.

There is a counterargument worth taking seriously. Some will say that Zimbabwe is too repressive, too broken, for neat institutionalism. That only a powerful, magnetic figure can mobilise the numbers needed to challenge the state.

That process can wait until victory. History offers little comfort here. Movements that postpone internal democracy rarely rediscover it later. Power, once personalised, resists redistribution. The habits formed in opposition often harden in office.

Rejecting saviour politics, however, does not mean rejecting leadership itself. This is where some critiques overreach. Zimbabwe does not need the fantasy of a politics without leaders or authority. The state cannot be wished away.

Hierarchy does not disappear because we dislike it. In fact, when formal structures are absent, informal hierarchies flourish. Money, proximity to power and rhetorical dominance fill the vacuum. This is not liberation. It is unaccountable power in disguise.

What Zimbabwe requires is a recalibration of political imagination. Leadership must be anchored in rules, limited by process and rendered replaceable without collapse.

Opposition formations should be deliberately unglamorous. Constitutions. Internal elections. Term limits. Transparent finances. Disciplinary mechanisms that do not depend on personal favour. These are not technicalities. They are the substance of democracy.

At the same time, politics must expand beyond election cycles and podiums. Community power matters. Residents associations, worker cooperatives, student movements, professional bodies and faith-based networks should not exist merely to amplify politicians.

They should be autonomous actors capable of organising around concrete demands and sustaining pressure regardless of who leads a party.

Here, lessons from decentralised traditions are valuable, not as total alternatives to politics, but as correctives to its excesses.

African history – of which I’ve been a student since Form 1 in 1992 – offers examples of collective decision-making and mutual aid, but it also reminds us that authority has always existed.

The task is not to romanticise the past but to adapt its participatory instincts to modern realities.

Contemporary struggles across the continent show that communities can extract concessions even under hostile regimes when organisation is disciplined and demands are specific. Yet those gains endure only when linked to broader institutional reform.

The diaspora is often invoked in moments like this, usually as a source of funding or moral endorsement. Its role should be more strategic.

Instead of financing personalities or endless mobilisation, it should invest in civic infrastructure. Independent media. Legal defence funds. Policy research. Training for organisers and councillors. These investments lack the emotional rush of rallies, but they outlast them.

Chamisa’s continued prominence tells us something uncomfortable about the opposition ecosystem. It has failed to produce a bench. A political culture that cannot generate multiple credible leaders is already in crisis.

The answer is not to double down on the most popular figure, but to ask why alternatives struggle to emerge. The goal should not be to find a better saviour, but to build a politics in which saviours are unnecessary.

Zimbabwe’s future will not be delivered by any single voice, however gifted. It will be constructed slowly, imperfectly, through institutions that can absorb conflict without imploding.

Through leadership that can be challenged without being demonised. Through citizens who organise not around personalities, but around principles and procedures.

Agenda 2026 may yet energise parts of the electorate. Energy is not transformation. Until Zimbabwe breaks its fatal fascination with saviours and commits to the unromantic work of system building, we will continue to cycle between hope and heartbreak.

The country does not need another prophet. It needs politics that can survive its leaders.